Drums, drums, and more drums. That's what we get in these two pieces by master percussionist Fritz Hauser. (Well, the longer of the two pieces, Die Trommell, is all solo percussion, and the shorter one is for cymbals and drums.) To be honest, most solo percussion recordings are a bit of a snooze no matter who the drummer is. They accent filling time and space with all manner of rolls and trills and chromatic progression of the different voicings these instruments have. Hauser is different. Hauser is interested in using the almost innumerable elements in his percussion arsenal to illuminate the role that silence plays in creating percussion's prominence in music. In his 42-minute Die Trommell, single notes are played, evenly spaced over long periods of time to accent the silences; when more notes and rhythms are engaged they are admitted into the mix slowly as if passing thrugh the door of silence for admission into the rhythmic episode. Brushes and hands are used as often as sticks or mallets. When silence is employed as its own rhythm and drums are what punctuate it, Hauser has done his job; he has created a painting not unlike DeKooning's earlier sketches or Rothko's later deep hued browns and blues. On Die Welle, scored for ten players on cymbals, tympanis, and bells, the crashing intensities expected never develop. The effect is one of sheeting the sound in layers of cymbals, rows of muted tympanis, and tam tams, coloring the musical canvas with a dynamic of subtlety. Certainly there is thunder and lightning, but it occurs so gradually it feels as if the timbre of the instruments has merely created an aberration in the vibrational elements of Hauser's sound world. It is ten minutes in length and serves the purpose of creating and diffusing a tension that appears to have been created somewhere just south of the heavens as they communicate and clash with each other. Summarily, Hauser remains the most creative and innovative composer for percussion on the scene. His control over his environment appears to be total and his ability to express the essentialist melodic and chromatic nature of percussion is unparalleled. ~ Thom Jurek, Rovi

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