Georges I. Gurdjieff, Thomas de Hartmann

Featuring: Cecil Lytle

condition (record/cover): NM / VG+ (light wear)

The collaboration between Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1866-1949) and Thomas de Hartmann (1885-1956) is one of the stranger documents in twentieth-century music history. Gurdjieff, the Greek-Armenian mystic and philosopher, had absorbed during his years of travel through Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Caucasus a vast repository of what he called "objective music" - melodies, rhythms, and harmonies from Sufi orders, Tibetan monasteries, Caucasian folk traditions, and sources he never fully disclosed. He was, however, not a musician in any technical sense. De Hartmann was: a trained composer who had studied with Taneev in St. Petersburg, whose ballets had been premiered before the Tsar with choreography by Fokine, Nijinsky, and Pavlova. He met Gurdjieff in 1917 and spent the following decade as his closest disciple, transcribing and realizing for piano what Gurdjieff sang, played on a hand harmonium, or demonstrated through movement.

The resulting body of music - several hundred pieces spanning liturgical suites, dervish dances, Tibetan sacred music, Central Asian folk material, and more - sat in disarray in de Hartmann's estate for decades after his death. In the 1980s, musicologist and pianist Cecil Lytle undertook a three-year reconstruction project, producing the first accurate edition of the scores. This LP, the first volume of a projected trilogy, presents the most ceremonial and meditative material: the majestic suites titled "Seekers of the Truth," "Hymnes d'un Grand Temple," and "Rituals of a Sufi Order." What de Hartmann did for Gurdjieff, as Lytle's liner notes put it, was what Bartók did for the Magyar folk tradition - transformed raw melodic utterance into a sophisticated piano composition indebted both to nineteenth-century European art music and to something that has no name in that tradition. The result sits outside every category available to it, and has been treasured by an increasingly wide circle of listeners since its release. Recorded in Munich in 1987.