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Back two years ago in my report on the 2009 Southeast Horn Workshop, hosted by Travis Bennett at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, NC, I noted that I was actually pretty much blown away hearing a live performance of Main Bersama-Sama, a work for horn and gamelan by Lou Harrison. Then yesterday on Facebook jazz hornist Tom Varner posted a link to a YouTube version of the same work. First, though, a bit more background from the 2009 article.
Horn and gamelan! When I was a MM student at Eastman another student found a recording of Lou Harrison Main Bersama-Sama (“Playing Together”) for horn and gamelan. I later purchased a cassette tape (!) of this recording (CRI label) and have listened to it many times but never thought I would ever hear it live at a horn event. Many congratulations to Alan Mattingly (former WCU faculty, now at the University of Nebraska) for playing this work; a very, very cool piece that I don’t believe has ever been performed live at any other horn workshop and frankly may never be again! Which is a shame as this work is completely unique in our repertoire and again very cool. And, for me again it was breathtaking as I have listened to this work many times but never had the visual of what the gamelan looked like with the horn on stage. [So, you are wondering, what is a gamelan anyway? It is a type of percussion ensemble used in traditional music in Indonesia. More here from the Wikipedia.]
With that intro, the video is below is based on the CRI recording, that audio combined with visual art. Enjoy!
The horn uses a modified tuning to match the gamelan and the suling (bamboo flute) soloist is Lou Harrison himself. Over in the YouTube comments we learn more about the recording from the French horn soloist, Scott L. Hartman, currently on the faculty at Santa Clara University. He notes that
I was really young, like 20. As you can hear the intonation is not the normal tonal stuff we are used to using. I had to move slides all over the place to get it as good as it was on the recording. We did a total of two takes of this work and they told me there would be no splicing. There’s a clam in this take and I remember Lou shaking his fist at me in semi-mock anger during playback…
This is probably my absolute favorite, random work for horn, one I always mention in the horn repertoire class. A hat tip again to Tom Varner for posting this video on Facebook, it brought back memories.
