Whitebread reduction of Cecil Taylor's 60's/70's breakthroughs. A self-centered head buzz for Mr. Harrison I presume. Wynton Marsalis for the Roulette crowd.
@soundisadream This is nothing like Cecil Taylor, whose starting point was Bartok, not LaMonte Young. CT's hand-over-hand positions and the rest of it are straight out of Mikrokosmos Bks V-VI and very much in the modernist tradition. This is not a put-down -- Taylor was an original -- it's a discussion of his chops.
Harrison is working specifically with real tunings and using resonances to create ringing harmonics. The work is static by design and, again, has *nothing* to do with Taylor's.
The point was...Cecil Taylor, seminal artist...Michael Harrison, one-trick pony. A not so amazing a trick. Or maybe any trick for a pony IS amazing by definition.
@soundisadream The real point is that your comparison doesn't work. If you want to praise Cecil Taylor, then compare him to someone working in that style. Here, the comparison is meaningless. You could substitute any other minimalist composer and comparisons to Taylor would be equally meaningless. If you really care about this, then compare minimalism itself to experimental jazz with modernist classical roots. But even then, you're only saying that intentionally static music sounds static.
The comparison I made, and the lack I find in Harrison's music, has to do with medium and message. If you find some message in Harrison's "Revelation", then good for you, he is not all medium as I find him to be. To me the most revealing thing about Harrison's" fascination with medium" is that he chose to name his piece what he did. He certainly places great value on his explorations of medium. Taylor's music delivers a message and so there is a comparison that I make (not you)..
@soundisadream "The comparison I made . . . has to do with medium and message. " No, the comparison you made has to do with your own musical illiteracy. The great thing about absolute music (look it up) is that there's no such thing as a "message." Not in Taylor's piano music, not in Harrison's, not in tone poems. Instrumental music isn't representational: there's no literal narrative.
I have a degree in composition and play piano for a living. I'm trying to be nice, but you're clueless.
@Fremglerk No actually you are a pontiff. My degree in composition from The Juilliard School and my wondeful relationship with my teacher the late Vincent Persichetti merits something. I did get the drift that you were speaking from on high...a high horse that is. Do you get laid much? You have to get your nose out of the books that others write, get off the high horse, and smell the world as it is. We can both valid opinions, even though you are an over-educated twerp by all evidence.
@soundisadream You're not from Julliard and you didn't study with Persichetti, who died in the 80s. If you had, you wouldn't make such glaring errors.
You came here to "speak on high" against Harrison. That is the fact of the matter. You've been lowering yourself and the conversation deeper and deeper into ad hominem barking. None of it has to do with music. All of it has had to do with coming to a little-known composer's page and trashing him out of egotism -- yours and no one else's.
@Fremglerk Hopefully to finish and put out the trash...I can hear you running about about Pythagoras and tuning...what his famous experiment with the monochord proved was not that all humans possess absolute...they don't. But all humans can find the octave on a vibrating string 2:1...it's in our spiritual DNA. The point of Pythagoras was that there was a "hidden harmony" at work and not to get distracted by surface differences. Bach? A good father hopefully, but truly distracted by noise. You??
@Fremglerk The "message", as I see it (IMHO) of the Germanic composers was nothing but cultural superiority...albeit a hidden message. The result of this wonderful culture 200 years past JSB? Aryanism and National Socialism...the clues are all there in the Germanic literature. Music is all message, in the sense that we are spiritual beings, and the Holy Mystery of music is that our actual spirit can blend with the "musical" vibration (not the absolute sine wave). You are a typical culture snob.
@soundisadream If others are snobs and not you, then why are you presuming to preach condescendingly about culture (and invoking Godwin's law in the process)? The hilarious part is that you're talking to a Jew about Nazism and still manage to blow it by reducing all "Germanic" lit to an anti-Semitic message. Kafka, Weill and Theodor Adorno would be so proud!
@Fremglerk Books all burned by the German National Socialists...the grandchildren of the 3 Bs...not the 4th obviously...a Hungarian who was turned away from his application to teach piano at Juilliard (I have a problem with this, I admit) as a war refugee by these fine upholders of the Germanic tradition...an edifice to snobbery if there ever was....don't play that harmonic scale as a melody...you might go all Arab...or drums...dark Africa..egad!
