RICHARD BONE - Vesperia

For the peace of our senses. For our most intimate mysticism. "Vesperia", the new work by the Atlanta (Georgia) musician, opens with a slow unfolding of pacified immensity. The music breathes like a huge, weary animal on the doorstep, watching the dusk turn the blue sky red. Commissioned by the Holliston church for its vespers celebrations, "Vesperia" carries an imposing descriptive power, even though its flow is more akin to that of a small mountain stream, placidly, almost reluctantly, winding its way down into the valley.

In its supremely graceful blending of ambient scenery and the subtlest of cosmic textures, this work retraces the steps of the magnificent "The Eternal Now" (1996), after its more recent flirtations with world music. Thus, the second movement explores a hushed symphonism, in which synth flourishes adorn an undulating backdrop while distant, voice-like female tones intone a mystery deeper than any abyss. The pianistic minimalism of the third movement, meanwhile, offers an exemplary projection of nostalgic glimpses dominated by a supernatural force.

This is music that embraces you as if under a spell, living contained within a lush circle of titanic resignation. Music possessing the indescribable thrill of nature lit up by relentless rain. It washes over us, then, like an endless dream, a pervasive, intoxicating slowness, bearing images that belong to a time beyond time. Music, again, that works at a deep level, where the need for eternity drives us to turn memories into an indispensable, inexhaustible store of spiritual strength. A superhuman song, then, succeeds better than anything else in outlining the truest face of our cosmic solitude, while oscillating drones and empty piano chords let the music contemplate itself and its reflection in the cosmos (fourth movement).

In the end, then, the words of Lisa Louise Indish's poem are merely a way of giving voice to music that, even in its "contemplative muteness", manages to whisper to us that yes, in this unfathomable universe, we are home. Despite everything.

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18/12/2006