New TCS Album: “Emergence and Rebirth”

Emergence and Rebirth: Renaissance vs. Contemporary Choral Music

Taipei Chamber Singers’ new album, released in 2017

A vocal dialogue across time and space; an innovative approach to musical art

◎ The classical aesthetics of order and harmony: Renaissance choral classics

◎ The deconstructed, abstract language of today: highlights from ten years of Music Unlimited

About “Emergence and Rebirth”

Ten years into Music Unlimited, Taipei Chamber Singers’ new 2017 album, “Emergence and Rebirth” (破繭與重生), a collection of Renaissance and contemporary choral music, brings together contemporary choral works commissioned over the years along with several Renaissance classics.

Built on the meeting of old and new, the album breaks conventional frameworks in its musical concept, experimentally selecting the finest music from two distant eras. Between order and harmony, deconstruction and abstraction, each illuminates the richness and brilliance of the other; and for all the differences between Renaissance and contemporary music, both follow a shared spirit of innovation, pursuing the boundless possibilities of emotional liberation and sonic breakthrough. This spirit is the past, present and future tense of humanity’s musical evolution: emergence and rebirth.

“Emergence and Rebirth” not only breaks through the boundaries of time and space, proving that the pinnacle of one era is the birth of the next; the whole album breaks out of its cocoon, bringing the beauty and soul of music to life again, awakening the enduring shared experience of humankind, and leaving a precious testament to our time.

“The symbolic title ‘Emergence and Rebirth’ perhaps hints at the consistent ideals and vision of Taipei Chamber Singers: rather than the usual approach in contemporary music performance of breaking free of traditional constraints in order to emphasize experimental innovation, it brings old and new together, learning from the past to understand the present. It moves freely between order and harmony on the one hand and freedom and abandon on the other, between harmony and coherence and deconstruction and abstraction, letting the two extremes collide and strike off rich, brilliant sparks…

This album perhaps embodies the philosophy of Taipei Chamber Singers: the past, present and future tenses of music’s evolution, tightly interlinked, succeeding one another, and again and again reborn from the cocoon.”

— 陳漢金, musicologist

Track List

Super Flumina / G.P. da Palestrina (1525-1594)

O Rex Gloriae / L. Marenzio (1553-1599)

Crucifixus / A. Lotti (1667-1740)

The Angels / Jonathon Harvey (1939-2012)

I Love the Lord / Jonathan Harvey (1939-2012)

Invisible Mantra / Jesper Nordin (b.1971)

Time is the Substance I am Made of / Huck Hodge (b.1977)

Wayang-Lagu / Chong Kee Yong (b.1971)