@Fremglerk Try a friendly experiment to see the musical forest for your academic trees. Have a friend over and play, for example, "The Willsau Concert" and then Revelations, and ask the untrained if they see any comparison with Harrison's pounding and Taylor's splitting a note in two, seeking it's atomic structure. You might be surprised at how the unwashed hear the world. Be really brave and bring in a brother and ask if he smells cultural ripoff. All Harrison reveals is a penchant for coattail
@soundisadream Your second mistake: assuming that every untrained person hears exactly as you do. I've spent my life playing for audiences and every single listener has been different. Most have been very open.
Something else. It's anti-creative to trash other people's enthusiasm because you never know where their explorations might lead. Your own, for example: Even though you're a snob, I haven't shared my criticisms of Taylor's playing because he matters to you. That's important.
@Fremglerk Your second mistake: assuming that every untrained person hears exactly as you do.
Isn't that your mistake form the get-go? I didn't assume anything, but posited an experiment, the outcome of which I perhaps hypothesized.
every single listener has been different....How do you know what every single member of your audience thought? Oh, that's right, you don't assume (as I do)...you KNOW.
@soundisadream Stop insulting people's intelligence. You didn''t "posit an experiment," you presumed the results. You claimed that "the untrained listener" would agree with you. Yet you came here to pontificate that Harrison was a hollow poser compared to Cecil Taylor. That wasn't an experiment, that was trolling. It was the exact opposite of respect for the untrained listener and a love of true experimentation.
@Fremglerk I am not insulting your intelligence. I am insulting YOU. You do posit an experiment with a hypothetical presumption and await verification. You don't experiment in the dark. Honestly...you are either Michael Harrison incognito, or again, just a twerp (I am insulting YOU, not your intelligence) who needs to get laid. Absolute music carries within it the hidden message of music as does sound and all Creation. Enjoy playing other people's music, and please please please get laid.
@soundisadream "I am not insulting your intelligence. I am insulting YOU."
That's all anyone on this page needs to know about you: You're here to insult other people. You tell others to get a life, yet it's you who keep attacking them, You criticize in others what you fail to recognize in yourself.
You're a troll who publicly admits s/he's a troll. You've taken the first step, now take the second and stop yourself.
@Fremglerk Exactly...unlike you, hiding behind pleasantries of the academy, I'll spit it out in public. You seem like a weak sister who wouldn't stand up in the real world for fear of finger injury. You WERE insulting me, but at least I'll say it. I am human, as are you, and so of course that's not all people need to know about me. We are one spirit, for insatnce, that is a good starting point, besides the different personalities.
@Fremglerk Oh High One...ever read Greek philosophy? Investigare Heraclitus and the nature of hidden harmony and then investigate the Mystery cult surrounding Pythagoras. As Heraclitus famously posited...the hidden harmony (the message from God about our true nature as unified beings at one with God and the Creation) is the strongest" The basis of our culture is the Greeks and far from being ancient idiots, they understood that the medium (and absolute music as well) held this message.
@soundisadream Read Fremgtlerk. Read. As i said with respect...the late Vincent Persichetti. You are all noise and surface with your remarks and at least I admit that my remarks were personal at you ad hominem. You are a pussy who can't fess up. Keep skating the surface...wow....tunings!!
@soundisadream "Oh High One," etc. -- more ad hominem barking, and in the same tone you've used against Harrison. Let's leave the good name of Heraclitus out of this, and your illiterate use of his very unfixed sense of time to try to make an irrelevant point about the harmony of the spheres.
Fact: You're a troll who came here to trash a little-known composer. You can pretend to make this about me all you like, but you're a troll who can't leave Harrison alone.
@Fremglerk but you're a troll who can't leave Harrison alone.
I see, you felt the need to answer a post I made a year back. Harrison is well known in the New York community...as a coattail hanger-on,never failing to mention Riley and Young in the same breath as promoting (and he does promote) his own water-down (my original point) "works". We can both have opinion and not be trolls, but you lack the stomach to admit the personal defensive nature of your attack...Michael Harrison...COME OUT
@Fremglerk The hidden harmony message was not just philosophy, but Truth with a capital T to the neo-Platonists we have to thank for saving his written for future generations. Heraclitus does not have a "good" name, just an historical one.
