Double exposure: Dorothy Carter vibrates on in 1976.
THE CIMBALOM and the hackbrett; the yangqin and the santur: included in the sleevenotes to last year’s reissue of Dorothy Carter’s 1978 album Waillee Waillee is the musician, historian and composer’s illustrated family tree of the psaltery, the ancient stringed instrument that was one of Carter’s beloved “trapezoids”. Whether they were plucked or struck with hammers, from China or Ukraine, Hungary or Iran, Carter – who played dulcimer, psaltery, hurdy-gurdy and zither – carefully noted them down. It’s a tangled taxonomy, one that matches Carter’s time-stretching, space-bending work, vibrating at the junction between Appalachian folk, New Age spiritualism and world music.
“Vibrating at the junction between Appalachian folk, New Age spiritualism and world music…”