Meteora - Erhu Duet in A Harmonic Minor

Two erhus sing together in A harmonic minor over a warm pad. The erhu is one of the most human of instruments, a bowed voice that keens and slides the way a person cries or sings, and here two of them wind slowly around each other with wide air between the phrases. The music rises to a single exposed peak and then settles back. The film travels between sacred places that people built high above the world. It opens and closes on the Shanti Stupa above Leh, a white Buddhist dome that stands at almost twelve thousand feet in the Himalaya of Ladakh. A Japanese monk raised it and finished it in 1991 as a monument to peace, and the fourteenth Dalai Lama enshrined relics of the Buddha at its base. In between, the film moves to Meteora in Greece, where Orthodox monks began climbing the nearly unreachable sandstone pillars in the fourteenth century and built their monasteries on the summits. They chose those heights on purpose, because the difficulty of the climb bought them solitude and safety, and they named the place Meteora, which means suspended in the air, between heaven and earth. At their height there were twenty four of these monasteries, and only a handful still hold monks today. The two places sit centuries and continents apart, one Buddhist and one Christian, yet they answer the same human impulse. Each one rises high above the world, reaching for the sacred. To me, the keening erhu sounds like that reaching. The minor key carries the ache, the sliding notes carry the longing, and the wideness leaves room to breathe. This piece is made for the sacred. erhu, erhu duet, erhu music, chinese erhu, meditation music, cinematic, contemplative music, reflective, emotional music, sad erhu, world music, original music, composer, original composition, self produced, music producer, erhu performance, video editing, post production, video editor, ladakh, leh, meteora, buddhist monastery, himalaya, A harmonic minor