'[The Trio is...]...superbly performed...recommendable...to those interested in contemporary American music...' - David Hurwitz in Fanfare

HARRISON, L.: Homage to Lou Harrison (A), Vol. 3 - In Praise

Classical Music

Composer/pianist Michael Harrison's Time Loops is the follow up to Revelation, a critically acclaimed Cantaloupe recording from 2007, and features "cello goddess", Maya Beiser and one track with the Young People's Chorus of New York City. Michael Harrison is known for developing one of the most distinctive musical styles in recent years; utilizing innovative tuning relationships to further develop Just Intonation - an ancient tuning system where the distances between notes are based upon whole number ratios.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Sadie Harrison's music is instantly recognizable from that of any other composer of her generation. She has a potent sense of instrumental color and a distinctive rhythmic vigor permeates all of her output. Here a program of her exotic chamber music is presented by leading musicians in the contemporary music field.

Harrison is a melodist who has found his own patterns for melody, apparent in the anxious repetiion of an unresolved motif in the opening "Preludial," in the transformative, alchemical heat suggested by "Sintering," or the contrast of the transparent resolution of "River Dolphin." Throughout, Harrison creates his own structural language with a music that is both deceptively simple and, ultimately, wholly beautiful...(Stuart Broomer, August 2014)

Classical Music

Harrison: For Strings

Percussionist Christopher Whyte releases Cold Stability, a collection of works for different percussion instruments that explores paths to quietude through sound. Featuring works by Toshio Hosokawa, Sarah Hennies, Lou Harrison, and Whyte himself, the album travels through a variety of timbres, most of which inhabit a space which subverts the expectation for a bombastic percussion recording.

The Australian-British Sadie Harrison is no ordinary composer: she is also an archaeologist and a professional gardener. So it is hardly surprising that a fascination with historical artifacts and biological processes filters into her music. The instrumental miniatures on this recording are both slow and brutal, some of them mirroring ancient worlds and natural phenomena and others taking their starting point in the paintings of Brian Graham and Peter Sheppard Skærved, expressing visual and textural ideas in sound. All are first recordings.

REVIEW:

Australian-born and UK-based, Sadie Harrison took some time out from composition to work as an archaeologist and professional gardener, activities which nourish these new works, mostly written in the past four years. Her fascination with fragments, minutiae and painted miniatures has resulted in five groups of tiny pieces each lasting around three minutes or less. The shortest is 24 seconds! Gallery (Rooms I and II) for solo violin—19 musical glimpses to be played in any order—takes the paintings of the versatile violinist Peter Sheppard-Skaerved as a starting point. Hidden Ceremonies, for piano, explores prehistory as depicted through paintings by Brian Graham. Musical echoes, from Vaughan Williams to Stravinsky to Aghanistan and beyond, are woven into Harrison’s works, each glittering in their intensity.

-- The Guardian

Includes work(s) by Lou Harrison. Ensemble: Tammittam Percussion Ensemble. Conductor: Guido Facchin.

Listen to the Naxos Podcast to learn more about this release

Lou Harrison was a composer far ahead of his time. A protean innovator, he epoused "world music" before it had a name, and this recording documents his pioneering roles as a composer for percussion and as an integrator of Western and Indonesian idioms. The Concerto for Violin and Percussion, both intimate and vigorous, demonstrates his experimental enthusiasm in the use of non-pitched percussion. The Grand Duo for Violin and Piano is a remarkable example of gamelan-infused chamber music while Double Music, co-composed with Harrison's friend John Cage, is a well-known product of their celebrated San Francisco percussion concerts.

Lou Harrison was born in Portland, Oregon in 1917. His musical style was shaped by the San Francisco of the 1930s. There he studied composition with Henry Cowell, and staged high profile percussion concerts with John Cage. He spent the year 1942-43 in Los Angeles where he studied with Arnold Schoenberg. In 1946, Harrison conducted the premiere of Ives's Third Symphony which he had edited from the manuscript score. The following year Ives was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for this work which he shared with Harrison.

During trips to Japan, Korea and Taiwan in 1961-62, he studied native instruments including the cheng and the p'iri. Back in California he enthusiastically presented concerts and lectures on Korean and Chinese music and experimented in his own works with hybrid instrumental ensembles. In 1975, Harrison began an intensive study of traditional Javanese gamelan techniques. He soon began to explore ideas of cross fertilization, adapting the concerto principle to the Indonesian orchestra by composing works for Western soloists accompanied by gamelan. Harrison died in Lafayette, Indiana, 2003, from a heart attack while on his way to a festival of his music at Ohio State University.

This 4 CD set brings together all the works recorded in the USA for the MusicMasters label during the early 1990s.

REVIEW:

Fans will be ecstatic that these recordings return to the catalogue; newcomers will find a lot of attractive low-density music that always sounds beguiling and is easy to live with.

-- Gramophone