Ceremony is the first duo recording by the Swiss baroque violinist Maya Homburger and the English double bassist and composer Barry Guy. It sets a single prelude by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber against five pieces by Guy, and works in the field of tension between old and new music, and between composition and improvisation. The album shows how phrasing, textures and colours from one practice can change the other, and it introduced Homburger to ECM New Series.
The two had worked together in many settings before this record. Homburger came from historical performance, with credits in the 1980s alongside Camerata Bern and The English Concert, while Guy brought his work as composer and improviser. The music was recorded in April and July 1997 at the Propstei St. Gerold in Austria and at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, with Jan Erik Kongshaug and Peter Laenger as engineers and Manfred Eicher as producer. The booklet carries an interview with both musicians by Patrik Landolt.
The disc opens with Annunciation, the Praeludium of Biber's first Mystery Sonata, and Guy's pieces take their material and their sense of ritual from it. Celebration is a free, wide-ranging solo for violin, and Still is its counterpart for solo double bass. At the centre stands the title piece, more than sixteen minutes long and written for baroque violin and seven-track tape: Homburger plays against layers of her own recorded playing, building dense textures from long perfect fifths and echoes. Immeasurable Sky is a set of four songs for the duo, while the closing Breathing Earth reworks the last movement of the same Biber sonata, bringing the album back to its starting point.
In BBC Music Magazine Stephen Pettitt gave the album five stars, calling it an "evocative, original and entirely captivating disc" and Guy "a master of atmosphere". Writing on ECM Reviews in 2010, Tyran Grillo described how "the magic of multitracking allows Homburger to work her fractal spell" in the title piece. The duo kept this line of work going on later albums such as Dakryon (2005, Maya Recordings) and Tales of Enchantment (2012, Intakt Records).
This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1643, first released in January 1999.
