A Conversation with Michael Harrison
Bret Schneider (BS): Let's start at the beginning: your origins — as a musician but also as an artist, more broadly, and as a person. What were your interests growing up? Did you know you always wanted to be a musician or were you exploring other things, as well?
Michael Harrison (MH): I started piano lessons when I was six, but I had a very strict teacher who was not very creative. So the music lessons were about learning to read music and play simple piano repertoire, and it was pretty frustrating. I remember specifically one day coming home really unhappy with my lessons, I don't remember if I cried during the lesson or cried coming home, but I asked my parents if I could quit piano lessons and, much to my surprise, they agreed. And I think it was a good thing because then when I came back to music later, I came back on my own initiative and because I really loved it. Otherwise maybe I would have developed a distaste for music had I been forced to take lessons with a teacher that I didn't have a good connection with. But we had a nice Steinway upright, and it was always there anyway. My parents didn't sell it, and so the light bulb really went on for me when I was 12 or 13, when I started hearing songs and trying to play them and make up my own pieces at the piano. My dad and my grandfather were both in the sciences — my dad was a mathematician, and my grandfather was a physicist — they both had a real love for music and they both understood (my mom, too) the connection between math, science, and music and were fascinated by that connection.
My dad knew the basics of music theory, so when I was kind of stuck at the piano he gave me my first music theory lesson and showed me how you can create triads, and how you can shift and transpose them from one key to the other by seeing how many half-steps they were apart. And so that was when it just kind of opened up for me, and I realized that I can play this in this key, I can play that in that key, and so forth. I understood some of the basic harmonic relationships and started improvising, making up my own music, and that coincided with my awakening to music in general, which was pop music at that time, just the Beatles and progressive rock and many different kinds of mostly popular music, jazz, and world music. So it all coincided, and it was shortly after that, I remember I was a freshman at high school when I was studying math and science and English and all the things that you study in high school, but also studying music. I remember being really inspired by music and just trying to set aside two hours every day to practice and explore different things, improvise, and I remember at that time definitely making up my mind that I wanted a life in music, and I knew that it was a competitive field and difficult to make a living in. But I felt, like at 14, that I was young enough that if I dedicated myself and had a discipline in music practice that I would be able to make a living in music, so I never went back.
BS: So you were somewhat self-taught, I suppose, I mean, with some kind of multidisciplinary guidance.
MH: Well, I was not a prodigy, so I wasn't somebody that was playing Mozart from the age of six. I was somewhat self-taught, but when the lightbulb went on with my dad, they got me another piano teacher. So I studied classical, I studied jazz, but pretty much all along I was more interested in creating my own music than just playing standard repertoire. So my origins are largely self-taught, let's say, but I did study a lot, and I made up for it later, because I got the equivalent of two master's degrees in composition, one at the University of Oregon, one at Manhattan School of Music. I also took a lot of classes at Juilliard, and, of course I trained for decades with Pandit Pran Nath, La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Ustad Mashkoor Ali Khan.
So I've had really extensive training, and I continue training all the time. I take weekly lessons, mostly in Indian classical music. But I have a composition mentor, Reiko Füting, whom I see when I can when I'm writing a new piece, and he always gives me really beautiful insights.
BS: So you liked popular music, but you were also interested in classical music; did this change as you went to school for composition? How did your training change your tastes?
MH: It did. For one thing, I got into Indian classical music pretty early on. I saw Ravi Shankar at Berklee College of Music when I was 16, and that was amazing. It was a major opening. And then I took a class on world music at the University of Oregon, where I did my undergraduate work. We studied African music and Indonesian music and music from different parts of the world, but I was particularly attracted to Indian music. So it was around that time that I started looking for an Indian music teacher. Pandit Pran Nath was living in Berkeley, California, and starting in 1978, when I was 19, I made my first trip down to study with Pir Shabda Kahn, who was a disciple of Pran Nath. I took a bunch of lessons with him, and then shortly after that I was able to start studying with Pran Nath, La Monte, and Terry.
Michael Harrison. Cantaloupe Music.
BS: This is a broad question, but what was the attraction to Indian music for you, like what were the qualities that really captivated you?
MH: I was interested in meditation and spirituality from the age of 16. And I think it started somewhat with my first passion, the great outdoors. So even before music, growing up in Eugene, Oregon, which is about an hour from the Oregon Cascades, and an hour from the ocean, I had a real passion for mountain climbing, hiking, backpacking, swimming, and I climbed many of the Oregon Cascades as a teenager and in my 20s. But I was fortunate that my dorm master at Andover, where I went to prep school, was a mountain climber. When he heard that I was interested in mountain climbing, he organized a trip to the Himalayas. So at age 15, we went trekking for two or three weeks into the Himalayas, and in pretty remote places, where there were villages where Tibetan refugees were, and the Tibetan refugees had crossed over into Nepal to be free from the communist Chinese regime. And I did have a really life-changing experience. I won't describe the details of it, but I had a kind of transcendental experience, which I think affected my whole life. And it was shortly after that that I started a daily practice of Transcendental Meditation, and then a few years later, I was introduced to the teachings of the Sufi master musician, Hazrat Inayat Khan, from his book, The Mysticism of Sound.
That totally opened me up. From there I was able to find various teachers, and I gravitated towards his son, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, who became my meditation teacher and spiritual guide. There is a connection between Sufism and music, and in Inayat Khan’s branch of Sufism, music is considered the highest path towards spiritual development. And it ends up that Pandit Pran Nath; even though he was born into a Brahmin family, his music guru, Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan, was in a similar Sufi lineage of great musicians that goes back for generations. So my interest in spirituality and Sufism coincided with the lineage that I was studying Indian classical music with as well.
