School of Rock
Random article All articles A–Z
2 languages

Cappella Romana

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

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, to which Rome and Western Europe belonged, but also the Byzantine Empire with Constantinople as the New Rome. The ensemble is best known for its research into Eastern Orthodox chant and contributed to exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. It is directed by Alexander Lingas, a musicologist at City University in London.

Music and breakthrough

In 2010 the ensemble joined the research project Icons of Sound on the acoustics of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, together with Stanford University. For the album Lost Voices of Hagia Sophia from 2019, digital sound techniques were used to recreate the enormous space, so that Byzantine chants sound as they could be heard a thousand years ago. Other albums are When Augustus Reigned in 2000, The Fall of Constantinople in 2006, Voices of Byzantium in 2012, Cyprus: Between Greek East and Latin West in 2017 and The Akáthistos Hymn in 2018.

Influence

The music consists of monophonic and polyphonic choral chants, often over a drone (bourdon), without instruments. Cappella Romana shows how space and singing belong together, and makes an ecclesiastical tradition of more than a thousand years audible to a wide audience.

Listening

Listening tip. Listen to a chant from Lost Voices of Hagia Sophia. Notice the long reverberation of the space and how the voices rest on a sustained note.

Discography

Studio albums

Categories: Artists