Dvorak's Prophecy: Film 6

No non-Western musical idiom has so impacted on the Western concert tradition as Indonesian gamelan, beginning with the Javanese Pavilion at the 1889 Paris Exposition: an epiphany. Sampling gamelan-inspired works by Debussy, Ravel, and McPhee, our film arrives at a paragon exemplar of cultural fusion- Lou Harrison- and a pair of concertos, for violin and piano, unsurpassed by those of any other American. The composer/scholar Bill Alves demonstrates the layered complexity of Javanese gamelan, and how it translates into keyboard textures composed by Harrison for Keith Jarrett. For Harrison's Concerto for Violin and Percussion, we tour the 'junk percussion'- including flower pots and washtubs - that Harrison made sing and dance. Our participants include the gamelan scholars Jody Diamond and Sumarsam, and the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, who has long championed Harrison on both sides of the Atlantic. (Joseph Horowitz)