Editor’s note: This is part of The Know’s series, Staff Favorites. Each week, we give our opinions on the best that Colorado has to offer for dining, shopping, entertainment, outdoor activities and more. (We’ll also let you in on some hidden gems.)
Colorado is rich with prehistoric artifacts and culture stemming from the Paleo-Indian people of the southwest United States.
Two years ago, four Denver musicians put that Indigenous history to use by recording a 12-piece album featuring lithophones, which are stones chiseled and ground down more than 6,000 years ago to create musical instruments. Believed to predate ancestral Puebloans, the lithophones produce the sound of ringing bells.
“Gentle Worship,” the collaboration between composer Nathan Hall and Perc Ens — short for Percussion Ensemble, a minimalist classical trio — was released in September online and on a vinyl pressing. The mood is dark and mysterious, the tone both opaque and crystal clear, the ancient sounds delivered in uncanny high-definition.
The particular lithophones used by the artists were discovered in archaeological sites in Great Sand Dunes National Park and the San Luis Valley. Each stone was hand-crafted into long, thin slabs with curved ends. Marilyn Martorano, an archaeologist and Alamosa native, studied the stones with support from a state historical fund grant.
Martorano’s research, which she presented with the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center last summer, found that lithophones have been made by people on every continent and went by names such as “ringing rocks” or “rock bells.” When she struck one with a mallet and heard its chime, she said, “it made the hair on my arms stand up.”
After meeting with Martorano, hearing the lithophones and arranging them in a musical scale, Hall consulted with the leaders of the state’s Indian tribes regarding their use as instruments, he told KUNC last month. They were unaware of their uses and encouraged him to create music out of them, he said.
Hall and percussionists Jack Arman, Luke Watcher and Michael John McKee decamped to the town of Rangely to record from inside the TANK Center for Sonic Arts, a seven-story water tank that never, according to the artists who run it, served its original purpose. They take full advantage of the lithophones’ clear resonance and the studio in which they were recorded.
The seven movements that open the album are labeled in the credits as “stone echoes.” Hall tests the tank’s reverberating steel frame with finger snaps and the instruments’ bell tones, similar to those of xylophones.
Other instruments soon accompany the lithophones. Timpani drums, woodblocks, cymbals — even a trash bag — fill the void, adding depth and a rough, visceral texture to the dulcet chimes. On “Movement V,” Hall and his players use the lithophone as a tuning fork, arranging the notes and performing them as a vocal choir. Flute-like screeches scrape across the surface. Whistling evokes birds flying overhead.
Live, Perc Ens usually builds polyrhythms brick by brick and, through eye contact and improvisation, changing the emphasis and structure. That intricacy and energy are evident in “Dressing and Trimming,” the album’s penultimate song and the one credited solely to the group. The trio up the tempo and strike the lithophones with precision and a propulsive stubbornness, an avant-garde “Carol of the Bells.”
It was not too long ago when Martorano first researched the use of these stone artifacts. At the time, she said, she thought she was the first person to hear their sound in thousands of years. Her research could be just scratching the surface; she believes other artifacts like them could be strewn elsewhere in Colorado.
On “Gentle Worship,” they’re available for others to hear, too. When they do, they’ll listen to the echoes of the early humans who created the instruments still reflecting into the future.