FESTIVAL AT CORNISH continued |
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Like so much of Harrison’s music, two of the other pieces on the program, 1998’s Music for Remy and 1967’s In Memory of Victor Jowers, were also dedicated to close friends. For the gregarious Harrison, music was something you did with your friends, whether in a percussion ensemble or a gamelan.
Percussion also accented the two major works on the program. Taub’s flute carried Harrison’s sinuous chamber music score for Jean Erdman’s 1948 ballet, The Perilous Chapel, one of several percussion-propelled chamber works he wrote to accompany dance during his decade in New York City. The show came to a rousing conclusion with the exhilarating 1961 Concerto in Slendro for violin, two tack pianos, celesta and percussion and performed by members of the excellent Seattle Chamber Players for maximum drama (especially violinist Mikhail Shmidt), from its explosive opening to its jubilant finale. Harrison wrote it on his way to a conference in Asia, already in thrall to his newly reinvigorated love affair with Asian musical cultures, and this performance brought out the influence of native instruments like the Chinese guzheng and erhu.
One reason the piece sounded so powerful is that, as in the rest of the festival, the players used Harrison’s preferred tunings, which permit expressive nuance and power far surpassing the compromised “industrial” equal temperament system he so often scorned. Along with a couple other later Harrison works, this concert included one of his earliest experiment in just intonation tuning, the 1955 landmark Incidental Music for Corneille’s ‘Cinna,’ again played affectingly by Drury, who emphasized its Baroque heritage. Cornish deserves a lot of credit for taking the trouble to use appropriate instruments; they deployed half a dozen pianos, all prepared differently.
IV
Saturday’s four hour, two concert Cage marathon also traversed much of the composer’s career, which really took off at Cornish, where he worked as an accompanist for the dance department — a job he got thanks to Harrison. When he knocked on Harrison’s door in San Francisco in the late spring of 1938, Cage wasn’t seeking a creative partner or new insights into the future of music. He was looking for a job. Harrison recommended him to Cornish dance professor Bonnie Bird, who’d wanted Harrison himself for the position, but he was happy in a similar job at Oakland’s Mills College. The rest is, literally, history.
Upon arriving at the little arts school in the fall of 1938, Cage began to organize a percussion nsemble for concert performances, as he had (more informally) in Los Angeles, giving a Seattle concert in December, and repeating the program the following month at the Universities of Idaho and Montana, and Reed and Whitman Colleges in Oregon and Washington. Following these shows, he wrote to several composers, including Harrison, Cowell, and Virgil Thomson, requesting scores for a spring concert at Cornish. The performers included Cage and his wife, Xenia, pianist Margaret Jansen, and dance instructor Doris Dennison, who would form the core percussion ensemble for several Harrison/Cage concerts in Seattle and San Francisco over the next few years.
“Percussion music is revolution,” Cage began a magazine article around this time, and this festival’s two pieces from those concerts, performed Saturday night, still sounded revolutionary. His cyclical 1941 Third Construction used bass drum and conch shell along with a huge battery of percussion (rattles, drums, cowebells, lion’s roar, and many more exotic noisemakers) to achieve a massive, almost overwhelming tidal wave of powerful rhythm. After a false start to rearrange some of the tin cans, the PRPQ players excelled in both the nuanced soft sections and in the impressive racket .
The Imaginary Landscape #2 from 1942 added an amplified coil of wire that hung from a tall stand — one of the first electronic music experiments. (His first Imaginary Landscape used turntables from the Cornish radio station.) Seven decades after its premiere, and after half a century of raucous rock and roll, Cage’s piece still elicited shouts and “Wooo!”s from the audience, which included plenty of 20 and 30 somethings.
Cage had been lured to Cornish by Bird’s promise of a closet full of percussion instruments left in the dance department by his predecessor, but the senior recital by budding Cornish choreographer Syvilla Fort took place at a nearby smaller venue that lacked the space for a full percussion ensemble. Yet the African themed piece, titled Bacchanale, really demanded the visceral power of percussion. So the ever practical Cage improvised, remembering Cowell’s experiments playing inside the piano, damping strings, even placing a book and a darning egg on the strings to generate strange harmonics. Cage himself had used a screw and a strip of cardboard to modify some piano strings a few months earlier in his Second Construction, and at a recent rehearsal a metal rod tumbled into a piano and produced strange and evocative sounds. By placing objects like bolts, screws, and weather stripping in the strings, he could get strange and wonderful sounds and textures. Cage’s third Cornish innovation, the prepared piano, was born. (“Dammit, I wish I’d thought of that!” Harrison replied when Cage told him of the innovation — which Harrison called “screwing the piano”- on his return to San Francisco for that summer’s break. Harrison then immediately wrote May Rain for prepared piano.)
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