The Wanderer

The work of Pauline Oliveros, one of the great mavericks of American music, frequently has an element of whimsy that does nothing to detract from the seriousness of her artistic intent. The album The Wanderer, a reissue of a 1984 LP, is a fine introduction to her acoustic work from the 1960s to the 1980s, featuring her favored instrument, the accordion. Her Duo for Accordion and Bandoneon, performed here by the composer and David Tudor, is a revision of her Duo for Accordion and Bandoneon with Possible Mynah Bird Obbligato, a perfect example of her artistic playfulness and the beautiful results it can produce. At the original performance at the San Francisco Tape Music Center in 1964, as accompaniment to a dance by Elizabeth Harris, Oliveros and Tudor were seated on a seesaw that spun around as the seats moved up and down, and a mynah bird in a cage suspended over them imitated the sounds of the instruments. Even stripped of the dance, the lighting, the changing spatial relationships of the performers, and the mynah bird, the piece still holds the attentive listener in rapt anticipation, much the way Morton Feldman's music does. Even more impressive is Oliveros' The Wanderer, a kind of concerto for solo accordion and an orchestra of 20 accordions, 2 bass accordions, and 5 percussionists. Oliveros uses the accordions' ability to sustain long tones to open the piece with an expansive modal landscape that evolves through slowly shifting textures and harmonies. The piece ends in a rollicking minimalist dance accompanied by the percussionists. Horse Sings From Cloud, which Oliveros describes as a sonic meditation, can be performed by any number of performers with any instrumentation, and in this incarnation it's played by Heloise Gold on harmonium, Julia Haines on accordion, Linda Montano on concertina, and Oliveros on the bandoneon. The score consists of the verbal directions to sustain a tone until you have no desire to change it, and only then change it. In this version, it's a harmonically dense, largely static cloud of sounds, some sustained and some pulsing, with inner parts whose subtle shifts create a sense of a very slow, organic evolution. The CD should intrigue any fans of daring yet sonically appealing American experimentalism.