Album: Theatre of Voices, Paul Hillier, Stories (Harmonia Mundi)

In Stories, Paul Hillier leads the vocal ensemble Theatre Of Voices through a challenging series of pieces by composers such as Luciano Berio, John Cage and Sheldon Frank that push the notion of narrative into more abstract realms.

Berio's A-Ronne collages together fragments of text from various sources representing the standard distinctions of beginning/middle/end, while Cage's Story deconstructs a short text by Gertrude Stein into rhythmic, fragmentary vocables. Sheldon Frank's As I Was Saying is a collation of the meaningless pause-phrases that punctuate normal speech: literally, like reading between the lines.

DOWNLOAD THIS As I Was Saying; Story; A-Ronne