Traditional Sicilian culture, from its language to various coded systems of myth and ritual, from its techniques of expression to their practiced forms, is the result of a stratification of elements attributable to each of the diverse ethnic stocks which in turn dominated this great island, located in the center of the Mediterranean (Greeks, Phoenicians, Romans, Byzantines, Islamic Berbers, Normans, Swabians, Frenchmen, Spaniards). The forms and styles of its traditional music, affected by these processes of hybrid growth, were also in one way or another marked by the archetypes of Sicily’s successive civilizations. As Ottavio Tiby stated, 'People listened to Greek nomos, the Byzantine hymn, the Arab maqam, the courtly troubadour ballad and the lied of the Minnesänger down to the opulent polyphony of the 16th-17th century!' (Studio introduttivo to the Corpus di musiche popolari siciliane by Alberto Favara, Palermo 1957).

This CD presents an anthology of the most remarkable vocal and instrumental typologies of traditional Sicilian music.

This music for string quartet offers a selection of melodically refined chamber pieces brimming with highly subtle ornamentation, creating a fine blend of different instrumental timbres and sonorities. It is performed with great poetry by musicians of the previous generation.

Traditional Vietnamese music, shaped by numerous cultural influences linked to its geography, is characterized by movement and abundant variation. It is an art form where dynamism appears to be a permanent feature. Each composition is played from memory, and improvisation is a primary form of musical creation. Once the melodic canvas is fixed in memory, performers can execute extremely complex and daring variations.

The ensemble features:
Nguyên Vinh Bao on dàn tranh (zither with 25 strings)
Ba Tu on dàn nguyêt (moon-shaped lute)
Ut Ti on dàn nhi and dàn gao (2-stringed spike fiddle)
Hoàng Cò Thuy on dàn ty bà (4-stringed pear-shaped lute)

The members of the Ensemble Hougaku Shijyuusoudan explore the art of sankyoku: a refined repertoire of instrumental chamber music, to which singing often adds a poetic touch. The practice of this trio music was established as early as the end of the Edo era (late 19th c.), and underwent a major growth with the secularization of shakuhachi flute playing (formerly reserved for itinerant Zen monks of the Fuke sect).

Ancient music and magnificent performers of today, all graduates of the Tokyo National Conservatory and winners of prestigious competitions: while perpetuating the traditional repertoire, they are multiplying collaborations and are also committed to animating the future of their instruments by commissioning works from contemporary composers.

Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023), featured in 2017 at Radio France's Festival Presences of contemporary music, was a central figure in a generation of internationally renowned Finnish composers and performers.

Kaija Saariaho developed computer-assisted composition techniques and mastered working with tape and live electronics, but she also encountered French composers of so-called spectral music, whose techniques are based on computer analysis of the sound spectrum of individual notes on different instruments.
In the profusion of works that Saariaho has produced in recent years, two features have marked her entire career. One is the close collaboration with other artists –writers, directors, musicians, etc.– in the creation of new works. The other is the concern to make her music, not the treatment of an abstract process, but an urgent sharing of ideas, images and emotions from the composer to the listener.

This collection is the recording echo of the Festival Presences (created in 1991) and its commissioning and creation activities, supported by Radio France's musical ensembles.

Since 1991, Radio France has been organising the Presences festival of contemporary music: several hundred new scores have been heard (a third of them world premieres), and the festival is also characterised by a series of portraits of composers from the late 20th century.
This CD, along with another volume devoted to Kaija Saariaho, marks a new stage of the Presences festival, which is extending its activities to include discs.
Tonal versus atonal, consonant versus dissonant, neo-classical versus serial, reactionary versus avant-garde, those who mourn a dreamed-of golden age versus those who claim to embody the meaning of history, Landowski versus Boulez, the list goes on and on. These binary and caricatured oppositions have fuelled a debate that has dominated the 20th century, and which is still sometimes in turmoil today.
In this context, we are struck by the emergence of spectral music, of which Tristan Murail is one of the initiators and most brilliant exponents. Spectral music proved that history could emerge from this sterile debate, that new territories of sound and harmony existed, that consonances were possible without being part of a backward-looking approach ¬–in short, that composers could move forward, continuing to invent, without having to resort to historically exhausted systems, such as those of tonal music or serial music.
The advent of spectral music was a major turning point in the great history of music, and its scope is such that its concepts, vocabulary (spectrum, fusion, partials, transients, inharmonics, etc.), writing principles and approach to sound and time have spread throughout the world and over several generations.
Few composers today have not been influenced in one way or another by spectral music. From George Benjamin to Kaija Saariaho, from Jonathan Harvey to Fausto Romitelli, via Philippe Hurel, Marc-Andre Dalbavie and Magnus Lindberg, spectral music and its concepts are everywhere.

Unanimously praised for his mastery of the sitar – the king instrument of North Indian classical music – Kushal Das is particularly renowned among aficionados (the rasika) for his art of the surbahar: this 'bass-sitar' with its long sustain, ideally suited to subtle alap, is here at the service of the raga Darbari Kanada performed in concert in the setting of the Radio France Auditorium. The adjective darbari comes from a Persian term meaning "royal court", and this was indeed a "majestic" concert lasting almost two hours. What a wonderful harmony between the acoustics of the venue, the choice of raga, the instrument and the artist, for this first concert of Indian classical music in the Auditorium! Although Kushal Das went on to perform other raga with tabla accompaniment, it is only the raga Darbari Kanada that is the subject of this disc: an alap –an improvised prelude, exposition and development of the raga; these terms reflect only an approximation of the real meaning, for when a complete alap is presented in this way by a master, it is much more a world in itself, in which the artist expresses alone, without accompaniment, the extreme of his musical thought in the service of the raga. Darbari Kanada is a deep night raga, and undoubtedly one of the most difficult to master. It requires a great deal of musical maturity to, through its melodic rules, unleash the full extent of its emotional impact imbued with breadth, dignity and depth. A fundamental raga, Darbari Kanada is also a perfect illustration of the fact that in a raga, the note (swara) must be considered as a "note in context", as are so essential the choice of ornaments, proportions, dynamics, angle and direction of the attack –everything that constitutes the "approach to the note".