When I was 14 and beginning to get serious about music, it was mainly progressive rock, but by the time I was 18 or 19, I was into Indian classical music and music for meditation, jazz, and improvisation, and also classical music. So that was a really formidable time for me. And by the time I was 20, I was studying directly and had very close relationships with Pandit Pran Nath, La Monte Young, and Terry Riley. So we were all part of the same family because Pandit Pran Nath was our music guru. And I traveled to India numerous times with Terry Riley and Pran Nath, and spent a lot of time with all three of them in New York, in India, and in Berkeley, California.
BS: So did you come to Indian classical music vocally at first?
MH: Yes, because Pran Nath was a vocalist. Singing didn’t come naturally for me, but I worked on it really hard. And I didn't have a good ear. I mean, I could improvise, so I could hear things well, but I didn't have a good ear for sensitivity to pitch and intonation. And I think that's a dilemma for a lot of pianists and guitarists. If you play a fixed-pitch instrument, you don't have to produce pitch the way you do as a vocalist or as a violinist, for example. And so singing really developed my ears to the point where, after a year, my main instrument, the piano, started sounding out of tune because I was hearing the compromises of the equal-tempered tuning. Then I got a second piano and started tuning it by ear, just self-taught, you know, figuring out how to tune the piano.
BS: And was that your first just piano? Was this analogous with Young and Riley? Were you guys kind of figuring out how to translate this to keyboard instruments simultaneously?
MH: So what happened then was that I first realized — studying with Pran Nath — that the tuning systems were different. Within the first year, I started hearing the differences and also understanding that it was just intonation that I was singing in the ragas and that equal temperament was a compromise so the notes would be equally spaced. So I figured that out within the first year, but when I started tuning a second piano by ear, I wasn't getting very far. I was using a traditional five-limit just intonation tuning, which I had access to only through the Harvard Dictionary of Music! So this was before there were books on just intonation and before I had found things like Helmholtz's On The Sensation of Tone, and before I discovered La Monte's music. And that five-limit tuning is not very practical. Let's put it that way. I mean, it plays six major triads, six minor triads, and you have wolf tones and commas happening all over the place. So I wasn't getting very far with it. But that was right at the time that I met La Monte Young. That radically changed my life because I was able to go, at age 20, to New York City for months at a time and work as La Monte's close apprentice and did all the tuning for his concerts of The Well-Tuned Piano, through which I gradually learned The Well-Tuned Piano, which grew to be six and a half hours long. I also studied Indian classical music with him, so that opened me to a new approach because tuning systems are paradigms for music. Growing up, like most of us playing in equal temperament, equal temperament creates certain musical genres and certain ways to approach music. If you're working in just intonation, you have to approach music from a totally different perspective. It's like a different paradigm, let's say.
So La Monte's music was already very highly evolved in just intonation because he'd been doing it for decades. Just studying The Well-Tuned Piano with him and studying raga with him gave me a new approach to music that I didn't have before.
BS: How would you characterize that difference? How would you describe the difference in form? How did the difference in the form between the equal temperament and just intonation change or affect the form and the feeling of this new music?
MH: For approximately 300 years we had the common practice period where triadic harmony was the foundation of Western classical music, but also many different other traditions including jazz as well. In an extended version, it's also the tradition of bebop, specifically. Indian classical music is based on modality. The ragas are like very specific melodic shapes that are based on different modes. Triadic harmony does not work so well in just intonation. It's pretty limited. In fact, I believe equal temperament developed out of the desire of composers, performers, and musical instrument makers to be able to play triads equally in all 12 keys. I mean, Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, it's not equal temperament, it was well temperament, so it wasn't an equal compromise, but it was tempered in such a way that he could compose music in all 12 keys, major and minor. In all 24 keys, we should say. And so that kind of music really requires some form of temperament, for the most part. I mean, I've written some triadic music in just intonation, and it's tricky to do. But modal music works really beautifully.
Ragas or ostinatos, or minimalism and ambient music works really beautifully in just intonation, depending on the nature of the music that you're interested in developing and exploring. Another thing that works really well is long tones. And that was La Monte Young's specialty, writing music with long durations and long tones. And this is a classic element of tuning: in pianos, the notes fade away pretty quickly, so you don't hear sustained tones in the way you do with an organ, for example. In organs, it's well known that equal temperament doesn't sound so great, because if you play a major third on an organ, you hear the sustained major third and how out of tune it is. So organs typically tend to have other forms of temperament, which will favor certain keys and certain harmonies more than others.
So the piano is generally tuned in equal temperament. And music based on drones and long tones, obviously, is another approach that works very well in just intonation that doesn't work as well in equal temperament. And a lot of ambient music composers haven't figured that out yet, actually, right? They just do it in equal temperament. And of course, they subconsciously navigate towards those intervals and harmonic relationships that are more in tune. Like fourths and fifths and ninths and sevenths, minor sevenths. Those are the most in-tune intervals in equal temperament. So that kind of thing tends to work well in ambient music, but the major thirds and sixths don't work so well. And I think drone music and ambient music can trigger a deeper emotional response and a more beautiful sonic palette, if it's tuned in just intonation. And there's no reason for a lot of it to be even tuned in equal temperament, except for pure convenience.
BS: Equal temperament was designed to modulate around and move around a lot. And one of the complaints about just intonation is that you start to lose that ability. However, with Young’s and your music, I feel like it still modulates pretty well. You still get quite a bit of emotional range in there.
MH: You do. You can modulate, of course, as much as you want. But the thing is, every key has different harmonic relationships. And so you just have to understand those harmonic relationships. And then you can modulate into any key. But you'll have different modes, different harmonic relationships in every key.
BS: So did you find that you were part of a small group of people who were interested in this and pursuing these forms at that time? Or was this kind of a general sensibility growing in that moment? Because you didn't, as you said, really have a yardstick, so to speak.
