Artist Statement

Organ concert. Return of the Pilots theme

Charlemagne Palestine creates intense, ritualistic music, which he refers to as ‘resonant music’, in contrast to the ‘minimal music’ of his peers, Phillip Glass, Michael Nyman, Terry Riley and Steve Reich. With his piano and organ works, he has developed a highly individual aesthetic centred around layered overtones, and electronic drones, which build and change gradually, gently harmonising. His performances are overtly spiritual in nature. Palestine’s pieces consist of stratifications marked by an absence of linear progression by an transcendent timelessness. What we hear seems to be an excerpt from a continuum that may well ring for eternity, an infinitely extended present that makes past and future fade away.

In cooperation with CTM (club transmediale) Festival for Adventurous Music and Related Visual Arts Berlin.

• Charlemagne Palestine (US): American composer, musician, performer and artist Charlemagne Palestine has close links with American Minimalist music of the 1960s. However, he chose to follow his own path early in his career. In contrast to the more light-hearted Minimalism of his contemporaries La Monte Young, Phillip Glass, Terry Riley and Steve Reich, Palestine took a more ritualistic approach. For more than forty years, he has used the existential intensity of his drone-based ‘resonant music’ to fathom the transcendent qualities of sound.

Text with image (PDF) p.  106