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Composers John Cage and Lou Harrison
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At the climactic moment in the final movement, when the piano cadenza flows into an accompanying role with saron (Javanese metallophone) imbal (interlocking parts), it seemed an effortless, natural rejoining of musical partners rather than the climax of some metaphorical battle. And after Varner (a member of Gamelan Pacifica who studied gamelan in Java last summer) took her bows and disappeared while the piano was being moved offstage, she returned to the stage (wearing pants instead of a dress), and sat down at the slenthem, rejoining the gamelan for the rest of the show, subsuming any artistic ego to the group in true gamelan fashion. Harrison, who so valued the communal act of music making — from his 1930s percussion ensembles to the American and Javanese gamelans that he happily played in for the last three decades of his life — might have been as pleased at that moment as he would have been by the fine performance.
The interweaving melodic lines of the gamelan were clearly audible in Cornish’s acoustically dry little PONCHO Concert Hall. Hearing the piano concerto in the context of the prepared piano and percussion music elucidated the link between it — the piano is, after all, just another tuned percussion instrument — and Harrison and Cage’s earlier work.
The piano concerto was followed by another of Harrison’s loveliest works, 1987’s Philemon and Baukis for violin and gamelan, which sports another of those incomparably beguiling Harrison melodic lines that seem as though they could go on forever. This performance didn’t quite attain the heights the piece can reach. Soloist Paris Hurley’s restrained performance might have been a shade too reticent, but that’s infinitely preferable to the vibrato laden, inappropriately romanticized style that sometimes afflicts uninformed performances of Harrison’s music.
The concert and festival closed with Duykers joining the gamelan and male chorus in a reprise of his 1980 Northwest premiere of Harrison’s Scenes from Cavafy, an alluring setting of the poet’s work for gamelan, harp, and Chinese psalteries. Powell’s program note explained that the non gamelan instruments were “stand ins for the gender [a metallophone that makes a gorgeous harp like sound], siter [zither], and rebab [two string fiddle] found in a Central Javanese gamelan,” and this performance replaced them with the Javanese originals. Although this performance sounded a bit more tentative than the others (perhaps partly because the singers, as traditional in Java, were seated, with consequent effects on vocal production that experienced Javanese singers have learned to compensate for), it still revealed the piece’s luster. As far as I know, it’s hitherto been available only on a single recording, a long out of print cassette, and it’s good news that Gamelan Pacifica will be recording it., the piano and gamelan concerto, and other Harrison works for CD. Harrison wrote enough gamelan music for a dozen concerts, but I was a little surprised that the festival didn’t program his Cornish Lancaran for saxophone and gamelan.
As with Cage, this and the festival’s other Harrison concert demonstrated how many of the qualities of his percussion music extended throughout his career. Harrison never lost his appetite for the sound of percussion, nor his gift for melody. (By contrast, Cage seemed more drawn to percussion’s momentary sonorities than to melodic development.) Harrison’s gamelan music poured those and the other major fascinations of his long and productive career (world music, tuning innovations, Baroque techniques) into a musical melting pot as rich as anything the 20th century produced.
While Harrison’s music continues to be performed almost every day (frequently in dance performances), Cage’s contemporary influence stems more from his ideas as from actual performances of most of his work. Whether Harrison’s work will ever be considered as influential as Cage’s is impossible to know, but it’s certain that neither of them would care. They were too busy enjoying the thrill of playing with so many different musical possibilities, a path that really started in 1930s San Francisco and Seattle.
Lou Harrison
Giteck, Kocmieroski and Powell had long and fruitful working relationships with Cage and Harrison, and brought them in for several residencies there in the 1980s and ‘90s, including a memorable joint residency shortly before Cage’s death. “I feel like Cage is in the building today,” Giteck said. She and the other faculty members assiduously recount stories of the two masters to their students in order to preserve a sense of continuity and linkage to the American experimental tradition they pioneered.
That tradition seems robust. Guest lecturer Larry Polansky, now at Dartmouth but one of Harrison’s closest associates when he lived in the Bay Area, delivered a paper outlining three major ideas pioneered by Cage, Cowell and Harrison that have deeply influenced today’s composers.
But really, the best evidence of the central role played by those three genial, forward looking West Coast composers, and now gradually earning long overdue recognition, appears in the music performed with increasing frequency all over the world. For example, next year, Powell and Kocmieroski plan to recreate Cage’s percussion ensemble tours at the same Northwest colleges they played 70 years ago. In Austin, Texas a group called the Cage Percussion Players is doing the same thing.
Practically every self respecting music department these days has a percussion ensemble, and the US boasts more than 100 gamelans.
The percussion ensemble’s influence transcends the music itself, which had almost no precedent. It’s probably a stretch to call it the progenitor of indie rock of the sort that made Seattle famous half a century later, but Cage and Harrison’s group consciously avoided the academic institutional setting most composers inhabited in favor of the practical, do-it-yourself, outsider spirit that fueled rock bands a generations later. It also provided a model for the Philip Glass/Steve Reich ensembles of the late 1960s (Cage was a mentor to Glass around then) and thus to today’s composer-led ensembles like Bang on a Can All Stars.
Taub, who serves on the board of Chamber Music America, says that organization regularly receives strong proposals from percussion quartets, and that today’s students are excited by the potential of playing in percussion ensembles without having to spend years developing virtuoso chops. “That’s in the spirit of Cage and his percussion players,” he says. Cornish’s Drums Along the Pacific festival is just the latest example of how resonant their ideas have been, how powerfully they still echo down the years.
Brett Campbell writes about music for the Wall Street Journal, Willamette Week, San Francisco Classical Voice, and many other publications. He and Bill Alves are writing a biography of Lou Harrison.
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