Russell Hartenberger – Arlington
Ryan Scott; Russell Hartenberger; Various percussionists
Nexus Records 11053 (russellhartenberger.bandcamp.com/album/arlington)
Despite Ionisation (1931), that great work for percussion by Edgard Varèse, and many other fine works by the great Michael Colgrass, David Saperstein, Henry Cowell and Charles Wuorinen (to name but a few), literature written specifically for percussion remains relatively rare. One reason could be that outside of contemporary blues and rock ensembles with prominently featured drum sets, in classical music, string instruments are often called upon to play pizzicato and col legno battuto to simulate percussion.
But the paucity of literature is not the reason why we must praise Russell Hartenberger’s disc Arlington; for it is a disc where melody, harmony and certainly rhythm are all celebrated in abundance. Hartenberger is a composer and a virtuoso percussionist as well. A founding member of Nexus, he is also what you may call a musical anthropologist who has mined the art and sculppure of percussion of drummers from West Africa and Europe and Indigenous drummers from the Near and Far East to North and South America.
However, it is not simply uncommon scholarship that informs the two large works for percussion on this disc. Hartenberger’s works seem not simply designed to show off the instruments that play them but also to illuminate the music itself: Arlington rises above being a funerary tattoo to celebrate the spectral spirits dancing in the rarefied air above every tombstone. The symphonic Red River is a large-scale musical metaphor that gushes with exuberance celebrating earthly life in all its protean variety.
