Instruments
In his earlier albums, he often used the Serge Modular synthesizer, giving his music a twinkling and "cosmic" sound. In 1982, he built "The Beam", a 12-foot-long (3.7 m) acoustic instrument strung with 24 piano strings, designed by Jonathan W. Lazell and built with the help of Paul Abell. He has since used it in many albums (solo or collaboration) as well as in concert and film scores. At the end of the eighties, his sound became deeper and closer to Steve Roach's style. Michael Stearns' music is always very ambient and woven with sounds of nature or human voices. But it can also be more melodic with great themes evoking wide spaces or great landscapes.
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“The form of act or thought mattered nothing. The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crimes of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of to-day, were all emanation of divine thought, doing their appointed work. It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they existed through a power hostile to the deity, but as instruments of the deity to work out his unrevealed ends.”
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How soon they find fit instruments of ill!”
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