MUSIC - Review

Whole Earth, Spring, 1999 by Dr

There are plenty of examples of recorded music that seem to breathe like living things. You can find them in the best of whatever kind of music you prefer. Below, though, are a few artists who have emphasized a powerful kinship with nature in their work, either through listening closely to what's out there, or by using natural sound as direct material inside their work.

TRANSFORMATIONS

Hildegard Westerkamp. 1996. $25 postpaid. Empreintes Digitales, 4580 Avenue de Lorimier, Montreal QC H2H 2B5, Canada, 514/526-4096, 514/526-4487. dim@cam.org, www.cam.org.

Westerkamp began working with Murray Schafer's soundscape concepts in the 1970s while recording the environments surrounding her Vancouver home. Her work is remarkable for its careful and exact transformations of natural sound into musical material. These are some of the most thoughtful environmental compositions ever recorded.

ECLAIRS SUR L'AU-DELA [ILLUMINATIONS OF THE BEYOND]

Olivier Messiaen. $15.99. Deutsche Grammaphon.

Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) was one of the greatest and most spiritual composers of this century anywhere on Earth. His music draws on the French Impressionist tradition, a unique personal harmonic theory, Indian tala rhythms, and exact transcriptions of bird songs adapted for human players. This piece contains all of his wonderful techniques and combines them into a deeply mystical meditation. He believed that God was everywhere, a Spirit that could be primally revealed through music that emulated the world's living sounds--not only birds, but shining crystals, flowing rivers, distant planets, and stars.

WITHIN EARREACH

Sonic Journeys

Richard Lerman. 1994 (Artifact Recordings, 1994, ART 1009). $15 ($20 postpaid) from Frog Peak Music, Box 1052, Lebanon, NH 03766, 603/448-9937. www.frogpeak.org.

Richard Lerman is the populist of natural recording technology. He makes inexpensive (under $1) microphones out of piezoelectric disks and attaches them to blades of grass and raindrops. Sometimes he lets hundreds of ants walk all over them in the desert. The sounds he produces and assembles are immediate, shocking, intensified, and brilliant. He'll also tell you how to make use of this technology in classrooms, at: pzo.lerman@asu.edu.

GREATEST HITS

Paul Winter. 1998. $15 ($19 postpaid). Living Music, PO Box 72, Litchfield, CT 06759, 800/437 2281, 860/567 8796, fax: 860/567 4276, pwclmr@aol.com, www.livingmusic.com.

Greatest Hits draws from the landmark Common Ground and six other of Paul Winter's records, along with new recordings, to document his twenty-year odyssey of bringing his Winter Consort in touch with the beautiful tones of the world's wild creatures. It includes some of the best of people jamming with recordings of animals, with a cast of stellar musical accomplices including Steve Gadd, Oscar Castro-Nueves, and Paul McCandless, not to mention eagles, wolves, and humpback whales.

FORESTS

Doug Quin. 1999. Price not available at time of publication. EarthEar, 45 Cougar Canyon, Santa Fe, NM, 505/466-1879, www.earthear.com. [Note: this company will not be fully in gear until April].

Quin is the best of the next generation of soundscape composers, blending field recordings from Antarctica and Madagascar with choral singing and improvised accompaniments to create long, epic works. This is the best of his pieces to be released so far, and it is the first from a new music-and-nature label, EarthEar, which has just put out several soundscape compilations and related products, with a commitment to offer the cutting edge in music/Nature collaborations.