Derived mostly from pansori singing and originally largely improvised, sanjo became (especially in the stylistic school of Master Choi Ok-sam) a structured instrumental suite: On the 12 silk strings of the gayageum zither, Kim Hae-sook paints with virtuosic serenity, a musical landscape of exaltation and restrained emotion. In the 14th and 15th centuries, most genres of the royal court music of the Joseon dynasty (ancestral rituals, banquets, military ceremonies etc.) were performed to realise the ideals of Confucianism. Emphasis was placed more on ideologies than on acoustic aesthetics. Consequently, rather than appreciating free expression, it was a common practice to moderate melodic progress, tempi and ranges. But a change in the musical climate encouraged emotional expression, calling for virtuosic professional performers. This led to the rise of the vocal genre of pansori as the kind of music that made the audience laugh and cry, which eventually resulted in the emergence of sanjo as solo instrumental music. This new genre overtly adopted the musical language of pansori, so much so that it has often been dubbed “pansori without voice”. The sanjo was originally created on the gayageum zither, the most representative of Korean string instruments. Initially an improvised musical form, the sanjo was diversified as various schools were formed according to teachers’ traditions and performing styles, exploiting the full technical potential of the instrument.

Two major facets of traditional Norwegian music: the beguiling richness of ancient melodies in ballads, love songs, wedding marches, dance-tunes, nursery rhymes, lullabies, coupled with the singular charm of hardingfele music, a singular violin considered the king of Norwegian instruments. The hardingfele (fiddle from Hardanger), richly decorated with bone and mother-of-pearl-inlay, and “rose painting”, and has four or five sympathetic strings, is a prominent member of the fiddle family, due to its make, tunings, and the particular richness and diversity of its regional styles and repertoire. The playing of hardingfele music has been a lasting tradition for nearly three centuries. Even today, airs and musical style are passed on orally. Several terms are frequently employed for vocal repertoire in Norway. In the first category, the words stev (sung poem), vise (popular song) and kveding (recitation) are often used. Depending on the type, a stev or vise can be recited or sung; the term vise stresses the importance given to the text. Songs for shepherds and herdsmen, dance, and cradle songs represent other forms of vocal tradition. Laling and lokking are used to call in the animals, or to re-unite people separated by great distances. As well as the wordless tralling, tulling or hulling, there is the slåttestev, whose rhythm is more important than the words or the meaning.

A self-taught master of the dutar and tanbur lutes, Turgun Alimatov stands out on the delicate and rare sato (bowed tanbur) with its hazy yet precise timbre. “I first heard Turgun Alimatov's music in 1977. I had come to Tashkent, Uzbekistan to study Central Asian music at the Tashkent Conservatory, and of all the music I heard that year, Turgun's elegant and laconic performances on the tanbur (long-necked lute with raised frets), dutar (two-stringed lute), and sato (…) made much the strongest impression. This man is a master, I thought, after listening to Turgun's recordings on the Soviet Melodiya label, and I must meet him. Thirteen years later, I did, and thus began a much-cherished friendship with a startlingly original musical creator whom I have come to regard as one of the great musicians of our time.” -- Theodore Levin.

Turgun Alimatov (1922-2008) was a master performer on the tanbur, dutar and sato which he was instrumental in reviving. He began his musical career playing the violin in Tashkent's Muqimi Theater of Musical Drama. In 1948, Turgun Alimatov joined the Tashkent radio station, where he performed in a succession of ensembles, until 1982. For his innovations, Turgun Alimatov earned scepticism from older musicians. In any event, Alimatov's achievement has won him a large following, and his neo-classical performance versions have become classics in themselves for a younger generation of musicians.

Petrona Martínez, an emblematic figure of bullerengue (a rare exclusively female “sung dance” in Colombia) shows here all her talent as a folklorist: improvisation, a universe of superstitions and legends, a chronicle of local life –and always Africa in the background. During the religious festivals of St John and St Peter (24th and 29th of June), the pregnant women, concubines and unmarried mothers, who could not take part in the fandangos (popular dances), used to gather on a patio to “clap hands and beat drums”. One of them would sing, improvising verses, whilst the others would respond in chorus. Between the songs, the women would tell each other riddles and saucy jokes. During these evening parties, or bullerengue, ñeque (home-made sugar cane alcohol) would be drunk. The dates and places for these meetings were communicated discreetly between the bullerengueras belonging to the same “sistership”. Such were the origins of the bullerengue tradition. Throughout her artistic career Petrona Martínez has been nominated three times for the Latin Grammy Awards for the best folk album, winning in 2021 with Ancestras.

The tradition of qawwali, originally limited to mausoleums and brotherhoods, has now spread everywhere, carried by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan –an exceptional performer: Sufi poems and incandescent lyricism. While the Mongols conquered by the sword and oppression, the Sufis attracted peoples through the richness of their culture. During their gatherings, these Sufis listened to the poems of their masters, sung by musicians known as qawwal. Their music, enriched with new literary and musical elements, ultimately became the most widespread musical genre in Hindustani music. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s group is the leading proponent of this secular tradition. “As each verse was sung, the emotion-filled audience uttered cries of joy that encouraged the musicians. Their gestures marked the syncopations and they swayed from one foot to the other. Deep silence fell when the singer embarked upon one of his subtle vocal variations...”