Michael Harrison: Revelation: Music for the Harmonically Tuned Piano

(Michael Harrison Music – www.michaelharrison.com)

Marcus Boon

(This review originally appeared in The Wire)

New York based composer/pianist Michael Harrison cut his teeth as La Monte Young’s piano tuner for The Well Tuned Piano in the 1980s, and as the only pianist aside from Young authorized to perform the epic piece.  A long time student of the late Indian raga masters Pandit Pran Nath, and, more recently, Ustad Mashkor Ali Khan, Harrison has continued Young’s exploration of just intonation tuning on a specially redesigned “harmonic piano” with a pedal that allows Harrison to modulate pitches around any key, allowing the piano to play 24 pitches per octave.  The piano also uses only a single string per note (in contrast to the three on a regular piano) giving a kind of harp like effect heard to great effect on Harrison’s first release, 1992’s From Ancient Worlds. 

In contrast to that CDs charming, delicate orientalisms, Revelation, a live recording made in 2001 at New York’s Lincoln Centre, has more in common with Young’s piano works, in particular the “tone clouds” that Young discovered in The Well Tuned Piano, which are basically clusters of pitches played together rapidly with both hands, so that they form a chord-like matrix which stretches out in time in an almost drone-like fashion.  Used with Just Intonation tuning, this technique produces remarkable sets of overtones as the pitches resonate with each other, building into a pulsating, shimmering wall of sound in which all kinds of ghost-like sound effects and structures appear.  Although this is an effect best heard live since it is an acoustic phenomenon, the CD captures the strange beauty of Just Intonation tuning, allowing the listener to experience the way notes that initially sound “out of tune” become compelling as the ear “retunes” itself away from the murky approximations of conventional Western equal tempered tuning back towards perfect pitch.  In particular, Revelation sets out to emancipate the comma, that tiny excess of pitch in natural tuning systems which western equal temperament sought to tame through its insistence on regular intervals.

A formidable pianist, Harrison’s playing sounds less jazzy than Young’s, but he shares with his teacher a fascination with reconciling form and improvisation through raga-like structures, which beckon towards an unexplored universe of sound relationships.    

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