MH: Now we have a lot of tools and resources. But then it was definitely a small group. So if we look at it, what were people doing at that time? In academia, most composers were still writing 12-tone music and atonal music and encouraged to do that. And minimalism, you know, started blooming in the 1960s, got stronger in the 1970s, and even stronger in the 1980s, and eventually became an accepted genre. But the universities and conservatories didn't accept it for the first 20 to 30 years. Now they play Steve Reich and Philip Glass in conservatories and in major orchestras. And John Adams, of course, is the most performed American composer. And he's not exactly a minimalist, but he has some origins in minimalism. He was originally considered, in some ways, a minimalist composer. And so minimalism was a major factor in shifting music back into a new tonality and allowing repetition, tonal harmony and modal harmony again. And finding a new approach to music that hadn't really been explored before. But there were composers also working with different forms of non-Western music, e.g., Lou Harrison was very influenced by Indonesian music. Obviously, La Monte and Terry Riley were very influenced by Indian classical music. And jazz was too, right? I mean, Miles Davis collaborated with some Indian classical musicians. So that was another element that was influencing a lot of Western composers. Steve Reich was influenced by drumming from Ghana that he studied. And then there was also a kind of new return to tonality, such as David Del Tredici's New Romanticism. Then there was also a kind of new approach to pop music that a record label like New Amsterdam epitomizes, where there's music that is kind of like indie pop music, but with classical sensibilities. So there's that, too.
So there's all these different things, but all of them point in a way to return to a new approach to tonality.
Some of them were broader than others. There were a lot of people exploring the relationship between improvisation and classical or extended techniques. There were people exploring the connections between Indian classical music and Western classical music, but there were far fewer people doing just intonation. In fact, when the Internet first came up, I had just intonation on my website. It was in my bio because just intonation was the basis of so much of my music. But if you did a Google search for "just intonation," the first thing that came up was my website. That was in the late 90s and early 2000s. That has completely changed. Now, if you search for just intonation, I'm sure you wouldn't find my website at all because there's so many books, articles, and videos. So it has really exploded. And when I first started giving lectures on just intonation 45 years ago — talking about it everywhere I went — I'd give a lecture, and no one had ever heard of it. I gave a talk to graduate composers at Princeton a few years ago and asked how many people were working with some form of just intonation, and half the room raised their hands. So it has completely changed now. And that's a good thing because equal temperament has dominated Western classical music for a couple hundred years. And so we're finally realizing as a culture, starting to realize that there are other paradigms that we can explore in music.
BS: You're in touch with or somewhat interested in a lot of new music going on today. How has the music quality changed for you over the years? It sounds like it's still very exciting for you. It hasn't grown less exciting, at least. It sounds like, actually, things are progressing pretty well from your point of view. And you're interested in a lot of younger musicians as well?
MH: Yes, I'm still excited by new music. To be honest with you, I don't find that much music that really turns me on. I listen to a lot of music just to keep in touch with what people are doing, and I'm part of a different community in New York City of contemporary classical music and world music. And I stay active, collaborating with people and going to my friends’ and colleagues' concerts and premieres. And there are some things that really astonish me that I think are really tremendous, and a lot of it that doesn't really move me that much. But they're in different genres. It's not just in one genre. I mean, I listen to microtonal music and just intonation music, but I also listen to jazz and traditional classical music.
And I'm often grabbed by a lot of music that I've never heard before. I often gravitate towards classics, like I love the music of Bach. The B-Minor Mass is one of my favorite pieces. I keep going back to Kind of Blue, Miles Davis's classic album. It just keeps getting deeper and deeper for me. One of the new composers that I really like is Amelia Huff. Have you encountered her work yet?
BS: Oh wait … isn't that Zhea Erose?
MH: Yes, exactly. Yeah, she's doing some really interesting things. The 11-limit stuff. She's a real genius. And she's doing really fabulous things with the Lumatone. Catherine Lamb, too, and I really like Caroline Shaw a lot. And she has been a collaborator because I got to work for a couple of years with Roomful of Teeth.
BS: Going back to this transition more broadly towards tonality or rethinking tonality, that's one of the most contentious and interesting moments in recent music history, right? It's something that people feel very strongly about in one way or another: the return or transition to this music of tonal beauty. It seemed like a lot of composers in the late 60s and 70s just kind of got bored by the atonality and just wanted to make beautiful music or something. What is the meaning of that return to tonality for you? Like, Young's Well-Tuned Piano chords, he's got the Brahms chord and then the Romantic chord and so on. So does it imply some sort of continuity after a continuity was broken or something?
MH: It does, in fact. And there's also the Homage to Debussy, and there's boogie-woogie sections, blues sections, so there are a lot of references. That's really nice that you pointed that out. Tonality never went away. Tonal music was always the most popular music, so it was only a very small circle of academic composers that were exploring atonality. And that's a good thing, because, you know, as creative artists, we want to always be finding new relationships and new approaches to art. And Schoenberg is unquestionably one of the most important composers of all time. If you think about it, just the fact that you're tempering a keyboard and gradually over the centuries leading to equal temperament, it is a compromise in tonality. And so it's a kind of natural result that it would lead towards abandoning all the rules that had been followed for 300 years in tonality and trying to free, emancipate dissonance.
Of course, the next stage of that is the emancipation of the comma. Because equal temperament basically obliterated the comma. It took the Pythagorean comma and chopped it up into 12 equal pieces, so you don't hear or experience it anymore. And commas in the Renaissance were heard to sound so dissonant that they were even labeled as wolf tones, that they would resemble the howling of wolves, right? And indeed, they were incredibly dissonant in comparison with the pure just intervals that were used. So they were naturally avoided. But commas are an incredibly potent and beautiful part of music that need to be explored. There are some modes that I use in Revelation that have multiple adjacent septimal commas as you go up and down the scale. And if you just listen to them next to each other, they create an acoustical beat. But when you spin them out in a scale with common tones connecting the harmonic relationships between the commas, they sound more beautiful than ordinary scales. They pulsate and shimmer. They create this kind of life quality that we haven't been able to explore in equal temperament. And so, if you free the comma and have it become a part of what we accept as a musical language, then you also can free yourself from the need for equal temperament, because temperament is only needed to avoid the sound of the commas. And if you embrace the commas in the fabric of the music, then that provides for a universal approach to just intonation that's not limited to the musical approaches that happened previously.
