Cornish College musicians re-create historic John Cage, Lou Harrison performances

On a winter's night in early 1992, the careers of John Cage and Lou Harrison, two composers with strong Seattle connections, were celebrated at Cornish College College of the Arts. After some stellar performances of their work — including a lively rendering of a percussion piece they wrote together in 1941 — the pair came onstage to take their bows.

Cage, with his ragamuffin hair, baggy jeans and flannel shirt, still looked boyish at 79. There might have been an old man's shuffle to his walk, but the light in his eyes made it clear that, at heart, he was scampering up there.

Harrison, five years younger, was a more majestic figure: bearded, rotund, almost oracular. But he was just as obviously pleased by the concert's warm reception.

In the years between their first collaboration and their 1992 Seattle appearance, Cage and Harrison had risen from obscurity to become titans of the American avant-garde. Harrison's forays into music of non-Western cultures helped fuel the world-music movement of the 1980s. Cage's experimentation with chance composing techniques, altered instruments and ambient sound — or "Silence," as the title of his 1961 book proclaimed it — was equally influential and brought him international renown. That night in 1992 marked their last public appearance together in Seattle — the city where they'd made pivotal contributions to the Western percussion tradition half a century earlier. Cage died that August; Harrison in 2003. But anyone wanting insight into what they accomplished here and elsewhere will have their chance starting Thursday with "Drums along the Pacific," a four-day festival at Cornish celebrating the work of Cage, Harrison and their mentor Henry Cowell.

The selections on the program range from the feistily playful to the tranquilly ravishing. Rich in rhythmic energy and otherworldly melodies, this music makes you want to get up and dance ... or else go meditate.

The festival takes its name from an article written by Cowell in 1940 about "an extraordinary interest in percussion music" developing on the West Coast.

"In Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles," Cowell wrote, "orchestras have been formed to play music for percussion instruments alone." He singled out Cage and Harrison's activities specifically.

That year, Cage's percussion ensemble, after performing at Cornish, took its show to Oregon, Idaho and Montana. "Drums along the Pacific," the festival, commemorates the 70th anniversary of that adventure by staging retrospectives of the three composers' works and taking them on the road.

Participants include local ensembles Seattle Chamber Players, Pacific Rims Percussion Quartet, Gamelan Pacifica and guest artists, among them pianist Stephen Drury and tenor John Duykers (former head of Cornish's music department).

A little local music history is in order here. The Cage-Cornish connection started in 1938, when Cage — on Harrison's recommendation — was hired as piano accompanist for the Cornish dance program. (Cage was born in Los Angeles, Harrison in Portland, Ore.) One of Cage's first assignments was to compose music for "Bacchanale" by choreographer Syvilla Fort.

Cage was accustomed to writing for percussion. But there was no room onstage for anything but a piano. Recalling Cowell's experimental use of the piano — reaching inside to pluck the strings, for instance — Cage worked on different ways to make the instrument sound more percussive.

Nothing he tried worked.

Then he had a brain wave.

"I decided that what was wrong was not me but the piano," he later recalled. "I decided to change it."

Eventually, by using screws, nuts and weather stripping he was able to mute some piano strings and alter the pitch or timbre of others. Thus the "prepared piano" was born, with its "palette of pings, thumps and drum- and gong-like noises" (as pianist Drury puts it).

Cage also founded the Cage Percussion Players while at Cornish and, after their 1940 Pacific Northwest tour, went on to program concerts with Harrison up and down the West Coast. They even wrote a piece together: the festive "Double Music" of 1941.

In the 1940s, their styles weren't so far apart: Harrison's "Fugue," "Symfony 13" and "Suite for Percussion" have a marked kinship with Cage's famous "constructions" for percussion ensemble. ("Double Music," the Harrison pieces and Cage's "Third Construction" are all on the festival program.) Both were under an Asian influence, Harrison in terms of sound, Cage more in terms of philosophy.

Cage, of course, ended up in New York where he collaborated for most of his career with choreographer Merce Cunningham, whom he'd met at Cornish. Harrison settled in California where, by the 1970s, his interest in the gamelan was key to his work.

Both reconnected with Cornish by 1980, doing weeklong residencies at the Capitol Hill school for the rest of their lives. The three Cornish faculty members behind the "Drums" festival — Matthew Kocmieroski, Jarrad Powell and Paul Taub — all worked with Cage and Harrison and believe their and Cowell's influence is greater than ever.

"Cowell was one of the first composers to take a really strong, studied interest in world music," says Taub, producer of "Drums" and flutist with Seattle Chamber Players. "Harrison took that one step further with his study and influence from non-Western music." While people are now well aware of music from across the world, Taub says, few know much about Cowell (whose beautiful "Homage to Iran," inspired by an Asian tour he took in 1956-1957, is on Thursday's program). Similarly, Cage has influenced a number of musicians and composers without their necessarily being alert to his accomplishments.

Kocmieroski, a member of Pacific Rims, points out that Cage was part of Cornish's dance department, not its music department, which in the 1930s was dominated by Russian Revolution refugees with more conservative tastes. Powell, director of Gamelan Pacifica, remembers Cage saying that Cornish's musicians weren't interested in his music — "but the dancers found it useful."

Harrison's and Cage's music later diverged in style, with Harrison using exotic tunings and timbres to delve into seductively melodic territory while Cage increasingly relied on chance elements — consultations of the I Ching, for instance — to structure works that were more austere.

There was also this difference: Cage used instruments he found to hand, albeit in unusual ways, while Harrison and his partner William Colvig built their own instruments, incorporating everything from "precision tuned aluminum and iron" to car parts. ("Automobile brake drums have changed and are no longer fine bells," Harrison griped in the 1980s, "and I rue the day when plastics will have swept from the market the fine galvanized iron tubs and garbage pails which are our only commonly available metal drums.")

Kocmieroski explains, "Before World War II all the old brake drums were made out of spun steel which was extremely resonant. After the war they were all made out of cast iron, which is a lot deader."

Kocmieroski, when we chatted, was still scouting the region for potential instruments. The reaction he gets from junkyard owners, he says, is: "You're looking for what? You want to use it for what? Well, if you want to come poke around the yard, you're welcome, but — "

It's the least he can do for Cage, Harrison and their mentor: "Even though they're not alive anymore, we still want to have them in residence every couple of years — and somehow revisit them and share them."

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com