Customer Reviews

Labyrinth-Suite-Fifth Symphony

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All of Harrison's early music for percussion alone (e.g. without additional or solo instrument), written between 1939 (Bomba, Fifth Simfony) and 1942 (Suite), shortly after he had completed his studies with Cowell. In 1939 he was 22.

This is excerpted from the liner notes of a competing New Albion recording (Drums Along The Pacific) and I find it very appropriate:

"Cowell taught that most of the world's music consisted of a melodic line with rhythmic accompaniment, noting that Western composers had neglected the possibilities of rhythm and melody to worship instead at the altar of harmony. Harrison was fascinated. In Fall 1935 he approached Cowell for private composition lessons. Cowell taught him to work with small germinal cells -- both melodic and rhythmic -- interweaving them in complex patterns. He also urged Harrison to explore new instrumental resources. "Henry encouraged us to forage through junkyards," Harrison recalls."

All these pieces were also written shortly after, on Cowell's instigation, Harrison had met another young composer interested in percussion music and oriental influences: John Cage. Their collaboration from 1941, Double Music, is also on the disc, while the Fifth Symfony was written for Cage's Seattle Percussion Ensemble; Fugue an Canticle No. 1 were written for the joint percussion concerts given by Harrison and Cage in Oakland and San Francisco in 1941-2, when Cage had returned from Seattle and before he moved to Chicago.

In the excellent genral essay contained on the present disc, Art Lange further develops the point about junkyards: given the unaffordable prices of percussion instruments back then, Harrison and Cage were encouraged to scour junkyards, basements, garages, in search for junk that could be salvaged and made into percussion instruments, offering " a wide sprectrum of resonances, timbral colors, and textures". Indeed, this is really what the music is about: timbre.

If my ears don't fail me the sonorities of metal instruments dominate, but you also hear some wood, some skins, maracas, flexatone. It all sounds very oriental (although Lange points out that they were written long before Harrison actually discovered and wrote for the Balinese Gamelan, which was not until 1972), and it is most of the times very rhythmical (Lange also remarks that most of these early works were written to accompany dance performances: hence their insistence on rhythm rather than melody - to say nothing about harmony, never Harrison's foremost interest).

An enjoyable and convenient collection, documenting as it does the early forays of one of the foremost American mavericks and experimenters into an approach of music and percussion so associated to his name.

TT 70:47.