BS: I don't think I realize that you were actually just lining up several commas. Because you did, you have talked about it as having to build up to it. How do you approach composition for the commas? It sounds like you're not quite building a scale the way that, e.g., The Well-Tuned Piano was built, where commas emerge out of a broader logic, but you're actually selecting those intervals that express commas specifically.
MH: The easiest way to discuss this is by showing tuning charts. I could outline the Revelation tuning for you. Are you familiar with the Revelation tuning? It's never been published before. It's very simple. And this is what makes it so beautiful, in my opinion. Every interval starts with F, and every harmonic relationship is an overtone of F. So let's start with the white keys on the piano because the piano keyboard is, let's face it, color coded. You have seven white keys and five black keys. So it'd be nice to have a tuning that shows that rather than just 12 equally tuned notes. So the easiest thing to do would be to just tune the white keys in Pythagorean tuning. So F is tuned to a pure fifth up to C. C is tuned to a pure fifth up to G. G is tuned as a pure fifth up to D. D is tuned as a pure fifth up to A. E is tuned as a pure fifth above A. And B is tuned as a pure fifth above E. So if we write those all on a horizontal line, then the horizontal axis would be a 3:2 relationship between all the white keys. Now, we're interested in exploring the seventh harmonic, because the seventh harmonic gives us a new harmonic language that is fresh and exciting to listen to and doesn't exist in equal temperament. So the most obvious thing to do is to take the seventh harmonic above our F, and put it on a vertical axis, which will give us the note E-flat. So on the vertical axis here we have a 7:4 relationship. Then the next note which would make the most sense would be to tune B-flat above the C, which is also a fifth above the E-flat. Now the next thing that would make the most sense would be to tune the F as the seventh harmonic of the G, which would be a fifth above the B-flat. But I'm sure you've already figured out there's a problem there, which is we already used the F key, because that's where we started. So what I do is tune it on the F-sharp key. Because we've already used it. The other option would be to tune it on the E key, but we already use the E key, so the best choice is the F-sharp key.
Now there's pros and cons of doing that. The advantage is the color coding that is staying on a black key, so that our intervals that are derived from seventh harmonics are on black keys. There's another advantage, in that this note falls in between the cracks, and if you tuned it on the E key, then you'd be tuning the pitch up approximately 69 cents. And you can damage the piano or break a string if you increase the tension on the strings. So it's always better when you're doing a radical tuning to lower the pitches from equal temperament rather than to raise them. So those are the reasons to do it. The disadvantage is it's a little confusing to the eye, because B-flat to F-sharp we're used to thinking of as a minor sixth, and now it's a perfect fifth. But if you can get around that, it's approximately the same distance on the keyboard, and it's black to black instead of black to white. So it makes sense. Now what happens is that the F to the F-sharp is a septimal comma of 64 to 63.
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BS: That's what you call the celestial comma?
MH: The celestial comma, and what's technically called the septimal comma. Now the reason I love this comma so much, and I think it is so powerful in music, is it's only three intervals apart: F to C, C to G, G up to the seventh to F, and you have two versions of F that are harmonically related by just three intervals apart. Or you can go from the F up to the E-flat, E-flat to the B-flat, E-flat to the F, the septimal F. Either way is good. And in fact, this makes a beautiful pentatonic scale, right? You have C, E-flat, F, G, B-flat, and you have two versions of the F. And if you play all these six notes together in a scale, the septimal comma will be sounding, and it will sound great. It will actually shimmer and pulsate, because you're showing all the harmonic connections between those notes in the tuning. So the next note we want to have is a C that is the harmonic seventh above D. But we have the same problem. That C is already used on the C key in our white keys in Pythagorean tuning, so we'll put it on the C-sharp key, but pitch is actually a lower version of C.
BS: So it doesn't uniformly ascend the scale.
MH: That's correct. In fact, when you go up C to C-sharp, it goes down in pitch. And when you go from F to F-sharp, it goes down in pitch. Ever so slightly. So I practiced scales using that kind of oblique motion. To be able to play easily and fluidly up and down the keyboard. Going up and down in pitch, but hands going in an oblique style. And there's one more pitch, which is G-sharp. So that's tuned as a seventh harmonic above A. And it's a low form of the note G. So it's also a septimal comma with a G, and it's tuned on the G-sharp key. So, as a result, the black keys form a series of Pythagorean fifths, from E-flat to B-flat, to F tuned on the F-sharp key, to C tuned on the C-sharp key, and to G tuned on the G-sharp key. The white keys are another Pythagorean series. The connection between the two Pythagorean series is all related to the seventh harmonic, because the black keys are seventh harmonics above the first five white keys in the series. And it's color coded. You have one series on white keys, one series on black. And when you mix black and white is when it gets juicy.
BS: It does indeed get very juicy. And you have three sets of adjacent commas, right?
MH: Yeah. So you have from the F to the F-sharp key, from the C to the C-sharp key, and from the G to the G-sharp key. So whenever you want to have simultaneously sounding commas, you can just alternate between any of those notes.
BS: Are you still playing these Revelation pieces? Is this still a system that you're playing around with and exploring? Or do you feel like you've mapped it out pretty well in the Revelation album?
