Harrison’s Concerto for Piano and Gamelan

courtesy of Jensen Artists

This past fall the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) released a recording of a previously presented concert performance. The concert took place at the CMA Gartner Auditorium on October 20, 2017 and was performed by pianist Sarah Cahill and the Gamelan Galak Tika under the direction of Evan Ziporyn and Jody Diamond. The ensemble presented Lou Harrison’s “Concerto for Piano with Javanese Gamelan,” the composer’s rarely performed second piano concerto.

As of this writing, the album is available only in digital form. Amazon.com has created a Web page for MP3 download. The bad news is that the download is entirely devoid of program notes. The good news is that the Web page includes an extended review by “Canticle,” which was uploaded this past November 17. The review includes descriptions of the concerto’s three movements, preceded by extensive background material sure to warm the heart of anyone that enjoys Harrison’s music (present company included).

However, as the hucksters like to say, that’s not all. CMA has created its own Web page for this recording. The site includes a player for streaming all three movements of the concerto, followed by extended essays by Cahill, Diamond, and Ziporyn. Cahill, in turn, cites Lou Harrison: American Music Maverick by Bill Alves and Brett Campbell, which, since its publication in 2017, has served me well as a primary reference for all-things-Harrison.

Harrison composed this concerto relatively late in life, when his primary focus was on just intonation and the integer ratios one encounters in the pitch classes of gamelan instruments. To bring these instruments together with a piano would require retuning the piano to honor those integer ratios in place of the “irrational” ratio (the twelfth root of two), which is the basis for equal tempered tuning. In reading the Alves-Campbell account of this concerto, one gets the impression that Harrison began by composing the gamelan music. The result would then guide how the piano would be retuned to fit into the “gamelan context.” Once the tuning had been finalized, the piano part could be developed around sharing thematic material. Actually, the concerto begins with an extended solo passage for the piano, allowing the ear to adjust to the intervals of the gamelan instruments before they join the piano.

The entire concerto is less than half an hour in duration. The first two movements are roughly ten minutes long, while the final movement is decidedly shorter. I must confess that my own listening habits are still adjusting the the concerto in its entirety, but the recording has left me eager to encounter this music in a concert setting. It also left me curious about what other joys may be lurking in the CMA recorded archives.