More “Manufactured” Music from Harnoy

from the Amazon.com Web page for the album being discussed

Tomorrow the Canadian Analekta label will release On the Rock. This will be the label’s second album featuring Canadian cellist Ofra Harnoy and her husband Mike Herriott, who serves as multi-instrumentalist, arranger, and co-producer of the album. Readers may recall that their previous album for Analekta was Back to Bach, which was discussed on this site almost exactly a year ago. For those too impatient to wait for tomorrow, Amazon.com has created its usual Web page for processing pre-orders.

Those with either long memories or web-surfing skills may recall that I was far from satisfied with Back to Bach. This had less to do with Harnoy’s talents as a cellist and pretty much entirely to do with the fact that every selection on the album was (to quote from my previous article) “a product of Herriott’s multi-track recording techniques through which both performers create ‘ensemble results.’” On the Rock is a similar “manufactured product,” this time bringing eight guest artists into the mix, five of whom are vocalists.

This time the repertoire is based on Newfoundland folk sources. (Herriott and Harnoy seem to have made St. John’s their home.) Experience has taught me that folk music has more to do with making, rather than listening. (One may go to both great lengths and similar expense when it comes to listening to someone as talented as Pete Seeger. However, I always felt he was there to teach me new tunes that I could then work with in my own way, no matter how rare and/or pricey the tickets were.) As a result, I found On the Rock as tiresome an account of folk sources as I had found Back to Bach a tiresome account of the early eighteenth century.

Caveat emptor!