MH: Well, Revelation had a long run. So up until a few years ago, I was getting fairly regular invitations to perform Revelation. So I kept one of my pianos usually in the Revelation tuning, so that I could keep it in my fingers and rehearse and prepare for those concerts. I wish it would continue for the rest of my life, and I hope it does. But people are interested in some new works and new pieces. So I'm developing, obviously, new music in other tunings. And I have two Steinway pianos at home. Usually I have one in my ragas tuning and one in Revelation tuning. But since I don't have any concerts coming up with Revelation, I've tuned the other one in my ragas tuning in a different key. So I'm not exploring the Revelation tuning on a daily basis right now. I really like it. It's a beautiful tuning, and there's a lot more to discover in it. And so at some point, I may go back and work with it again, and write more music. But I'm working on my Raga Cycle right now.
BS: And the collaboration with Bill Morrison too.
MH: Exactly.
BS: What will you be doing for that again?
MH: So there's two interrelated projects. The first project is the Raga Cycle. And the raga cycle is that my collaborators and I are creating 24 hours of music that will cover at least 24 different ragas that correspond to the 24 hours of the day and night. Now, ragas generally are grouped in three-hour groupings called Praharas. For example, early morning, 6 a.m. to 9 a.m., late morning, 9 a.m. to 12 noon, etc. So you have eight three-hour groupings around the cycle, four for the day, and four for the night. But I'm going to be doing at least three ragas in each grouping. So there'll be three early morning ragas, three late morning ragas, three afternoon ragas, three late afternoon ragas, etc. So that there'll be music that will correspond with a complete 24-hour cycle. Some of it is all original music, and some of it is based on traditional Indian compositions. One of the primary aspects that I'm developing is a repertoire for the piano that explores ragas. Because there isn't any repertoire for the piano, or very little, that explores ragas. And so, even though a lot of the music is structured improvisation, like Indian classical music, a lot of it is also getting scored out.
So I'm hoping to at least have one score for each of the 24 different ragas that I'm doing, which pianists will be able to play like a set of études. Pianists would be able to study these ragas and perform them in equal temperament or in just intonation, so the music can work in either one. I'm developing techniques of playing the piano in the ragas, because piano is not a traditional instrument for Indian classical music. I have to find new approaches to the ragas that use the piano, and it opens up a lot of possibilities. For example, harmonizing the ragas. Not just with triadic harmonies, but with dyads, especially thirds and sixths, where every note of the raga has certain notes that harmonize it, so that you get a harmonization of the notes of the ragas, which is a new approach.
Raga traditionally is a monophonic form, and I approach it in a pure way, where I return to the notes of the ragas. I maintain the integrity of the ragas, so any Indian classical musician can easily recognize the raga, and then I'm following the guidelines or rules of the raga, just with another harmonic dimension. Some of the music also uses polyphony, so there's counterpoint, or there's multiple lines happening at the same time. One of the primary techniques that I use is to work with ostinatos, because if you think of it, Indian classical music usually has a drone and a percussion instrument, like the tabla and the tanpura. So what is that? It's like an ostinato. Right? The tanpura is playing a drone, and the tabla is providing a rhythm.
I come up with ostinatos that I play usually with my left hand on the piano, that are like tabla and tanpura accompaniment. Sometimes simpler, sometimes more complex. And I'm working with an ensemble that you just heard a few days ago, with Elliot Cole, who's a composer, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist, and he plays keyboards and helps arrange and produce music for their group. Ina Filip, who is a Brazilian vocalist who trained in India for seven years in Dhrupad, and her husband, Benoît Rolland, who is a French electro-acoustic composer. And Mir Naqibul Islam, who's the best tabla player from Bangladesh. So that's the quintet that I'm working with. And the idea is, with different versions of the quintet, and also with some other guest musicians that we'll invite in, to record 24 hours of music.
Some of the music will be fully notated, and some will be structured improvisation. So that's what we're calling the Raga Cycle. Then the other related project is a collaboration with filmmaker and media artist, Bill Morrison, who I collaborated with on the film Just Ancient Loops. What he's doing is curating two live video feeds from each of the 24 different time zones around the planet and projecting all 48 videos simultaneously onto a 360-degree screen. So that even if we're playing an evening raga, for example, there will be some images, six screens, that will correlate with the evening raga, but then others that will correlate with all the other time zones. And one screen will be devoted to Wu Bing’s art satellite, upon which we are projecting and recording video imagery from outer space, so that you can have the 25th hour creating an objective view of planet Earth all as one entity, not divided into 24 different time zones. We're giving our first performance in a month. And I'm sure we'll give many more, and hopefully also create installations in various museums. But whenever Bill is present, he'll be live VJ-ing. So if something particularly interesting shows up on one of these live feeds, that might play out in different ways with the other videos. Part of this idea also came from a contemporary phenomenon, which is that a lot of Indian classical musicians are now performing live on Zoom. So what happens when you have an Indian musician playing in India, and an audience in Europe and the US? We're all in different time zones listening to the music simultaneously.
So the Indian musicians, even if their main audience is in the West, are generally still performing ragas that correspond with the time of day that they're experiencing at that time. So what do you do? It's like a modern day dilemma that kind of throws a kink in this whole raga time system. And so that's where this 25th hour satellite comes into play. It's really all just different vantage points of the same thing.
BS: Your collaboration with Elliot, Ina, and Naqibul is very beautiful. Back to the question of beauty, too: part of the beauty for you comes out of the shimmering quality of the commas, for one, but not all of your music features those commas, and yet it still has this very beautiful characteristic to it. I'm just wondering where this beauty comes from. Is it intentional on your part? Are you trying to create something that has this feel? Or do you really feel like it comes directly out of the harmony? I think some of it probably comes out of the way you play as well. When you were playing last week, with the repetitions and iterative quality, it felt like watching a prism slowly turn and refract. And I know it's a big and abstract question, but I think that your music is pretty unique in developing some of these evocative emotions. Maybe beauty isn't even the word — maybe it's a more complex emotion or something. I guess it's just a composer's question of, are you aiming for a mood? Or do you let the mood develop out of the techniques and the traditions, the forms?
