Revelation

Michael Harrison (Performer) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Performer: Michael Harrison
• Audio CD (January 1, 2002)
• Number of Discs: 1
• ASIN: B00005UWIH
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #843,085 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. Revealing the Tones & Dyads

2. Night Vigil

3. Revealing the Commas

4. Mystic Lyre

5. Homage to La Monte

6. Homage to La Monte (tone cloud)

7. Night Vigil II

8. Carillon

9. The Spaceship

10. The Spaceship (tone cloud)

Editorial Reviews

Philip Glass, composer

“Revelation shows a broad range of Harrison’s unique and highly developed musical personality.”

Product Description

Revelation, recorded live at Lincoln Center, is a sonic journey of shimmering and pulsating effects weaving through delicate lyrical passages as well as massive walls of harmonic resonance. This magnum opus is a modern approach to the ancient principles of pure tuning or “just intonation.” For over 20 years Harrison’s work with the “harmonically tuned” piano has developed the universal concepts espoused by Pythagoras and other Greek philosophers and mathematicians who discovered that musical concords arise from simple mathematical relationships based on whole numbers. Plato realized that these musical proportions not only relate to a universal order and the balance of the celestial spheres, but also reflect the harmony within man's soul. This philosophy is referred to as the “music of the spheres.” Plato taught that music could thus “correct any discord which may have arisen in the courses of the soul.”

Just intonation and natural tunings are found in the music of ancient Greece, India, Persia, China, and Japan, as well as in the "a cappella" music of the West, including Gregorian chant and renaissance polyphony. By contrast, equal temperament, the standard tuning for pianos, compromises these natural musical proportions in order to facilitate chord changes and shifts in key.

Revelation introduces for the first time in modern tuning the extensive use of simultaneously sounding “commas,” the microtonal intervals between two slightly different versions of the same note. When these precisely tuned minute intervals sound together they produce never-before-heard combinations of modes, harmonies, and acoustical phenomenon. These include Harrison’s resonant “tone clouds” in which the overtones are so audible that they create the illusion of voices and various instruments resonating from the piano. According to Harrison, “The Revelation tuning has so many beautiful and exotic sounds latent within it; I felt like an explorer in unknown and distant harmonic regions.”

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars remarkable and very moving, November 30, 2007

By 

Jack Schelin "Jack Schelin" (New York City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Revelation (Audio CD)

Harrison's music could be called 'experimental', I guess, but to my ears it's nowhere near 'new age'. He's using an alternate piano tuning that's quite different from what we're used to in 'classical' piano. He didn't invent it, either; it's been around forever and probably characterized some of the world's oldest music.

To me -- and I'm not a professional musician -- most of this music has aclear captivating melodic direction, which I've not often heard from music which I have understood typically to be in the 'new age' genre. (That's not intended to be derogatory to that genre at all.) I remember the first time I heard REVELATION, on a radio broadcast while driving -- I remember thinking, what if Gershwin or Kern or Porter or Berlin had heard this? And then I thought, what if John Lennon had lived long enough to hear this? I have no idea how you'd put lyrics to this material. Then I thought, what would Coltrane have made of it? I find that it really strikes deep in the soul, and I find it compellingly melodic and deeply lyrical (in the sense that 'lyrical' means 'expressive').

One last point, I've heard another of Harrison's albums -- I've forgotten the title -- on which he also performs pieces using standard tuning. I also found them to be eloquent, moving, and technically highly satisfying. It was very interesting to hear him perform both tunings on the same disk, whatever its title, and in the end the experienced reinforced what I'm trying to describe as my response to REVELATION. I think this music really is a gift to the soul. (For the sake of full disclosure, I wouldn't know Mr. Harrison if I tripped over him. I have no relationship to him, his producers, his publishers, his labels, etc. etc. However, I am grateful to them all for an extraordinary job.)

0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars New Age music on a slightly out-of-tune piano, February 11, 2004

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Revelation (Audio CD)

It's like the background music you hear in a store that sells crystals, incense, and posters of unicorns and rainbows. Played on the piano from your junior high school's music room. At the end of a humid summer.

It sounds as if someone is noodling around on this slightly out-of-tune piano... someone who enjoys some of the slightly sour chords and keeps coming back to the ones that he likes.

I don't see how this can ever be more than, at the best, a novelty. Some of the sounds are intriguing. As with carillon bells, or, indeed, bass notes on a piano, slight detunings can give a pleasant effect. Nevertheless, I have the definite feeling that the music Harrison produces is heavily constrained, rather than liberated, by the harmonic resources at his disposal.

I notice that Harrison plays very few full chords, in the usual sense of the word. He plays arpeggios, he plays pairs of notes with a widely separated bass accompaniment, and he plays "tone clouds," but not chords. I have to suspect that this is because chords do not sound good with this tuning.