But the truth he found goes back pre-Sumeria. Pythogoras, at least according to the documents of the first century cults, was that sound heals, and that's the message that you maybe missed. Though the language was atomistic, this revelation at least was true.
@soundisadream "How do you know what every single member of your audience thought?"
Why would anyone presume I'd have to know what a listener thought to recognize their individuality? You presume to preach about Heraclitus with the words "read, read, read." Yet his point was that every moment is different; in time, no river is ever the same river. As rivers to time, so to people's responses to music. You play to the listener before you and they play to you. You change each other.
@Fremglerk Finally something you say that "rings true". No...his point was that every moment SEEMS different, but that behind that difference was a hidden harmony..."the strongest"...the weakest being the one we hear (the river). The actual point, as much as you or I might not like to own, is that We Are One...there is a unity not apparent on the surface (different tunings)...."The river" is the symbol of the ego position...the mind of illusions that the blessing of music can truly dispel.
I was lucky enough to see Michael Harrison perform live. He was the opener for a band I went to see at the Society for Ethical Culture in NYC. The performance was part of the Wordless Music Series. I hadn't planned on arriving in time to see the opening act, but I'm really glad I did. The highs and lows of his pieces were so emotional. The acoustics of the room allowed me to literally feel his music. It was moving. I'm grateful that I got see him play. He was great.
I think it's very difficult to judge this piece without hearing it live, since one of (or maybe THE) big reasons for Harrison's alternative tuning of the keyboard is the overtones that are produced in doing so, near impossible to make out on this (and most) recordings.
I like the few minutes of this piece, and the few minutes heard from WNYC. And from what I've read (not heard) he uses an altered keyboard. I am not so sure he has really departed from Cecil Taylor or Andrew Hill, Thelonious Monk or Matthew Shipp. Will have to hear more though. LD
Top 25. Who picks these recordings anyway? Are you kidding? This is just stupid.With the mountains of inspiration that have been handed down through the centuries through truly inspired composers, this is just uninspired.This is the same kind of mediocrity that receives such a mass following as that Lawrence Welk of the piano Jim Brickman....
A lot of banging, with virtually no dynamics. Is this the emperor's new clothes? I just don't get it. It's not even interesting to watch let alone listen to.
Has this person heard the whole piece? Do they know that this is the climax of 75 minute work. Have they bothered to hear more of the work? The New York Times and the Boston Globe, who chose this work as top recordings of 2007 do not seem to agree. Even out of context this peaked my curiousity and made me go to Amazon to buy the CD. I was transformed by this music!
I have not heard the whole piece. I did listen thru this one though. I love classical music, but this modern stuff just doesn't move me. Perhaps, just perhaps, it is a matter of taste. But when I put it up against Bach, Beethoven, or even the extraordinary compositions of the teenage Mendelssohn (not to mention all of his other works) this just doesn't compare. In any case, I appreciate your polite response to my somewhat derisive comments.
nice. this was pretty intense. thank you.
joaomacdowell 2 weeks ago
He definately can make that piano sing.....but wouldn't it be better still to play something with a melody?
MightyCarnac 2 years ago
Whitebread reduction of Cecil Taylor's 60's/70's breakthroughs. A self-centered head buzz for Mr. Harrison I presume. Wynton Marsalis for the Roulette crowd.
soundisadream 2 years ago
@soundisadream This is nothing like Cecil Taylor, whose starting point was Bartok, not LaMonte Young. CT's hand-over-hand positions and the rest of it are straight out of Mikrokosmos Bks V-VI and very much in the modernist tradition. This is not a put-down -- Taylor was an original -- it's a discussion of his chops.
Harrison is working specifically with real tunings and using resonances to create ringing harmonics. The work is static by design and, again, has *nothing* to do with Taylor's.