MH: So for me, beauty is a spiritual ideal. There's a Sufi invocation that begins “Toward the one, the perfection of love, harmony, and beauty...” It's pretty amazing that beauty gets thrown in with love. And it's pretty amazing that harmony gets in there too, right? Because we usually think of harmony in terms of music, but we can think of harmony in terms of universal truth, creating harmony in the world and in our lives and with our relationships with others, and with our environment. And so beauty is very important to me. I don't know if I consciously seek to create beauty, but I imagine I do. So my music tends to use less noise and dissonance than a lot of contemporary music, because noise and dissonance are very commonplace in contemporary classical music. I think that's a good thing; I think we should be exploring everything, but my particular interest is more in creating harmonic resonance and something that I find to be beautiful. I'm also interested in this idea that the founder of Arts Letters & Numbers, who's a mentor for me, David Gersten, talks about, which is to create work to see something rather than to show something. And so I try to follow a principle that I compose whatever I'm the most excited about. So, whatever I want to explore the most and try to discover for myself, I work with that and try to see what the music is showing or telling me.
I also trust in the process that if it's exciting to me, then maybe it's not going to appeal to everyone, but there's going to be some element of humanity that's going to find a similar resonance to what I'm experiencing.
24 Hours @ Once. Live performance by The Raga Cycle Project with Michael Harrison, Benoit Rolland, Elliot Cole, Mir Naqibul Islam, and Ina Filip. Photo by Lívia Sá.
BS: Have you always approached music like that or has that developed more over the years? Was there a time where you were maybe not looking for that resonance? Or, is that something you've had to cultivate?
MH: Yes, it's something I've had to cultivate. I think it grew over the years, and I grew more confident in that approach over the years. I have explored the approach of writing music that I thought would appeal to other people, and I don't find it to be a particularly rewarding approach. There are some people that do that for a living. And I think a lot of film score composers are creating music for hire to fit with a certain film, so they're very skilled at doing that. That particular approach doesn't resonate with me, it doesn't create excitement for me. So I've been trying to follow the approach that I just outlined.
Beauty is a very interesting subject, because it's also very subjective. For example, there are many of us that find Schoenberg or Webern's music to be very beautiful, or contemporary classical music, atonal music, extended techniques, to be very beautiful, because it's showing a new approach, a different approach to music than what has a historical precedent. But many people don't find it beautiful. My father was a mathematician, and he did creative mathematics, and when he discovered formulas or whatever abstract algebra he was working with, he said it was like a moment of beauty. It's like music. It's like you see some kind of order in the universe, like with the Fibonacci series, for example. Another example is chess. I play chess, and it's really beautiful when you find a queen sacrifice. It seems like you're sacrificing your most valuable piece, but to win the game. There's a particular beauty in that.
BS: Yeah, there's also this idea that it's all kind of there in the form of the game. It's not so much about constructing the moves, all the possible moves are latent, waiting to be discovered. It just has to be uncovered, kind of like the piano.
MH: Exactly. And the same thing with commas. Commas have not been explored much in the history of music. And so this is something new that we're unveiling and uncovering that's universal. It's like a universal truth. And it can be used in so many different ways, like in La Monte Young's Dream House, he has high prime pairs of sine waves that create all these incredible standing waves and acoustical beating patterns. That's the result of the emancipation of the comma. Because every one of these prime pairs is creating a comma with acoustic beats. Or like the tuning of his The Well-Tuned Piano, or the tuning and harmonic relationships that I use in my work Revelation. There's infinite ways that you can explore commas, and there's an infinite number of commas.
BS: I just thought of this Schoenberg line when someone called his music lovely, and he's says, “My music's not lovely.” But I agree with you, it is, maybe not lovely, but more profoundly beautiful. There's something very beautiful about it, too, because it's of course about the music and the harmony and the tonality, but it's also because you can see a mind in action. It's almost like a snapshot of an internal process or something, which could be very beautiful.
How do you approach thinking and the intellect in what you're doing? Because obviously when you're constructing a scale, there's a lot of thought in there. It's not always very intuitive. And this goes back to what Terry Riley was saying the other night, that he's kind of on autopilot when he's improvising. I guess the question is still, to what extent? Is there a thought process in there? And to what extent are you thinking? What aspects of thought are you expressing?
MH: Well, Bach signed all of his scores with the letters S. D. G. for the latin phrase Soli Deo Gloria — “To God alone, the glory.” He also said “Music’s purpose should be the glory of God and the recreation of the human spirit,” which can also be translated as the “recreation of the mind.” And what makes Bach's music so deep is not only that it's emotionally moving and spiritually uplifting, but it's also very deep in its construction, structure, and the intellectual process with which it was created. And that's why it's become only more and more popular over the centuries. So I think there can be a really beautiful interplay in music between intuition and intellect. Indian classical music tends to be very intuition-based. It's designed so that the performer doesn't get on stage like in Western classical music and play a pre-planned program with all the notes worked out in advance.
They have certain systems that they rely on, for instance the raga system and the tala system and various forms and structures. But, you know, a great Indian classical musician can get on stage with accompanists that they've never even met before and give a whole performance, because they have a system in place. And it's designed that they can express their deepest mood and emotions spontaneously to try to create — well, the phrase colors of the mind is used a lot — to create moods, to create an atmosphere, an attunement that affects them and the audience. And that's what the music is based on, whereas Western classical music is generally a notated music form, although that's changed with jazz and a lot of contemporary classical music.
So there's a difference. Intuition is the source of science, actually. And if you think about it, this principle is much more accepted now than it was even 100 years ago. And the idea that someone like Einstein could come up with the understanding of the relationship between matter and energy and the universe with E = mc2, that's the result of decades of study of universal principles in science and mathematics that then came in intuition about how it all connected. So I think we can find beauty when a work has emotional, intellectual, and spiritual depth.
