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Composer John Cage at the piano in 1947
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This crucial work showcases many of Cowell’s advances later used by Harrison and Cage: the string piano, the use of percussion instruments or imitations thereof (such as woodblocks, gongs, rice bowls and the tuned bowls of the Indian jaltarang) even notational innovations that made it easier for non-professional players to understand their parts. It and other pieces, two written for the Harrison/Cage percussion concerts, were augmented by the festival’s other directors, percussionist and Gamelan Pacifica director Jarrad Powell and flutist Paul Taub, who played with distinction throughout.
Cowell gave the concert its name and helped establish Cage and Harrison’s national reputation with his article, “Drums Along the Pacific,” in Modern Music magazine. When Cage arrived in New York after leaving Cornish (Harrison soon followed), his West Coast-born innovations gained an international stage.
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It was Cowell who suggested to Harrison and Cage that they compose for percussion. A major reason was practicality — and these maverick composers always embraced the very American notion of practicality. Harrison and Cage couldn’t afford to hire professional musicians, but they had a lot of friends who were dancers and musicians like them and could keep time. And Cowell had long espoused what Harrison called the “wickedly subversive” notion of using “found” percussion—anything that could make a good noise was fair game, if the composer used it appropriately. You could produce a whole world of music, he told Harrison, and simply bypass the establishment.
“John and I weren’t about to go through a conservatory, get a degree, present our large symphonies to the local conductor and get them refused,” Harrison once explained. “This was nonsense and we knew it. But in the irrepressible good spirits of youth and having fun—we would invent our music, so we did, and we got very good musician friends who were interested in having the fun of giving concerts and we literally, with Henry Cowell’s stimulus, invented the percussion orchestra.”
Cowell urged his protégés to scour junkyards, thrift shops, anywhere they could find cheap “instruments.” Chinatown proved especially fruitful; the shops held all manner of gongs, tuned wooden temple blocks, various drums, and other colorfully exotic (to Western ears) noisemakers.
A highlight of those percussion concerts opened Friday night’s survey of Harrison’s music. He and Cage each independently composed two of the four parts of the celebrated Double Music (now a staple of the percussion ensemble repertoire) yet so well did the partners know each other’s style that you’d think it was the product of a single aesthetic sensibility.
Seattle’s Pacific Rims Percussion Quartet played it and the other percussion works brilliantly (probably better than the original performers, who were after all amateur percussionists), with fierce concentration, careful attention to dynamic contrast, and dramatic impact. Not for a moment do they convey the attitude that, for all the wild sounds, this is mere gimmickry or novelty. And such was their commitment to these still-surprising sounds that even seven decades after they were first unleashed on an unsuspecting public, you could imagine how shocking they must have been to those first audiences.
The same 1941 San Francisco concert that premiered Double Music featured Harrison’s Simfony #13, which that original audience voted its favorite of the night. (The composers had enough money to record only piece, so they put the question to a vote.) It features a richer textural palette than the all-metal Double Music and better spotlights Harrison’s gift for extended melody writing even on these unlikely instruments. In PRPQ’s precise hands, the melodic lines displayed all the clarity of a string quartet.
John Duykers
As with most percussion music, these pieces work best when experienced live, for both acoustical and visual reasons. Much of the fun for the audience is seeing the players clout the bright red dragon’s mouths (tuned Chinese temple blocks), shake the shimmering brassy thundersheet, and dip a gong into a bucket of water (a Cage invention).
Harrison also used percussion and Cage’s prepared piano in the melancholy 1941 song May Rain, a brief setting of a poem of his friend Elsa Gidlow. Rather than the intricate mechanisms of Cage’s prepared piano pieces, May Rain uses the preparations of the piano to create a delicate “drizzle” of harmonics. The unusual eight-tone mode of the voice contributes to its melancholy yet unearthly atmosphere, appropriate for Gidlow’s nostalgic text, sung movingly by Duykers.
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