Fremglerk 1 year ago
@Fremglerk
The point was...Cecil Taylor, seminal artist...Michael Harrison, one-trick pony. A not so amazing a trick. Or maybe any trick for a pony IS amazing by definition.
soundisadream 1 year ago
@soundisadream The real point is that your comparison doesn't work. If you want to praise Cecil Taylor, then compare him to someone working in that style. Here, the comparison is meaningless. You could substitute any other minimalist composer and comparisons to Taylor would be equally meaningless. If you really care about this, then compare minimalism itself to experimental jazz with modernist classical roots. But even then, you're only saying that intentionally static music sounds static.
Fremglerk 1 year ago
@Fremglerk
The comparison I made, and the lack I find in Harrison's music, has to do with medium and message. If you find some message in Harrison's "Revelation", then good for you, he is not all medium as I find him to be. To me the most revealing thing about Harrison's" fascination with medium" is that he chose to name his piece what he did. He certainly places great value on his explorations of medium. Taylor's music delivers a message and so there is a comparison that I make (not you)..
soundisadream 1 year ago
@soundisadream "The comparison I made . . . has to do with medium and message. " No, the comparison you made has to do with your own musical illiteracy. The great thing about absolute music (look it up) is that there's no such thing as a "message." Not in Taylor's piano music, not in Harrison's, not in tone poems. Instrumental music isn't representational: there's no literal narrative.
I have a degree in composition and play piano for a living. I'm trying to be nice, but you're clueless.
Fremglerk 1 year ago
@Fremglerk No actually you are a pontiff. My degree in composition from The Juilliard School and my wondeful relationship with my teacher the late Vincent Persichetti merits something. I did get the drift that you were speaking from on high...a high horse that is. Do you get laid much? You have to get your nose out of the books that others write, get off the high horse, and smell the world as it is. We can both valid opinions, even though you are an over-educated twerp by all evidence.
soundisadream 1 year ago
@soundisadream You're not from Julliard and you didn't study with Persichetti, who died in the 80s. If you had, you wouldn't make such glaring errors.
You came here to "speak on high" against Harrison. That is the fact of the matter. You've been lowering yourself and the conversation deeper and deeper into ad hominem barking. None of it has to do with music. All of it has had to do with coming to a little-known composer's page and trashing him out of egotism -- yours and no one else's.
Fremglerk 1 year ago
@Fremglerk Hopefully to finish and put out the trash...I can hear you running about about Pythagoras and tuning...what his famous experiment with the monochord proved was not that all humans possess absolute...they don't. But all humans can find the octave on a vibrating string 2:1...it's in our spiritual DNA. The point of Pythagoras was that there was a "hidden harmony" at work and not to get distracted by surface differences. Bach? A good father hopefully, but truly distracted by noise. You??
soundisadream 1 year ago
@Fremglerk The "message", as I see it (IMHO) of the Germanic composers was nothing but cultural superiority...albeit a hidden message. The result of this wonderful culture 200 years past JSB? Aryanism and National Socialism...the clues are all there in the Germanic literature. Music is all message, in the sense that we are spiritual beings, and the Holy Mystery of music is that our actual spirit can blend with the "musical" vibration (not the absolute sine wave). You are a typical culture snob.
soundisadream 1 year ago
@soundisadream If others are snobs and not you, then why are you presuming to preach condescendingly about culture (and invoking Godwin's law in the process)? The hilarious part is that you're talking to a Jew about Nazism and still manage to blow it by reducing all "Germanic" lit to an anti-Semitic message. Kafka, Weill and Theodor Adorno would be so proud!
Fremglerk 1 year ago
@Fremglerk Books all burned by the German National Socialists...the grandchildren of the 3 Bs...not the 4th obviously...a Hungarian who was turned away from his application to teach piano at Juilliard (I have a problem with this, I admit) as a war refugee by these fine upholders of the Germanic tradition...an edifice to snobbery if there ever was....don't play that harmonic scale as a melody...you might go all Arab...or drums...dark Africa..egad!
