Ian White

Grey Abbey Echoes

The evocative ruins of Grey Abbey lie near the eastern shores of Ulster’s Strangford Lough, a tranquil haven for reflection these days, but a hive of activity in the Middle Ages.  The striking remnants of Gothic arches and colonettes seem to convey the past in a way that active places of worship dating from the same period do not.  Isolated fragments of monastic buildings somehow remain linked through our awareness of their function in a late 12th century Cistercian community aspiring to spiritual purity.  The melodies in Grey Abbey Echoes are accordingly somewhat fragmentary, though often related by contour and intervallic structure to a solemn trombone theme at the outset.  Musical medievalisms are incorporated in the early lively sections to reflect Grey Abbey in its heyday.  However, as more atmospheric textures begin to emerge, the time warp disperses almost as if the present has now become the past.