With Strings Attached features so many wonderful new works and new transcriptions, it’s hard not to be excited by them all! One of the greatest parts of having a collaborative album with as fine of an ensemble as the San Francisco Choral Artists is that it allows us to release many new compositions we wouldn’t otherwise be able to. Stephen Leek’s new piece Hollow Stone is a perfect example of such a work!
Listen to a sample of Hollow Stone:
“Hollow Stone draws its inspiration from a line of text written by Australian poet Randolph Stow, which has resonated with me for many years: “Sleep, all who are silent, make me a hollow stone.” The work, dedicated to my good friends, Magen Solomon and the San Francisco Choral Artists, evokes a sense of eerie calm and peace in a landscape of the smokey Australian desert bushland still smouldering after a recent brushfire.
The text I think takes on several layers…On the most literal level there is the real sense of an Australian landscape conjured up through the hardships of the farming communities and through the dry descriptions of the smoke and heat and dust…but I think the level I like to look at it is on a more metaphysical level about the refuge and safe place of one’s own space in sleep. It is a place where all memories are stored and relived, it is a place where the mysteries unfold, and where the imagination runs wild.” — Notes by Stephen Leek
For more on Stephen Leek, please visit www.stephenleek.com!
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