For Opera About Tibetan Saint, Composer Searched For Sounds She’d Never Heard Before

Andrea Clearfield added Nepali and Tibetan bells, conch shells, and singing bowls to the Western orchestra for Mila, Great Sorcerer, but even those were sounds she already knew. So she got an instrument maker to create seven entirely new instruments, from, as David Patrick Stearns puts it, “an ethereal tricked-out music box to a drone that suggests something primeval welling up from the center of the Earth.” — The Philadelphia Inquirer

Article source here:Arts Journal