Doug Leedy: The Leaves Be Green (1975)

Leedy: The Leaves Be Green

for solo harpsichord, played by Margret Gries on an instrument made by Owen Daly. Brett Campbell of The Eugene Weekly recently wrote

Oregon teems with artists of national significance who should be better known than they are but are content to maintain a low-key existence here in paradise. One is Douglas Leedy, the Portland-born composer who was right there at the inception of minimalism with his University of California classmates LaMonte Young and Terry Riley in the early 1960s. Like Riley, he also studied Indian music and went onto found the electronic music studio at UCLA and make some of the earliest major synthesizer recordings. Following the example of fellow Portland native Lou Harrison, Leedy made important contributions to the study of musical tuning and was a pioneer in the early music revival, founding one of the West’s finest ensembles, the Portland Baroque Orchestra, still going stronger than ever a quarter century on. In recent decades, he’s studied the music and culture of classical Greece, crafting compositions and tuning systems that attempt to recreate its lost arts. As composer, scholar and performer, then, Leedy has been a pioneer in the 20th century’s most salubrious musical developments — minimalism, the return of beautiful natural tunings (instead of the compromised 12-tone equal temperament that, alas, still dominates most Western music), world music, electronic music and early music. Yet this trail blazing West Coast musical figure lives quietly in Western Oregon, lacking (as far as I know) even that imprimatur of modern artistic existence, a web page or MySpace.

from Renewable Music (Daniel Wolf)

“Here’s another reminder that the roots of the music that is widely called “minimal” are broader than the received history. Before the term minimalism came into play, terms like “static” or “repetitive” were more commonly in use, and especially among a loose cadre of west coast musicians, including students at Berkeley and in San Francisco (in particular, those who studied with Robert Erickson, William Denney, and Darius Milhaud). Douglas Leedy was a classmate of Riley and Young at UC Berkeley, but did not have their background in Jazz. A hornist, singer, and keyboard player, his interests turned more towards early western music and, later, to South Indian classical music. An accomplished classicist, he has also made a deep exploration of ancient Greek and Latin literature and the music much of it once carried. Leedy’s The Leaves Be Green (1975) is a particularly rich example of this other minimal tradition, connecting to the virtuoso early English keyboard music, as well as through extended pedal points, repetition, and subtle microrhythmic variations to South Indian music and to the music of his contemporaries. The pure major thirds of meantone tuning are also an essential feature of this music.”

A PDF file of the entire score is available here. (Largish file)

Jan 06, 2010 | Categories: Desert Island Tracks, Latest Tracks | Tags: harpsichord, meantone, minimalist | Leave A Comment »