Lou Harrison Concerts in Minneapolis

Yes, Kris, there is at least one other tuning list subscriber in
Minneapolis--me.

Yes, it's too bad that one of us didn't post news about the Lou Harrison mini-
fest on this list earlier.

This weekend, I attended both the Boriskin piano recital and the concert
including the local Schubert Club gamelan orchestra and the Minneapolis
Contemporary Ensemble.

The Boriskin concert had no alternately tuned music, but did make
insightful pairings of pieces of Harrison with those of his teachers or
contemporaries including Henry Cowell, Schoenberg, Carl Ruggles, and
Virgil Thomson. Each Harrison piece in these pairings did sound substantially
similar in style to one of the above composers, without suffering the
typical not-as-good-as-the-original problem. (In fact, I'd certainly rather
hear Harrison's Suite (1943) than Schoenberg's Suite Opus 19, although I
used to play the latter.) The Rondo in Harrison's Suite was particularly
good, and its Conductus movement anticipates the complexity of Boulez. The
Carl Ruggles Four Evocations was a particularly brilliant piece on the
program,
and the Harrison Triphony (1945) compares well. Harrison's Reel: Homage to
Henry Cowell (1939) is also very worthy of further performances.

The program was framed by some more accessible music of his: a Dance Suite
a la Aaron Copland, and a Tango.

I think that Boriskin has, or will, release this music on an album entitled
The Equal-Tempered Lou Harrison.

Today's concert began with traditional Javanese gamelan, and then included
Gendhing in Honor of Palladio Slendro and Bubaran Robert Slendro by Harrison.
The style difference between traditional gamelan and Harrison's pieces was
certainly noticeable, even without the clapping in the first piece, and the
trombone soloist in the second. Nevertheless, the rather static style of
these pieces, and many of their structural features were very close to those
of the traditional pieces.

The second half of the program included Triphony again, and Waltz for
Evelyn Hinrichsen both played by local pianist Mary Jo Payne, the
Air for Flute solo backed by synthesized drone, and Party Pieces for chamber
ensemble of piano and wind quintet. These latter were written from fragments
composed at some New York composers' parties in the 1940s.

Regrettably, there was none of Harrison's JI music so far this weekend. Perhaps
the Kronos Quartet will do some tomorrow night?

European list members: for those of you with an interest in freely atonal
music, please
seek out the music of Ruggles. It's some of the best of its kind, and I
think it's not
well-known across the Atlantic. Another such composer is Ruth Crawford
Seeger, whose
string quartet is hopefully known a bit, but whose other work is certainly
unjustly
neglected as well.



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