Michael Harrison: Raga Cycle

24-Hours of Music Moving through Morning, Day, Evening, and Night

Raga Cycle is an ambitious recording project by the celebrated composer, pianist, and singer Michael Harrison, which will be released across eight albums, featuring planned collaborations with a range of musicians from around the world, including Laraaji, Roomful of Teeth, Bergamot Quartet, Dhrupad vocalist Ina Filip, bassist Hansford Rowe, tabla player Mir Naqibul Islam, electro-acoustic composer Benoit Rolland, and others. The project is produced by composer Elliot Cole. The music will also be the score to Academy Award nominee Bill Morrison’s multimedia project 24 Hours @ Once.

Michael is known as an important composer-pianist in the Western classical tradition who has made special contributions to music theory of pure tuning. But for over 45 years he has also been a devoted student and practitioner of Indian classical music, adapting the ancient melodic science of Raga to the piano. Raga Cycle is the capstone of this lifetime of work, Michael’s definitive statement from a place of depth in both traditions that very few people have ever achieved. This has given him an extremely unique musical voice that is eloquent, profound, and fresh to modern audiences, and also is a rare accomplishment, historically important to document.

Ragas are structures for melodic improvisation that capture a specific attitude, mood, and spiritual reality. In India they have been transmitted from teacher to student in arguably the oldest continuous aural tradition of classical music in the world. Michael continues the lineage that traces its roots to the 13th century, received from masters Pandit Pran Nath (alongside Terry Riley and La Monte Young) and Ustad Mashkoor Ali Khan. His approach to Raga on the piano faithfully continues their essence while unfolding new possibilities of harmony, texture, and resonance.

Each raga is meant to be performed at a certain time of day. Raga Cycle will ultimately be an entire day of raga: 24 hours of music that moves through morning, day, evening, and night.

The first album installment, Evening Light: Raga Cycle I, has been recorded and is available now to stream privately.

Listen to a private stream of Evening Light: Raga Cycle I

Raga Cycle performance with Bill Morrison’s 24 Hours @ Once, featuring Michael Harrison, Ina Filip, Mir Naqibul Islam, and Elliot Cole.

Critical Acclaim

Michael Harrison’s latest album Seven Sacred Names (Cantaloupe 2021) was called “music of positively intoxicating beauty” by Steve Smith in The New Yorker, and features performances by Grammy-winning Roomful of Teeth, violinist Tim Fain, cellist Ashley Bathgate, and others, with Harrison on piano. Just Constellations commissioned and recorded by Roomful of Teeth (New Amsterdam 2020), was called "glacially beautiful" and "luminous" by Alex Ross in The New Yorker and selected for NPR's Best 100 Songs of 2020 and Bandcamp's Best of Contemporary Classical 2020. His Time Loops album (Cantaloupe 2012) was chosen for NPR's Top 10 Classical Albums of 2012. His work, Revelation (Cantaloupe 2007), achieved international recognition and inclusion in the Best Classical Recordings of 2007 selections of The New York Times and Boston Globe and was called "… the most brilliant and original extended composition for solo piano since the early works of Frederic Rzewski three decades ago" by Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Tim Page. Harrison’s music has also been recorded on Innova, New Albion, New World, and Important Records. His most listened to track on Spotify has over 8 million streams.

Harrison performs on a piano tuned in Just Intonation; this means the intervals are pure and uncompromised, creating a more beautiful resonance than traditional equal-tempered pianos, and more faithfully matching the tuning of traditional raga singers. 

About Michael Harrison

Composer/pianist Michael Harrison (called "an American maverick" by Philip Glass) forges a new approach to composition through just intonation (the system of tuning based on pure harmonic proportions). His works blend classical music traditions of Europe and North India. 

Harrison creates dedicated tuning systems for many of his works. He pioneered a structural approach to composition in which the proportions of harmonic relationships organically determine other musical elements such as pitch, duration, and dynamics. He also invented the "harmonic piano," a grand piano that plays 24 notes per octave, documented in the Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments. Harrison seeks expressions of universality via the physics of sound – music that brings one into a state of concentrated listening as a meditative and even mind-altering experience.

Michael Harrison’s music has been performed at BAM Next Wave Festival, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Park Avenue Armory, the Louvre, Centre Pompidou, MASS MoCA, Big Ears Festival, Spoleto Festival USA, the United Nations, Klavier Festival Ruhr, and the Sundance Film Festival. His recent engagements include the Minimal Music Festival at the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam, the Italian Virtual Pavilion of the Venice Biennale 2021, the Mattatoio Museum in Rome, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Harrison collaborates with performers including Alarm Will Sound, Cello Octet Amsterdam, Maya Beiser, Clarice Jensen, Del Sol String Quartet, and Contemporaneous, who have commissioned his works using just intonation. He has collaborated with visual and media artists, choreographers, and filmmaker Bill Morrison.

While still an undergraduate student, Harrison met composer La Monte Young. Soon Young brought him to New York as his protégé to study composition, performance, and Indian classical music. Harrison was the exclusive tuner for Young's custom Bösendorfer concert grand and became the only person other than the composer to perform Young's 6-hour The Well-Tuned Piano.

Living in Young's Tribeca loft during this formative decade, Harrison was immersed in the world of minimal music and art. Terry Riley became a close friend and mentor within a broader circle that included John Cage, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Marian Zazeela, and the Dia Art Foundation's founders (the patrons of Harrison's work with Young). Most importantly, he became a disciple of Young and Riley's music guru, Pandit Pran Nath, traveling to India with Pran Nath and Riley for extensive study and practice periods.

Harrison’s residencies include MacDowell, Yaddo, Camargo, McColl Center, Ucross, Djerassi, Millay, Bogliasco, La Napoule, Marble House Project, I-Park, MASS MoCA, and the Visiting Artists program of the American Academy in Rome. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, NYFA Fellowship, Aaron Copland Recording Grant, Classical Recording Foundation Award, IBLA Foundation Prize, American Composers Forum residency and performance in the Havana Contemporary Music Festival, and a New Music USA Grant. Harrison received his Masters in Composition, studying with Reiko Fueting, at Manhattan School of Music.