BS: You brought up Bach, and of course, Bach was an educator. And that leads into the question of education, and how education is really important for you in a way that maybe it's not for many other artists. And you're one of the ones who's also still a student, you're still taking classes, different types even, it sounds like, and you are teaching a lot. Why do you think education is really bound up in music, going back to Young, Bach, or going back even to more ancient traditions?
Bach score signed Soli Deo Gloria — “To God alone, the glory.”
MH: There are different ways to create your work in the world. One way, the classic way for a composer, is to write music that gets into the repertoire. And then, ideally, it's seen as some kind of enormous gift to the world. I mean, what would our world be without Bach and Beethoven, Mozart and Debussy, and the Beatles — you know, it wouldn't be the same.
But there are many other ways that we can give gifts to the world, and one way is teaching. It's a way of directly having your musical thought and your musical ideas carry down into future generations. This is a really important part of Indian classical music. To many Indian classical musicians, it's as important to them that they are practicing and performing and developing their art as it is that they are having disciples that they teach that carry on their lineage. And it works. You know, it's arguably the oldest continuous oral tradition in the world, in music at least, that goes back directly 700 years or more. So I think I draw a lot from that, from the Indian classical model, and that's a lot of the way I learned because two of my main teachers, Pandit Pran Nath and Ustad Mashkoor Ali Khan, are both very deep in that tradition.
But also La Monte Young and Terry Riley taught in that way too, and when you teach that way, it's not just music, it's a way of life. You spend a lot of time with your teacher, you make and share meals together, go for walks together, and so you really learn an approach to life. And music is much more than the music that we think of in our everyday language. I mean, if you think about it, music is vibration, and the whole universe is made up of vibration. Nature is music. Architecture is music. Food is music. All of these different elements combine harmony, disharmony, and different types of compositional ingredients in different ways. And of course, one of the essential things about music is its relationship to time, how music progresses through time. It's a time-based art in a way that painting, for example, isn't. So we become very attuned to time working with music, more so than I think in different art forms. We're very sensitive to how elements repeat in time and what elements are new. And time is a universal thing, it's not just in music, but it exists in every aspect of our relationship to the universe.
Returning to your question, I've just naturally gravitated over the years to teaching, and I find it really rewarding. I have a few students that have really excelled in creating music in just intonation. Two of them, Stacy Fahrion and Paul Mortilla own Lumatones, which is a fantastic new invention. It is a keyboard instrument that doesn't have a traditional keyboard, and you can program it to play in any type of tuning. And you can lay out the keyboard by color coding each key according to different parameters. Some of my students are really deep into exploring just intonation with other instruments as well, like Maddie Ashman who is singing, playing cello and guitar in just intonation. Both Maddie and my collaborator Ina Filip are creating some incredible music by recording multiple vocal tracks in just intonation. And my other collaborators in the Raga Cycle project, Elliot Cole and Benoît Rolland, are both doing some amazing work with electronics in just intonation. I'm really excited to see that that's carrying on. I hope that at some point I have some students that can carry on my work with playing Indian ragas on the justly tuned piano. I have one student who's very promising. She's a 14-year-old virtuoso classical Indian vocalist from India, Raya Chatterjee. She's studying piano with me, and we're learning traditional piano as well as raga-based piano music. But she excels mainly as a classical Indian vocalist. She's been featured on national TV in India since she was age 10.
BS: So you're probably learning from her, too.
MH: You bet I'm learning from her. In fact, I've invited her to teach a segment of my upcoming online raga class, because she's a really extraordinary musician.
BS: Has teaching changed the way that you think about music? Has it changed the way that you approach writing your own music? I think there's an idea that sometimes you don't really know something until you teach it yourself.
MH: One way is that whatever I'm teaching, I've become more interested in. I'm teaching a lot of raga. I teach an online raga class with a new series every semester, and that also gives me motivation to work on the ragas that I'm teaching and to continue my own study and practice — which I would do anyway — but it motivates me even more because I'm teaching on a regular basis, not only a group class but private students. So that's one way that it affects me.
Another way that it affects me is that most of my students are younger than me and they have their own interesting culture that's developing, and so I'm very influenced by that. It's a way of keeping attuned to new developments that are happening in culture and society. And yes, you learn from teaching, you learn what works, what doesn't work, what you're really interested in, and what's more superficial.
BS: Yeah, we talked about this a little bit with the interests of younger students and new music today — how would you characterize those interests versus, say, when you were a student in the 70s? Have interests changed pretty dramatically to you? Other than just intonation being a little bit more common now, have there been other big changes that you've noticed over the years, just in general artistic sensibilities?
MH: Yes, there has been. When I first was in school, most composers were encouraged to write atonal music. And now, at many universities and conservatories, it's equally accepted to write different forms of music based on new approaches to tonality. So that's been a major shift.
The other thing that I've seen as a major shift is timbre developing as the fourth primary musical ingredient, along with melody, rhythm, and harmony. And if you think about it, Bach's music can be played on almost any instrument, even The Art of the Fugue wasn't specified for certain instruments, right? You could do the fugues on any instrument. But there's been a gradual trend in music towards writing music that is specific for certain instruments. And then you get to something like Lachemann, where it's very much about the color of the sounds, the timbre qualities of the extended techniques, and the musical sounds and the noise that is created by the different instruments.
So that's been, at least in contemporary music circles and academia, the major trend I would say. Even more than microtonality. Like you heard it in the string quartet concert that happened here the other night. Brooks's piece (Brooks Clarke); Zhanna's piece (Zhanna); Jason's piece (Jason Zhang). There were tons of extended techniques creating different timbral varieties. So that's now become a new vocabulary for performers and composers.
BS: So you've noticed this as a big shift even just from the 70s until today? Adorno wrote about this in the 40s or 50s, that timbre will be the new thing that will be explored, primarily resulting from his exposure to the new electronic music then. But it's interesting because there's a relationship between timbre and harmony in some ways, right? How do you approach that yourself? Because in some ways, the exploration of the commas could be constructed as a timbre domain thing, but it comes directly out of the harmony.
