The Monastery of Christ in the Desert in northern New Mexico inspired Robert Kyr to compose the music on his new album of choral works. Karen Kuehn for NPR

We all need to escape the madding crowd from time to time. Where and how? Plenty of choices. Desert. Sacred, devotional acts. Music. As you choose. Or all of the above. Thanks to National Public Radio (USA) for the reminder of such places and activities:

Inspiration can come from unlikely places. For composer Robert Kyr, the silence of a desert monastery is key to the radiant music on his new disc of recent choral works performed by the vocal ensemble Conspirare and its director Craig Hella Johnson.

Kyr travels frequently to the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, in northern New Mexico, from his home in Eugene, Ore., where he teaches composition at the University of Oregon. Living among the monastery’s Benedictine monks, Kyr hikes along the winding Chama River by day and composes music in a bare-walled room at night.

The story behind the music on this album was told in a series of radio, video and online features reported by NPR’s John Burnett, who first met the composer by chance, deep in the New Mexico desert, on a snowy New Year’s Eve. Burnett visited Kyr at the monastery, tracing the journey of Songs of the Soul, a 47-minute cantata, from inception to its 2011 premiere in Austin, Texas. Now another chapter in the story unfolds as a recording of Songs of the Soul and its companion cantata The Cloud of Unknowing have been released…

Read the whole article here.