John Cage, Lou Harrison, Mario Bertoncini, Peter Garland, Edward Miller, William Albright

Featuring: Blackearth Percussion Group

condition (record/cover): EX- (light marks not affecting play) / EX

Booklet included.

A remarkable document from Opus One, gathering music performed by the Blackearth Percussion Group - the Chicago-based ensemble that, across the 1970s, played an important role in expanding the repertoire and the profile of contemporary percussion music in America. The programme brings together composers across several generations and sensibilities: John Cage, whose early percussion works established the terrain on which so much subsequent American percussion writing built; Lou Harrison, Cage's longtime collaborator and the composer whose engagement with world percussion traditions ran deepest; Mario Bertoncini, the Italian member of the Nuova Consonanza collective who brought a European improvisatory sensibility; Peter Garland, the composer and editor of Soundings journal who had done more than almost anyone to bring Nancarrow's player piano studies to public attention; and Edward Miller and William Albright. A concentrated document of the American percussion avant-garde at mid-decade.