CD Lute Music for Witches and Alchemists

This recording takes us into worlds in part quite alien to our modern consciousness. At the time the music was composed, human perception of the tenebrous recesses of the soul and of the rarefied heights of a bright mythological world of spirits had not yet become obscured by the power of rational thinking. The activities of the alchemists included confronting their essential selves in a process of meditation, the primary phase of which they colled nigredo, a "black blacker than black." And one of the techniques of witchcraft involved using music and dance in order to stimulate the life-forces in an atmosphere that was congenial but at the same time mysterious and dreamlike.

Lutz Kirchhof, Renaissance lute, Vihuela, Baroque lute, Theorbo lute