Cappella Romana & Alexander Lingas

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Cappella Romana & Alexander Lingas · Cappella Romana is a vocal ensemble founded in 1991 in Portland, Oregon. The name means Roman Chapel and refers to the medieval Greek idea of the Roman oikoumene, the inhabited world, which included Rome and Western Europe but also the Byzantine Empire, with Constantinople as the New Rome. The choir is known for its exploration of the music of the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Its music director is Alexander Lingas, a musicologist at City University in London who specialised in Byzantine music. Guest artists regularly take part, among them Ivan Moody and Vladimir Morosan.

Music and breakthrough

The ensemble contributed to exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. In 2002 it performed Passion and Resurrection by Ivan Moody, and in 2014 it gave the world premiere in Portland of Passion Week, a choral work from 1923 by Maximilian Steinberg. From 2010 it took part in a Stanford University research project on the acoustics of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.

Influence

On the 2019 album Lost Voices of Hagia Sophia, those acoustics were recreated with digital techniques, so that Byzantine chant sounds the way it might have sounded in the church a thousand years ago, even though the recording was made in a studio in California. In this way the ensemble makes music from a distant past audible, and shows that space and sound belong together. In School of Rock the choir represents the early church music of the East, with, among other pieces, a Cherubic Hymn and a chant by Kassia.

Listening

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  Asmatikon Cherubic Hymn · Cappella Romana & Alexander Lingas, 574
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  Lord, the Woman Found in Many Sins (Kassia) · Cappella Romana & Alexander Lingas, 850