Harrison, Michael

Revelation

Label: Cantaloupe Country: USA

"A protégé of new music pioneer La Monte Young, composer-pianist Michael Harrison has developed one the most distinctive voices of our time, informed by his study of North Indian classical ragas and Middle Eastern rhythms. In Revelation (2001), his hypnotic seventy-minute work for solo piano, he employs the principles of harmonic resonance and just intonation to forge a remarkable new sound for the instrument, based on unfamiliar tunings and scales. Live performances of this strangely beautiful work have been praised for delivering 'heaping doses of old-fashioned, jaw-dropping virtuosity' (Los Angeles Times) and for generating 'pulsating shimmering walls of sound.' -The Wire."

"Revelation is a caressing, cataclysmic, monumentally over-the-top ode...a sonic bomb...you might think all the bells of the Vatican have entered your skull...by the hallucinatory end, it's all stars and rainbows."-Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times

"In November of 1999, I was one of four American composer/pianists - along with Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and Charlemagne Palestine - invited to perform at the 4 Pianos festival in Rome. We performed on four Steinway concert grand pianos, one for each of us, in the center of the high dome at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, with the piano lids removed so that the audience could sit in a circle around us and the music could reverberate throughout the space. Both Terry Riley and I had our pianos tuned in our own unique and different versions of just intonation. The intensive experience of rehearsing and performing my own work, as well as hearing the music of my colleagues, was extremely inspiring. As the week progressed, I found myself contemplating the sonic effects that result from working with "commas" (two slightly different, mathematically precise versions of the same note). I woke up on the morning following the last concert with a radical new tuning in my mind. It came to me very clearly, seemingly with no planning or effort, with all of the mathematical proportions worked out in a well-balanced symmetrical configuration. It felt like a gift; however, I am aware that this moment could only have happened as a result of twenty years of working with just intonation tunings.

Upon returning to my music studio in New York City, I applied this new tuning to my customized "harmonic piano" and began composing a new work based on the tuning's unusual qualities. I have titled both this new composition and the tuning "Revelation." As I experimented with the "revelation" tuning, I discovered that it possessed unique capabilities that I had never heard or encountered before. 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 that it sounds as if many different 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 unknown and distant realms."-Michael Harrison