Anne McCaffrey, Tania Opland & Mike Freeman
Sunset's Gold
The second CD from this best-selling author and two fine acoustic musicians, based on McCaffrey's "Harperhall" trilogy -- all original music with multi-cultural, classical and early music overtones.
The first McCaffrey/Opland/Freeman collaboration -- "The Masterharper of Pern" -- has been overwhelmingly popular with McCaffrey's fans. Listeners not previously familiar with the books who have been brave enough to get the CD anyway have also raved about it.
The back story to the novels is that colonists came to Pern from Earth millennia earlier, but the new world lacked the natural resources to maintain their technology. Crucial information that had to survive through the centuries was written into music, and a special class of musicians created to preserve and disseminate that music.
Since the colonists came from many different countries and cultures, and brought with them the full spectrum of terrestrial music, those influences would have all been present in the music of Pern from the start, but as the level of technology declined and the society reverted to feudalism, musical styles that suited acoustic instruments - and memorable lyrics for unamplified voices - survived.
Tania Opland and Mike Freeman were already performing music from many (Earth-based) countries and cultures, on a diverse assortment of instruments, before Anne McCaffrey approached them about composing the music she'd been describing in her books for so many years. They had been about to record their first duo album at the time, but they were so taken by the idea that they put their project on a back burner and got to work on "The Masterharper of Pern". Their cross-cultural collection "Cut to Rhythms" didn't get finished until more than a year later.
They've revisited Pern for "Sunset's Gold", with guest vocals from Alicia Healey, William Pint, Felicia Dale, Toni Wood, Joe Prater, and Emily Groff, and instrumental contributions from Philip Boulding (folk harp and valiha), Harper Tasche (folk harp and bray harp), Madeleine Doherty (concert harp) and Felicia Dale (hurdy gurdy). Opland and Freeman, as usual, pitch in with vocals, guitars, violin/viola, recorders, hammered dulcimer, cittern, mandola, djembe, congas, frame drums, bells, bones, glasses, pan lids...
The cover illustration, by Elizabeth Malczynski Littman, graced the 1977 edition of the first Harperhall novel, "Dragonsong", and was an all-time favorite for many of McCaffrey's readers.
World: World Traditions