I never said I wasn't a snob...I said you were.
soundisadream 1 year ago
@Fremglerk Try a friendly experiment to see the musical forest for your academic trees. Have a friend over and play, for example, "The Willsau Concert" and then Revelations, and ask the untrained if they see any comparison with Harrison's pounding and Taylor's splitting a note in two, seeking it's atomic structure. You might be surprised at how the unwashed hear the world. Be really brave and bring in a brother and ask if he smells cultural ripoff. All Harrison reveals is a penchant for coattail
soundisadream 1 year ago
@soundisadream Your second mistake: assuming that every untrained person hears exactly as you do. I've spent my life playing for audiences and every single listener has been different. Most have been very open.
Something else. It's anti-creative to trash other people's enthusiasm because you never know where their explorations might lead. Your own, for example: Even though you're a snob, I haven't shared my criticisms of Taylor's playing because he matters to you. That's important.
Fremglerk 1 year ago
@Fremglerk Your second mistake: assuming that every untrained person hears exactly as you do.
Isn't that your mistake form the get-go? I didn't assume anything, but posited an experiment, the outcome of which I perhaps hypothesized.
every single listener has been different....How do you know what every single member of your audience thought? Oh, that's right, you don't assume (as I do)...you KNOW.
soundisadream 1 year ago
@soundisadream Stop insulting people's intelligence. You didn''t "posit an experiment," you presumed the results. You claimed that "the untrained listener" would agree with you. Yet you came here to pontificate that Harrison was a hollow poser compared to Cecil Taylor. That wasn't an experiment, that was trolling. It was the exact opposite of respect for the untrained listener and a love of true experimentation.
Fremglerk 1 year ago
@Fremglerk I am not insulting your intelligence. I am insulting YOU. You do posit an experiment with a hypothetical presumption and await verification. You don't experiment in the dark. Honestly...you are either Michael Harrison incognito, or again, just a twerp (I am insulting YOU, not your intelligence) who needs to get laid. Absolute music carries within it the hidden message of music as does sound and all Creation. Enjoy playing other people's music, and please please please get laid.
soundisadream 1 year ago
This comment might appear twice.
@soundisadream "I am not insulting your intelligence. I am insulting YOU."
That's all anyone on this page needs to know about you: You're here to insult other people. You tell others to get a life, yet it's you who keep attacking them, You criticize in others what you fail to recognize in yourself.
You're a troll who publicly admits s/he's a troll. You've taken the first step, now take the second and stop yourself.
Fremglerk 1 year ago
@Fremglerk Exactly...unlike you, hiding behind pleasantries of the academy, I'll spit it out in public. You seem like a weak sister who wouldn't stand up in the real world for fear of finger injury. You WERE insulting me, but at least I'll say it. I am human, as are you, and so of course that's not all people need to know about me. We are one spirit, for insatnce, that is a good starting point, besides the different personalities.
soundisadream 1 year ago
@Fremglerk Oh High One...ever read Greek philosophy? Investigare Heraclitus and the nature of hidden harmony and then investigate the Mystery cult surrounding Pythagoras. As Heraclitus famously posited...the hidden harmony (the message from God about our true nature as unified beings at one with God and the Creation) is the strongest" The basis of our culture is the Greeks and far from being ancient idiots, they understood that the medium (and absolute music as well) held this message.
soundisadream 1 year ago
@soundisadream Read Fremgtlerk. Read. As i said with respect...the late Vincent Persichetti. You are all noise and surface with your remarks and at least I admit that my remarks were personal at you ad hominem. You are a pussy who can't fess up. Keep skating the surface...wow....tunings!!
soundisadream 1 year ago
@soundisadream "Oh High One," etc. -- more ad hominem barking, and in the same tone you've used against Harrison. Let's leave the good name of Heraclitus out of this, and your illiterate use of his very unfixed sense of time to try to make an irrelevant point about the harmony of the spheres.
Fact: You're a troll who came here to trash a little-known composer. You can pretend to make this about me all you like, but you're a troll who can't leave Harrison alone.
Fremglerk 1 year ago
@Fremglerk but you're a troll who can't leave Harrison alone.
I see, you felt the need to answer a post I made a year back. Harrison is well known in the New York community...as a coattail hanger-on,never failing to mention Riley and Young in the same breath as promoting (and he does promote) his own water-down (my original point) "works". We can both have opinion and not be trolls, but you lack the stomach to admit the personal defensive nature of your attack...Michael Harrison...COME OUT
soundisadream 1 year ago
@Fremglerk The hidden harmony message was not just philosophy, but Truth with a capital T to the neo-Platonists we have to thank for saving his written for future generations. Heraclitus does not have a "good" name, just an historical one.
