VOCES8 has released its 15th Anniversary double album on its own label with a beautifully produced booklet illustrated with contemporary artworks that add a visual dimension to the exploration of the themes.
“After silence, that which comes closest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” – Aldous Huxley
In the essay from which the title After Silence is taken, Aldous Huxley offers his thoughts on the essential force of music. The most profoundly significant constituents of our being, he says, include our responses to beauty, pleasure, pain, ecstasy and death. These can best be ‘experienced, not expressed’ through silence, and after silence, through music.
The four releases that make up After Silence are here associated with the four classical elements, earth, fire, air and water:
Remembrance, invoking death, loss and the return to earth;
Devotion, focusing on the flames of love, sacred and secular;
Redemption, celebrating rebirth and the renewed breath of life;
Elemental, returning us to the ebb and flow of nature.
Listen to After Silence on Spotify here, and Apple Music here.
Buy the beautiful double album here.
On August 1st, the group will be singing a selection of music from the double album in the first concert of the Live From London festival. Music includes the 2 pieces written especially for VOCES8, Vertue by Jonathan Dove and An Elemental Elegy by Mårten Jansson and poetry from Charles Anthony Silvestri.
All of VOCES8’s sheet music publishing is with Edition Peters here.