Michael
Harrison's Revelations
By
Molly Sheridan
© 2001 NewMusicBox
When composer Michael Harrison sits down at his piano and begins to play,
the sound is distinctive. Listen for a minute and you may pick up on the
fact that his normal-looking grand piano has been tampered with--Harrison
has customized its tuning and in doing so has opened up a whole new plane
of possibilities for piano composition.
Harrison has created his own musical style combining his
early classical and jazz piano lessons, compositional study
at the University of Oregon and The Juilliard School, and
his interest in North Indian classical singing. His education
led him to experiment with the pitch and form of piano
music and to bridge North Indian and Western classical
music traditions.
Mentored by musicians such as master Indian vocalist Pandit
Pran Nath, La Monte Young, and Terry Riley, Harrison has
spent the last 20 years developing this area of piano technique;
studying, teaching, and performing throughout the Unites
States and India. His latest project is a work which he
calls Revelation, a major composition for the "harmonically
tuned" piano based on his newly created "revelation" tuning
(which divides the octave into twelve unequal notes per
octave, all of which are tuned to overtones of a fundamental
low F). Revelation: Music for the 'Harmonically Tuned'
Piano, a recording of the work's U.S. premiere given at
Lincoln Center, will be released in early December.
In his program notes for the performance, Harrison explains: " As
I experimented with the "revelation" tuning,
I discovered that it possessed unique capabilities that
I had never heard or encountered before. These sounds are
difficult to describe in words. However, by combining carefully
selected pitch relationships with various performance techniques,
this tuning creates undulating waves of shimmering and
pulsating sounds, with what sound like "phase shifting" and "note
bending" effects and other acoustical phenomena. Sometimes
the overtones are so audible it sounds as if many different
acoustic and electronic instruments are resonating from
the piano. The tuning has so many beautiful and exotic
sounds latent within it, that for the first few months
every time I played it, I discovered new harmonic regions
and felt like an explorer in vast unexplored and distant
realms."
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