t makes perfect sense that the first sound you hear on Serenado, a collection of Lou Harrison's music for guitar, is that of water bowls. Water bowls, and the myriad other instruments of the percussion family, play a central role in Harrison's music. Like his teacher Henry Cowell, colleague John Cage, and fellow iconoclast Harry Partch, Harrison was fascinated by the music of Asia, Africa, Native America, and the Pacific, and found through percussion a way to explore these influences. Along with Serenado, New Albion has also recently released a collection of his writing for percussion titled Drums Along The Pacific.


Harrison's interest in percussion dates back to the early 1940's when both he and Cage, with the encouragement of their teacher Henry Cowell, would scavenge junkyards in search of automobile brake drums, flower pots, metal bowls, and sundry other items that they could use as instruments. The result was Harrison and Cage's collaborative piece "Double Music" - a key work in New Music that is sadly unrepresented on these CDs, but has been recorded elsewhere. Cowell also taught that most music of the world concentrated on melody and rhythm, as opposed to western classical music's obsessions with harmony and counterpoint. Later in his career, Harrison became especially interested in the gamelan - an orchestra of tuned gongs found in Indonesia. As he studied the gamelan and the serene influence of the Javanese school of gamelan composition influenced his own work, he and his longtime companion William Colvig (who passed away in 2000) branched into instrument building by constructing their own "American Gamelans" out of slab metal with tin can resonators pitched to different tunings.


Armed with this knowledge, and fortified by his work as a dance accompanist, Harrison's music became suffused with a sense of melody and rhythm that lends an accessibility to even his most experimental works. Make no mistake; although he was never as radical in his approaches as John Cage, Lou Harrison was an eternal student whose explorations of style and form resulted in works that experimented with alternates to western tuning, unusual instrumentation, and even the occasional dissonance. His gift was in using his natural eclecticism to combine these influences in ways that still sounded musical to audiences outside of the traditional avant garde circles.


"Drums Along The Pacific" is bookended by two of Harrison's gamelan-inspired works of the 1970's. "Threnody For Carlos Chavez" (1978), for gamelan and viola, is a somber piece that highlights the sensitive playing of violist Geraldine Walther. The liner notes point out that even though it is written in a traditional form, Harrison uses a triple meter instead of the duple meters of gamelan music, allowing this melancholy piece to maintain a calm sense of flow. The other gamelan-inspired piece is the concluding "Solo To Anthony Cirone" (1972) featuring William Winant on tenor bells. Harrison gives the piece an uncluttered melodic line with sparse accompaniment that is reminiscent of many of the pieces for guitar found on Serenado.


The bulk of Drums Along The Pacific explores works from the early 1940's. The William Winant Percussion Group bashes away on a panoply of percussion in lively works whose shifting textures exploit the sonic possibilities of everything from water buffalo bells and woodblocks to brake drums (who carry the melody on many of the pieces) and glasses. Especially vivid is the "Song Of Quetzalcoatl" (1941), which begins with a round between glasses and brake drums and then explodes in a flurry of woodblocks with a martial snare drum. It then simmers down into a spacy section featuring the gongs before the other instruments rejoin with a guiro for the climax. "Simfony #13" (1941) reminds me of Can with its repetitive drive, its flurries of drums, and its "bass" figure on brake drums (or was it the water buffalo bells?). But perhaps the most ambitious piece is "Canticle #3" (1942; revised 1989), whose melodic line for ocarina is traded off with the different parts of the ensemble while a guitar is strummed like an autoharp. "Canticle #3" also has a feel of ebb and flow as the music builds to a climax, the ocarina introduces a new theme, and then recapitulates the original theme at the end.


This sort of 3-movement form is sort of like the classic exposition/development/recapitulation of the sonata form in western classical music, and also pops up quite a few times on Serenado. On pieces like "Music For Bill & Me" (1966-67) and "Serenado Por Gitaro" (1952), Harrison tends to begin with the melody delivered with minimal counterpoint, followed by a development with increased counterpoint, and concluding with a spare restatement of the melody. David Tanenbaum plays sympathetically throughout, whether exploring the lovingly entwined lines of "Music For Bill & Me" or expressing the anguished dissonance of "Plaint" (1978). Serenado is essentially an expanded version of a previous recital titled "The Perilous Chapel" with some key additions, especially "Scenes From Nek Chand" (2001-02) - a three movement work that was one of Harrison's last finished pieces, and his first work for the National Steel Guitar. Written in three movements, the first explores slide playing to create a sort of Indian/blues hybrid, and the other two movements use the increased sustain of the National Steel to create drone notes for his melodic lines to dance over. In other pieces on Serenado such as the "Jahla - in the form of a Ductia..." (1972) and the "Sonata in Ishartum" (undated) Harrison combines his interest in medieval music with Asian influences to great effect.


Drums Along The Pacific contains some of Harrison's most groundbreaking (and least mellow!) music and is an obvious recommendation, particularly if you're a fan of John Cage or Harry Partch, or just curious about the use of unconventional instruments. Serenado is also a fine CD, particularly if you're a fan of guitarists like Leo Kottke. Either way, this remains a fitting tribute to the recently deceased American composer.