MH: Yes, exactly. That's a beautiful analogy. Another one is the Tristan chord, where the half diminished seventh chord, that is the Tristan chord, doesn't operate according to the rules of tonal harmony. And so, some of the tones of the chord become like color tones rather than functions. So it's like the beginning of appreciating harmony as timbre. And then you can take it to the extremes and say, okay, a cluster of tones creates a certain timbre, rather than a harmonic function. And that's a beautiful analogy you just made with the commas, that the commas are a harmonic relationship that creates a new kind of timbre — a shimmering, pulsating sound. I'm very drawn to the timbre of the piano. I've explored working in just intonation, mostly on acoustic pianos, but I've done some on keyboards and electronic instruments. And I find that the piano has such a rich timbre that when you work with just intonation with simultaneously sounding commas, it creates an incredibly beautiful, rich sonority that is hard to replicate with many other electronic instruments and with any other instruments. Also you get so much sympathetic resonance from the piano when you hold down the pedal, or if you specifically control the resonance with the middle pedal, the sostenuto pedal, which I do a lot in my work. So I'm very much in love with the timbre of the piano. But also string instruments. I do write a lot for string instruments, particularly cello, because it has such a wide range.
BS: Yeah, Just Ancient Loops is such an incredible piece. So powerful. It's literally awesome. You do hear the commas a little bit at the end, but not so much throughout, which didn't really matter. It's an incredible piece.
MH: I wasn't really exploring the commas in that piece, but I have another cello piece that does, it's called Cello Constellations, where there's many commas that are sounded between the various voices of the different cellos. It was commissioned and recorded by Clarice Jensen.
BS: And you said you did write a piece in SuperCollider at one point, too?
MH: Yeah, I've done a few pieces in SuperCollider. In fact, the piece I just mentioned, Cello Constellations, was all written in SuperCollider and then notated. It's a piece for multi-track cello. It builds up to about 20 layers of cellos and sine tones. It was multiple sine tone tracks, and then some of them I transcribed for the cello. And it's all based on an extension of the concept of total serialism. Total serialism is the idea that there would be an interrelationship between all the different aspects of music. So if you gave a certain number, for example, to the pitches, it would correspond to the dynamics and to the rhythmic elements of the tone. But the problem with total serialism is that there isn't necessarily an organic connection between the notes and the rhythms. For example, if you apply a 16th note to dynamics and you call it pianississimo, but then you assign it to a certain pitch like a D flat, it's fairly arbitrary. And so what I did is I took the chords, or constellations, as I call them, that I created with various whole number proportions and sine tones, and then I used those same ratios to create the structure of the piece and the envelopes of all the different notes. And it works really beautifully if you have, for example, a constellation of tones unfolding, you can have each new note of the constellation come in at the inverse proportion to its ratio. So for example, if you go up the harmonic series, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, you would have the fundamental come in at a time element of one, have the octave come in at a time element of one over two, have the third harmonic come in at a time element of one third, the fourth harmonic come in at a time element of one fourth, etc. And so you can have a gradually unfolding curve of the harmonics entering in a natural proportion in time with their frequency.
BS: It touches on the relationship of pitch and rhythm, which are not really separate, but rather on the same continuum. Even Schoenberg wrote about how rhythm is so important to music, but it's so insufficiently notated. He says there's not even a close correspondence between what's being written and what's played. And what's being written with rhythm hasn't even been thought about very often either. That’s why there's a rhythm chapter in Schoenberg's book on harmony, but it's only like two pages or something. But for him, it should be thought about a little bit more because it actually is on the same spectrum as harmony.
MH: And polyrhythms are harmonies, right? Like you take a 3:2 proportion, it's a 3:2 polyrhythm, but it's also a perfect fifth. And a 4:3 polyrhythm is also a perfect fourth. And a 5:4 polyrhythm is a perfect third. I've been told that if you clap in a 3:2 rhythm and you speed up the recording 20x, 30x, that you'll hear a perfect fifth. So yes, I've done a few pieces like this, my best one is Cello Constellations. But the prototype was Radians Phase, which was a really exploratory piece. Radians Phase is for computer controlled sine waves, flute, clarinet, violin, and cello. There is also another version for string quartet and two flutes. So first of all, there's five or six constellations in that piece. It's a relatively short piece, only nine minutes long. And that was where I first discovered and explored this relationship between time durations and dynamics that were derived from the frequencies of the notes themselves.
But I also explored prime numbers to an extreme. So the opening chord in Radians Phase starts at the very top of our hearing range, the highest frequencies you can hear. And it descends through a series of prime numbers of a fundamental that you don't hear until the end of the chord. So the whole chord just spins out a series of prime numbers — only prime numbers. So there's one perfect fifth, which is prime three. There's one pure third, which is prime five. But it goes up into the tens of thousands. And it's just a huge cluster of prime numbers descending in order. And then the piece ends the opposite by starting with a fundamental and going up through the harmonics and then gradually fading out as it goes through to the highest primes that we can hear.
BS: Are you still climbing? Do you still climb mountains?
MH: No, but I love to hike. So if I do an artist’s residency or take a vacation in a beautiful natural setting, I always make sure to get out and go for some nice hikes. And I'm always inspired by beautiful natural settings.
BS: Do you think you'll ever build a permanent installation, like a Dream House of your own?
MH: Well, that's the ideal for 24 Hours @ Once. It would be to have a permanent installation that would be open 24 hours a day, at least sometimes. Maybe eight hours a day most of the time, but 24 hours a day, one day a week or something, that would play the complete 24 hours of the Raga Cycle recordings with whatever Bill Morrison is designing for the 24 time zones with the satellite as the 25th time zone. So that's the goal. I hope that it will happen during my lifetime.
