Revelation
Track Listings
| 1. Revealing the Tones & Dyads | ||
| 2. Night Vigil | ||
| 3. Revealing the Commas | ||
| 4. Mystic Lyre | ||
| 5. Homage to La Monte | ||
| 6. Homage to La Monte (tone cloud) | ||
| 7. Night Vigil II | ||
| 8. Carillon | ||
| 9. The Spaceship | ||
| 10. The Spaceship (tone cloud) |
Editorial Reviews Just intonation and natural tunings are found in the music of ancient Greece, India, Persia, China, and Japan, as well as in the "a cappella" music of the West, including Gregorian chant and renaissance polyphony. By contrast, equal temperament, the standard tuning for pianos, compromises these natural musical proportions in order to facilitate chord changes and shifts in key. Revelation introduces for the first time in modern tuning the extensive use of simultaneously sounding “commas,” the microtonal intervals between two slightly different versions of the same note. When these precisely tuned minute intervals sound together they produce never-before-heard combinations of modes, harmonies, and acoustical phenomenon. These include Harrison’s resonant “tone clouds” in which the overtones are so audible that they create the illusion of voices and various instruments resonating from the piano. According to Harrison, “The Revelation tuning has so many beautiful and exotic sounds latent within it; I felt like an explorer in unknown and distant harmonic regions.”
The New York Times, October 24, 2001
“Harrison reconfigured the piano… a new harmonic world began to assert itself [and]… generated huge golden balls of vibrant sound.”
Stuart Isacoff, Temperament (Knopf), 2001
"…high-pitched sounds seemed to rise and float toward the ceiling… he seemed to free an angelic choir above."
Album Description
Revelation, recorded live at Lincoln Center, is a sonic journey of shimmering and pulsating effects weaving through delicate lyrical passages as well as massive walls of harmonic resonance. This magnum opus is a modern approach to the ancient principles of pure tuning or “just intonation.” For over 20 years Harrison’s work with the “harmonically tuned” piano has developed the universal concepts espoused by Pythagoras and other Greek philosophers and mathematicians who discovered that musical concords arise from simple mathematical relationships based on whole numbers. Plato realized that these musical proportions not only relate to a universal order and the balance of the celestial spheres, but also reflect the harmony within man's soul. This philosophy is referred to as the “music of the spheres.” Plato taught that music could thus “correct any discord which may have arisen in the courses of the soul.”
Revelation
Revelation, Music, Michael Harrison
Music Review:
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Chopin: Waltz in Df Op64/1, B164/1; Barcarolle in F#
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