Solo Works for Percussion

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"Very soft, very long, very white." No, not an advertising slogan for a well-known household product, but composer James Tenney's suggestion, in lieu of a conventional score, for the music of FOR PERCUSSION PERHAPS, or (FOR HAROLD BUDD) to the performer, who on this disc happens to be the percussionist Matthias Kaul playing a prepared hurdy-gurdy. Belonging to a series of "postal pieces" from 1970-71, each notated on a postcard "addressed" to a dedicatee, this otherworldly work and four wittily-titled others, spanning two decades from the early sixties on, together include a sizeable bunch of the key strands of mid Twentieth-century American experimental music. Tenney, never slow to grasp and try out new things (he was, for instance, one of the first composers to work with computer-generated composition, demonstrated in the spaciously quirky ERGODOS II for tape and percussion, from 1963-4 the earliest work here) delves into the whole spectrum of experimental thinking in his percussion music, from indeterminacy through to the philosophical and political challenges of realigning composer/performer roles. (The latter point especially is highlighted by the choice of the acutely sensitive Kaul, who has previously worked with such composers as John Zorn and Mauricio Kagel, as percussionist.) And if your taste in percussion music demands polyrhythmic, noisy displays of semi-theatrical virtuosity, there will probably not be much here for you, with the possible exception of the opening piece MAXIMUSIC (1965); at five minutes the shortest work on the disc and the closest to most listeners' expectations of what percussion music should be (though it will come as no surprise that even here, the performer follows verbal directions, as in FOR PERCUSSION PERHAPS, instead of playing from a musical score). The remaining works, the antithesis of so-called "badabum, badabum" percussion playing, have much to commend them. An extreme example of conceptual limitation generates the central work, KOAN: HAVING NEVER WRITTEN A NOTE FOR PERCUSSION (1971), for tam-tam here (the exact instrument is unspecified in the score), an extended roll on one note only, creating a giant arch form lasting over 17 minutes. Curiously, and characteristically of this Tenney/Kaul synthesis, it offers a listening experience far from extreme, transporting the receptive listener to a plane of aural awareness where tiny events take on a vastly magnified significance. The most recent piece, DEUS EX MACHINA for percussion and tape-delay system (1982), with its unwitting audience participation, inhabits a similar sound world to the preceding two in which real time evaporates, supplanted by a meditative, architectural delineation of musical time and space. Music not minimalist but minimal: music for installations of the imagination.