Musica Sacra, the renowned New York-based chorus, performs music by Meredith Monk and the abbess Hildegard von Bingen.  Also, listen to excerpts from Morton Feldman's masterwork "Rothko Chapel," and "Atmospheres" by Gyorgy Ligeti.  Feldman’s powerfully communicative work, “Rothko Chapel,” is a tribute for his friend, the American abstract expressionist painter, Mark Rothko (1903 -1970), and suggests a divine music, appropriate to the sombre spirituality of Rothko’s chapel.  Ligeti’s "Atmospheres" for orchestra, with its tangled webs of dense texture and very slow changes, is a radical exploration of negation, and sometimes is called “stasis music.”

PROGRAM # 2868, choral music (First aired on Thurs, 11/13/08)