04/23/2026
I’m saddened to hear the news of Michael Harrison's passing.
Michael was a contemporary composer and his work usually centered on the Harmonic Piano -- a just-tuned version of the traditional piano. He won a Guggenheim in 2018.
I knew Michael from when we were both at the University of Oregon. And even though our extracurriculars were seemingly in opposition -- I was playing in punk bands and Michael was exploring the meditative sides of Indian music -- we both knew we had some kind of "outsiders" connection. At least in relation to the music school as a whole.
We connected again after we both moved to NYC. I was now musically involved with Robert Fripp and Michael with La Monte Young. Michael had been studying with La Monte and also, I believe, Pandit Pran Nath. We all owe a lot to Pran Nath, as he brought a bucketload of musicality from Indian to many here in the west. Particularly in the world of melody-ing. For my 2 cents, we can personally thank him for giving John Hassell the breadth that he ended up exploring.
Michael was responsible for tuning La Monte Young's Just-Tuned Piano. Which was a chore and a half to say the least. He invited me down to the Dia Foundation, in NYC, to hear Young's epic work "The Well-Tuned Piano." This was an extremely rare experience to hear this live. And I have attended different three performances, thanks to Michael!
Some would say that one performance is more than enough, as the piece can last between 4 and 6 hours! Some parts are amazing and others are downright ugly. But, I like a challenge and I ate it up.
Michael gave me some insights about the tuning process which he incorporated into his own work, with the Harmonic Piano, later on. I don't think I would be revealing any trade secrets at this point. Though at the time he preferred to keep things under the hood.
Basically, it took about a month to get the piano in tune. That's right, a month. Most pianos get tuned in an afternoon.
But this was special piano and a special tuning. La Monte used an Imperial Bosendorfer which had 8 full octaves and 9 extra low keys. The piano had to be moved in the Dia Foundation where it stayed for the tuning process and a series of concerts. By the way, there were no seats in the room. Just a lush white carpet with pillows, so you could sit or lay down during performances.
Michael spend that whole month tuning and retuning this beast to La Monte's specialized tuning system. There were several secrets inside the piano. First off, La Monte used the middle pedal of the piano to “lock down” certain notes that would sustain, while others would ring short like normal. This was done with a skinny board, the length of the keyboard, that had key-sized notches cut out of it. La Monte and Michael would gently lower this down onto the keyboard and only specific keys would silently get depressed. Then La Monte would lock the middle pedal down. He could now arpeggiate up and down the piano and specific tones would ring out while others quickly faded. They had different cuts of wood for different sections of the piece, so the drones would change throughout the performance.
And further on from that, the piano actually had two entirely different tunings on it. Let me see if I can explain. For most of the notes on the piano there are 3 strings. If you look inside a grand piano you will see this. Now, there is another pedal on the left. The soft pedal. This pedal moves all the hammers just off to the side so only two of the three strings are struck, thus making the sound softer. It shifts the entire hammering mechanism over to do this. What La Monte did with his piano is he took out the middle of the three strings leaving the two outside strings for each key. Then he shaved down the felt of the hammer so that it was more narrow than standard. This was adjusted so that when the piano was played with no pedals down the hammer was only hitting one of the strings. Then when he put down the soft pedal (and locked it) all the hammers moved over and were now playing the other group of strings. Michael could now tune one whole group strings to one tuning and the other to another tuning.
The tuning itself was also very involved. I couldn’t follow it at the time, but Michael was on top of it. They were lots of super complicated ratios between the notes. The result was genuinely other worldly.
I lost touch with Michael for many years after leaving NYC myself. But he quickly became a force of his own, making many concerts with his own Harmonic Piano and his own tuning system. He produced a wide range of recordings for both solo piano and in collaboration with others. One of my favorites was with Roomful of Teeth called “Just Constellations” and performed in the Tank at the Center for Sonic Arts in Rangely, Colorado.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XX4BQTDtZ8
Michael was a gentle spirit and he will be missed.
But no doubt exploring ratios elsewhere.
