By BRAD WEISMANN
The Harp of New Albion
Terry Riley
1986
Celestial Harmonies
Defining music can be a fatal pursuit for the subject and
its listener. We are addicted to boxing things up, creating compartments where
none are necessary. When we think of art as product rather than process, we
cheat ourselves of a little glory.
Case in point: a recording from 27 years ago that I grabbed
out of idle curiosity and can’t stop playing (a little brain-softening from the
after-effects of the ‘70s? I assure you these musings are grounded in
sobriety). Composer Terry Riley’s freeform, loosely structured keyboard
meditation “The Harp of New Albion” is based on the wistful idea that explorer Sir
Francis Drake left behind a harp on American shores, which shamans set up above
the water’s edge, leaving the winds to play it.
Drake’s harp in this case is a piano retuned with the idea
of just intonation, as opposed to the equal temperament normally used in
Western music. Hours of research on this topic left me none the better able to
grasp the difference – it’s beyond me currently, so I will take the composer’s
word for it. What results are 11 movements, lightly structured and containing
room for improvisations, each based on differing tonal centers.
He states in the program notes that “Although The Harp of New Albion is improvised
throughout, each movement contains structural or composed elements which
determine the overall shape the section will take. In a concert performance the
order of the movements may vary and ideally, new movements will be improvised
spontaneously.”
The abandonment of compositional norms leads the listener
into an entirely new territory. What begins as a calm procession of Debussian
chords morphs into nearly an hour of tremendously exciting exploration in sound
that varies in pulse, attack, harmonics, and colors – a bold adventure that
redefines for me of what the instrument is capable.
Riley escapes definition as a composer through pieces such
as this, although he is commonly and sometimes contemptuously thought of as a “hippie,”
a drone/trance artist, and/or minimalist. Like other supposed outcast composers
such as Charles Ives and Harry Partch, there is a mystical yearning in his work,
but here it’s balanced by an almost scientific curiosity about what can be
summoned out of what he terms “the emerging energies that flow through both
instrument and performer”.
The best way to hear this is in complete silence or at least
through headphones. The overtones extend for several octaves in both
directions, and the strange juxtaposition and interrelation of sounded notes
creates unearthly harmonies that seem to crack and claw at the limits of aural
understanding. Voices woody, human, brassy surround and transcend what we
process as a typical piano-string vibration. It takes a multitude of listenings
to even begin to hear some of what is going on here – and since my personal
definition of what a classic is is something that offers new revelations with
each exposure, a classic it is.
If I’ve whetted your appetite, be patient with it – there are
passages that skirt close to vamping or noodling, and some quite familiar kinds of
ostinatos that can madden. Don’t worry if some vertigo ensues . . . stay with
it.
And what kind of music is it? Like the work of the Monks
(Thelonius and Meredith), like that of Gavin Bryars or Brad Mehldau, this work
transcends classifications and sweeps us into a place where it seems that
anything, again, is musically possible.
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