John Cage, Lou Harrison, Lukas Foss, Harvey Sollberger

condition (record/cover): M / EX

New World Records - founded in 1975 with a Rockefeller Foundation grant to document the full breadth of American musical culture, from blues and jazz to concert music - gave Double Music one of its cleaner presentations. Double Music (1941) is the one fully collaborative composition that John Cage and Lou Harrison produced: each composer writing independent parts for percussion ensemble, neither hearing what the other had written until the score was assembled, the combination designed to cohere through a shared rhythmic framework. The result is among the most charming and rhythmically inventive pieces in the American percussion repertoire. Alongside works by Lukas Foss and Harvey Sollberger, the LP documents a strand of American concert music that New World was uniquely positioned to preserve.