But the truth he found goes back pre-Sumeria. Pythogoras, at least according to the documents of the first century cults, was that sound heals, and that's the message that you maybe missed. Though the language was atomistic, this revelation at least was true.
soundisadream 1 year ago
@soundisadream "How do you know what every single member of your audience thought?"
Why would anyone presume I'd have to know what a listener thought to recognize their individuality? You presume to preach about Heraclitus with the words "read, read, read." Yet his point was that every moment is different; in time, no river is ever the same river. As rivers to time, so to people's responses to music. You play to the listener before you and they play to you. You change each other.
Fremglerk 1 year ago
@Fremglerk Finally something you say that "rings true". No...his point was that every moment SEEMS different, but that behind that difference was a hidden harmony..."the strongest"...the weakest being the one we hear (the river). The actual point, as much as you or I might not like to own, is that We Are One...there is a unity not apparent on the surface (different tunings)...."The river" is the symbol of the ego position...the mind of illusions that the blessing of music can truly dispel.
soundisadream 1 year ago
Oh wow. The high quality audio sounds much better.
osxdude 4 years ago
Here is an ultra high quality audio version so you can here the overtones.. watch?v=A1vaXBotrAI
electrostatic1 4 years ago
watch?v=A1vaXBotrAI is indeed better sounding
Isosphere 3 years ago
how do you add the code. . .?
20FL06 3 years ago
I was lucky enough to see Michael Harrison perform live. He was the opener for a band I went to see at the Society for Ethical Culture in NYC. The performance was part of the Wordless Music Series. I hadn't planned on arriving in time to see the opening act, but I'm really glad I did. The highs and lows of his pieces were so emotional. The acoustics of the room allowed me to literally feel his music. It was moving. I'm grateful that I got see him play. He was great.
alitamf84 4 years ago
I think it's very difficult to judge this piece without hearing it live, since one of (or maybe THE) big reasons for Harrison's alternative tuning of the keyboard is the overtones that are produced in doing so, near impossible to make out on this (and most) recordings.
JussiTM23 4 years ago
I like the few minutes of this piece, and the few minutes heard from WNYC. And from what I've read (not heard) he uses an altered keyboard. I am not so sure he has really departed from Cecil Taylor or Andrew Hill, Thelonious Monk or Matthew Shipp. Will have to hear more though. LD
etabu 4 years ago
Top 25. Who picks these recordings anyway? Are you kidding? This is just stupid.With the mountains of inspiration that have been handed down through the centuries through truly inspired composers, this is just uninspired.This is the same kind of mediocrity that receives such a mass following as that Lawrence Welk of the piano Jim Brickman....
TubelessM 4 years ago
Congratulations, Michael:
It is an honor and a pleasure to know you and to have you as a friend and colleague....
Best,
Erica vanderLinde Feidner
EricaFeidner 4 years ago
A lot of banging, with virtually no dynamics. Is this the emperor's new clothes? I just don't get it. It's not even interesting to watch let alone listen to.
justwarren 4 years ago
Has this person heard the whole piece? Do they know that this is the climax of 75 minute work. Have they bothered to hear more of the work? The New York Times and the Boston Globe, who chose this work as top recordings of 2007 do not seem to agree. Even out of context this peaked my curiousity and made me go to Amazon to buy the CD. I was transformed by this music!
squishmynose 4 years ago
I have not heard the whole piece. I did listen thru this one though. I love classical music, but this modern stuff just doesn't move me. Perhaps, just perhaps, it is a matter of taste. But when I put it up against Bach, Beethoven, or even the extraordinary compositions of the teenage Mendelssohn (not to mention all of his other works) this just doesn't compare. In any case, I appreciate your polite response to my somewhat derisive comments.
justwarren 4 years ago
An orchestra in two hands! The young genius has opened the floodgates of musical expression and heart-felt passion.
Lethah 4 years ago
Awe-inspiring.
Seymour Bernstein
seeless 4 years ago