Michael Byron’s Approaches to Percussion

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

Halcyon Days is the second of three new albums just released by Cold Blue Music. The first of these, The Basketweave Elegies, was discussed yesterday. Hopefully, the final album will be discussed on this site tomorrow.

Readers may recall that The Basketweave Elegies was a solo performance of Peter Garland’s nine-movement suite by percussionist William Winant. Halcyon Days is also a percussion album, at least if we follow Béla Bartók’s classification of the piano as a percussion instrument, which he applied in composing his “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.” The overall “program” consists of five compositions by Michael Byron.

Winant is the soloist on the first two tracks, “Drifting Music” (1972) and “Music of Every Night” (1974). He also leads the William Winant Percussion Group, whose other members are Tony Gennaro, Michael Jones, and Scott Siler, in the performance of “Music of Steady Light” (1978). The remaining two tracks are piano music. “Starfields” (1974) was composed for four hands on a single keyboard; and it is performed by the Ray-Kallay Duo, whose members are Vicki Ray and Aron Kallay. The album concludes with Lisa Moore’s solo performance of “Tender, Infinitely Tender” (2016).

All of the music from the Seventies has been previously under-documented. This was the decade during which “minimalist” techniques began to emerge; and the lengthier compositions would soon benefit from the replacement of long-playing vinyls with compact discs, which could accommodate longer uninterrupted durations. Where resources are concerned, “Drifting Music” is decidedly the most “minimal.” However, the score explicitly exploits “interference” effects in which the superposition of the sonorities of individual tubes give rise to new sonorities. As in many other compositions from this period, listening must be directed at the details; and in “Drifting Music” those details serve up a thoroughly engaging experience.

Nevertheless, the selections on this album suggest that, once Byron had explored a particular approach to composing for an instrumentation, he felt obliged to consider another set of instrumental resources and shift his composition strategy accordingly. Thus, while the tracks on the album are not strictly in chronological order, one can still appreciate the progression of composition techniques. It is also worth noting that Byron would return to the textures emerging from his earlier techniques when he composed “Bridges of Pearl and Dust” in 2011. This piece was scored for four vibraphones and was recorded by Ben Phelps using overdubbing technology for a “singles” album that was released by Cold Blue in October of 2019. Presumably, Byron is still exploring new approaches to creating auditory textures.