Search - Edgard Varese, Johanna Beyer, Henry Cowell :: Historic Works for Percussion Ensemble

A good survey of percussion music in the wake of Varèse's se

Discophage | France | 06/13/2007

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Contrary to the accepted view (and the one later propagated by the composer), for all their daring avant-gardism Varèse's compositions from the early 1920s to the early 1930s met with considerable success in New York (see Chapter 2 of Carol Oja's Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s, "The Reception of Edgar Varèse"). Granted, audiences were usually split, but some critics - admittedly those favourably bent towards modern music - called him "a new God" or "a Hero", and even those not so well disposed recognized his importance and treated him with respect. His scores got published - "an extraordinary achievement for a composer in America during the 1920s" according to Oja. His compositions also had seminal influence over other, younger composers, and none was more seminal than his 1930-31 "Ionisation" for percussion ensemble, as this disc bears good witness. Viewed as the first composition for an all-percussion ensemble (although George Antheil's "Ballet Mécanique" can lay a legitimate claim on that title - but that piece was greeted with sneers and boos by audience and critics alike when it was played at Carnegie Hall in 1927, durably molesting the young, firebrand composer's reputation in the United States), it made it possible for others to think of what until then had been unthinkable: making music from sheer noise (unpitched percussion). Most compositions featured here share with "Ionisation" the taste for varied colors, the rhythmic complexity and the strong sense of pulse, much in evidence in Johanna Beyer's "IV" from 1935 and Carlos Chavez' 1942 "Toccata". To those basic parameters Cowell's "Ostinato Pianissimo" adds the influence of Balinese music with its altered piano evoking the Gamelan, and in his Canticle No. 3 (1942), Lou Harrison uses the ocarina (the small and sweet-sounding, oval-shaped instrument of the flute family), making it sound like some Japanese or Chinese rural tune (though it is the influence of Indian and Mexican music the composer acknowledges). Alan Hovhaness' "October Mountain" from 1942 is mostly subdued, with sweet marimba melodies punctuated by crystalline glockenspiel interjections, giving it again a strong "far-eastern" tinge and putting the stress on subtle coloring rather than on unleashed power.



I bought the disc to get an opportunity to hear more music from Johanna Beyer, the most obscure and demure member of a group, adept at "dissonant counterpoint" and gathered around Cowell, Charles Seeger, Ruth Crawford, Carl Ruggles and Dane Rudhyard. Born in 1888 and an immigrant from Leipzig, Germany, she established in New York in 1923 and died in 1944 of a neuro-degenerative disease. I discovered her music with the fine, stern and vehement Suite for Violin and Piano from 1937 (Works for Violin by George Antheil; Johanna Beyer; Henry Cowell; Ruth P. Crawford; Charles Dodge; David Mahler, Larry Polansky, Stefan Wolpe) and went on with her serious and unseductive "Dissonant Counterpoint" and "Gebrauchsmusik" for piano (Ruth Crawford: 9 Preludes, Johanna Beyer: Dissonant Counterpoint, Gebrauchs-Musik). "IV", composed in 1935, turns out to be a fine, post-Varèse piece, composed of nine rhythmic lines with no instrumentation indicated (the intepreters and not the composer are meant to chose the actual instruments) but a frustratingly short one too, less than two minutes long.



From what I can assess, the interpretations the University of Michigan Percussion Ensemble under Thomas Siwe seem perfectly apt, but in Hovhaness' October Mountain and Chavez' Toccata the sound has spots of saturation whenever bass drum and/or timpani come in. Still this is an enjoyable disc, but at 52 minutes the survey is not excessively lengthy. It is really too bad that the opportunity was missed to include some "historical" Cage (who really belonged there) and perhaps also John J. Becker's 1933 "The Abongo" (featured on Cowell: Quartet Romantic, a New World Records CD).

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