The title for this work comes from the “Dance of the Spirits”, a name given to the phenomenon of Aurora Borealis by the Cree people, one of the largest groups of indigenous peoples in North America. While settled in the north regions of the United States and Canada, the Cree population gave a truly inspiring name to nature’s mysterious play of wind and light, a surely mystical occurrence not accidentally compared with the various states our inner spirituality.

Chant of the Spirits is a work that mimics this metaphor of the spiritual world imbedded in natural phenomena such as Aurora Borealis. It takes neume-like melodic fragments of the soprano voice, and in a vocalize-like fashion gradually builds up a ritualistic atmosphere not foreign to Native American ceremonies. The percussion mallet and tuned instruments and drums and gongs reinforce this growth and decline of musical material.

The soprano delivers a series of melodies based on spiral-like patterns, and uttered by a series of five vowel groups (a, e, i, o, u). The hierarchy of individual vowels is determined by the spectral contact of each vowel in respect to their formant quality. For instance, front vowels appear to have stronger and spectrally richer higher formant regions, while the back vowels give an impression of smoother sound with more transparent spectral content.