The seven compositions recorded on this disc date from the pioneer Thirties and early Forties, when American music was making gigantic strides toward the honored place in the world arena which it occupies today. The percussion ensemble was new then, and its exploitation was a major challenge to composer and auditor alike. But, although the idiom of the percussion ensemble had little precedent in Western culture, it was not brought to being as the result of any whim.

Stravinsky stands, to some degree, behind all this music. His SACRE DU PRINTEMPS of 1913 had awakened human sensibilities to a new world of rhythm, and his HISTOIRE DU SOLDAT of 1918 had opened the door to a vast range of instrumental effect obtainable through the soloistic use of percussion instruments.

Henceforth the percussion was not to be a mere orchestral condiment, and its progress toward independent status was hastened by the interest--so marked in the Thirties--in the percussion ensembles of Bali and Java and the even stronger interest--also characteristic of that time--in the music of Latin America, wherein percussion plays so large a part. It is no accident that the oldest piece on this record is by the late Amadeo Roldan of Cuba and that one of the works by William Russell of the United States is in a Cuban vein.

Jazz and its uses of rhythm and percussion are another element in this story, although a relatively slight one.

Of much greater importance was the development in the theater known, rather loosely, as Modern Dance. Percussion music was ideal as accompaniment to this form of choreographic art, and several of the pieces on this record were originally composed for recitals thereof, either in direct association with the dances or as interludes between them. One of the composers represented here, Lou Harrison, was once active as a dancer and another, John Cage, remains to this day associated with the Modern Dance theater of Merce Cunningham.

Harrison, born in Portland, Oregon, in 1917, studied in San Francisco with Henry Cowell and in Los Angeles with Arnold Schoenberg. He has composed much, in many forms; he has also served as music critic (on the New York Herald Tribune), teacher (at Mills College and Black Mountain college), playwright, musical instrument maker, and, as observed above, dancer.

His list of works for percussion ensemble is very large. The score of his CANTICLE NO. 1 is inscribed "June 21, 1940/1:30-5:30/in San Francisco." The piece was written for the dance department of Mills College, where Harrison was teaching at the time, and he calls it "a simple waltz," but it is far less simple and far less waltz-like than this description would make it seem. The time, to be sure, is 3/4, but this fact is hidden by innumerable syncopations and exceptional rhythmic phrasings; furthermore, the characteristic swing of the waltz is not there.

The rhythmic aspect of all seven pieces on this disc is very difficult to talk about. Analysis would take much space and require all manner of quotations from the scores and many mathematical diagrams; but the purely instrumental and coloristic aspects of these works are not difficult to talk about, and there is always much interest in them.

CANTICLE NO. 1 calls for five players. No. 1 handles a sistrum, tambourine, three wood blocks of different pitches, and three high bells. No. 2 takes care of a gourd rattle, three of the wooden, clapperless bells known as "dragons' mouths," and three large glass bells. No. 3 is assigned a wooden rattle, three claybells, three large cowbells, and an Indian rasp of the type known as morache. No. 4 has a set of glass windbells, a triangle, a suspended cymbal, a large bell, a very large gong, a brake drum, tam-tam, and a large thundersheet. No. 5 looks after three high drums, three muted gongs, and three low drums.

The piece as a whole is an example of the delicate, tactful, lacy effects of which the percussion ensemble is capable. Such effects were at one time heavily stressed, even perhaps over-stressed, in an obvious effort to forestall the criticism that percussion music must of necessity be noisy.

William Russell is not a composer whose name will be found in biographical dictionaries. His list of works is small. In recent years he has been much interested in jazz and in research on its history, but in the late Thirties he was one of the San Francisco group, along with Cage, Harrison, and others, who gravitated around Henry Cowell and his New Music Edition, which published Russell's THREE DANCE MOVEMENTS in 1936. (They had been written three years earlier.)

The first of these dance movements is a waltz in 7/4, the second a march in 3/4, and the last a fox trot in 5/4. This is sterner, more dramatic and violent stuff than Harrison's CANTICLE. It demands four players. No.1 manipulates two triangles, a small dinner bell, a ginger ale bottle (empty), a tom-tom, and a steel bar or anvil. Player No. 2 is assigned four cymbals of different sizes and types, as well as a tom-tom; No. 3 has wood blocks, drums, and another tom-tom, and No. 4 the piano and a slapstick.

The piano is handled in unorthodox ways in the first two movements. During part of the waltz the pianist runs a fork over the piano strings. Throughout the march he plays huge tone-clusters, and at the end of this movement he is directed to depress all the keys of the piano simultaneously with a board. In the fox trot the piano is played in conventional style, but this movement contains one of the great imperatives in the history of percussion music, two bars before Letter G__"Break Bottle, sFFFz!"

No record that surveys any aspect of modern American music is likely to omit the work of Henry Cowell, who has been a front-runner for new ideas in this country for the better part of the past half-century. His career has been too varied and adventurous even to sketch; suffice it here to say that he was born in Menlo Park, California, a suburb of San Francisco, in 1897, and turned the San Francisco Bay Region into a proving ground for new music all through the period covered by the compositions on this disc.

The OSTINATO PIANISSIMO is one of the most delicately conceived works in the present collection, and its ostinato feature brings it, at least superficially, closer to the music of the Orient than anything else presented here.

The scoring is for two string pianos (pianos in which certain strings although struck by hammers in the normal manner, are damped by hand, producing a marked alteration in the tone quality of the instrument), as well as eight rice bowls of varying pitches, a xylophone, a marimba, two wood blocks, a tambourine without its customary metal jingles, a guiro, two bongos, three drums, and three gongs.

It is played on this record by eight performers. The parts for the various instruments are of various lengths, and each is repeated, over and over again, in different rhythmic texture of extreme complexity are built up from very simple elements. It is interesting to note that Mr. Cowell was present during the recording of his composition.

Typed by Barb. Golden, 4/11/95