The same values that motivate Kisho Kurokawa in architecture, motivate Eckart Rahn in music. Kurokawa's buildings are recognizable for their incorporation of other cultures - an openness to new elements that reconfirms his own Japanese tradition. Both delight in the variety of our world's cultures and seek out ways to combine them in fascinating new ways.

It is this goal that Eckart Rahn strives for in the music he produces on Celestial Harmonies and its affiliated labels. "The music represents an intercultural dichotomy in which each cultural style is valued for itself while being influenced by the others." Rahn combines the old with the new, Eastern with Western. Like Kurokawa, he does not allow the juxtaposition to descend into schizophrenic chaos or anarchistic collage. The combinations are contextual and symbolic.

The music of Celestial Harmonies spans the globe, from Europe, Northern Africa, India and Asia-Pacific, to North and South America. Much of the music represents the intercultural synthesis that Rahn so appreciates. Like Kisho Kurokawa, Eckart Rahn celebrates the idea of a "symbiosis of past, present and future . . . where each person can display his own individuality, where many different cultural spheres exist together."

Taken from: INTERCULTURAL MUSIC FROM PLANET EARTH AND BEYOND
- The Symbiosis of Intercultural Awareness by Patricia Bryers

The selections below evoke this philosophy via the instrument of the human voice. The featured title 'Anthology of Chant' is a potent example of the whole series, how voices and music from different times and places blend to become universal.