Michael Harrison: Seven Sacred Names
Cantaloupe Music

If Michael Harrison's Seven Sacred Names is more cohesive on thematic than musical grounds, it's no less rewarding for being so. A variety of artists appears on the release, from vocalists Ina Filip and Payton MacDonald and vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth to violinist Tim Fain, violist Caleb Burhans, cellist Ashley Bathgate, and tablaist Ritvik Yaparpalvi, with Harrison himself playing, primarily, just intonation piano. With personnel changing from one piece to another, a musical potpourri results. Conceptually, however, the album's united in presenting itself as a companion album to the book Nature's Hidden Dimension by astrophysicist and modern Sufi mystic W.H.S. Gebel. In liner notes, the author clarifies that the seven sacred names, in accordance with the cosmology of Sufism, “tell the story of an awakening primal Self.” The first stage, for example, “Al Hayy,” constitutes the originating awareness “I exist,” which leads in the second to the self-reflecting and rather Descartesian “I know I exist,” until a culmination of sorts is reached with the final stage “Al Kalim” and the conviction that “I have the capacity to express all that is within me.”

Gebel's belief that Harrison was the perfect composer for the project is convincing. A student of Sufism whose musical training is in both Western classical and Indian classical music, he's conversant with multiple tuning systems, from standard and just intonation, the latter rooted in musical intervals of perfect mathematical proportions, to ones he has created himself; he's also credited with having invented the harmonic piano, a grand piano that plays twenty-four notes per octave. In addition, Harrison is a one-time protégé of La Monte Young who lived in his Tribeca loft, was the exclusive tuner for his custom Bösendorfer concert grand, and is the only other person besides the composer to have performed the six-hour landmark The Well-Tuned Piano. Harrison also, like Young, was a disciple of Pandit Pran Nath and traveled to India with him and Terry Riley to study and practice. All such experiences clearly make him the ideal choice for a musical treatment of Gebel's book.

The sequencing of Harrison's seven pieces naturally mirrors the seven stages of universal awakening with one difference, “KALIM” appearing in two parts as prologue and epilogue. That move lends the work a satisfying structural design and helps give the six pieces in between a better sense of connection. Despite the contrasts between the parts, an ethereal, at times hypnotic character permeates the material, making the album conducive to a meditative response.

Listening to “KALIM” in both its iterations, it hardly surprises that Harrison drew for inspiration from Part's Spiegel Im Spiegel when writing his own material. Scored for violin, viola, cello and just intonation piano (prologue) and cello and just intonation piano (epilogue), the piece seduces with its prettiness and harmonic beauty. Certainly a tie to Part's piece can be identified in the sparseness of Harrison's arrangement, but the tone of his is sweeter and even perhaps more moving, and the performance Bathgate delivers in the luminous closing part is magnificent. The fourth of the seven names and signifying the birth of desire, “MUREED” reinstates the plaintive tone of the opener, this time with Fain and Harrison (playing piano in standard tuning) engaging in a gorgeous duet that's alternately tender and supplicating.

The instantly identifiable sound world of just intonation reveals itself in “HAYY: Revealing the Tones,” the opening movement from Harrison's evening-length opus Revelation: Music in Pure Intonation (released on Cantaloupe Music in 2007) and played solo by the composer. Performed by Harrison on his harmonic piano, the penultimate “BASIR” shimmers resplendently, the effect intensified through the application of processing. Reprising the fourth movement from Just Constellations, the four-part work Harrison wrote for the vocal ensemble (and issued in 2020 on New Amsterdam), Roomful of Teeth executes the lustrous timbres of “SAMI: The Acoustic Constellation” using Nom-tom syllables and sans instrumental accompaniment.

The only piece not solely credited to Harrison, “ALIM: Polyphonic Raga Malkauns” is performed and composed by Harrison on piano with MacDonald and Filip on vocals. Amplifying its Indian classical aura, Burhans contributes violin drones, and electronic tanpuras also appear to create the dreamlike impression of a midnight raga. That Indian dimension carries over into the dramatic “QADR: Etude in Raga Bhimpalasi” when the tanpuras and violin drones remain, though the musical focus does shift itself to a lengthy solo excursion by Harrison on just intonation piano with accompaniment from Yaparpalvi on tabla.

August 2021