Curious and Evocative Quarter-tone keyboard music played by Joshuua Pierce, reviewed by PATRIC STANDFORD American Festival of Microtonal Music    P-200207

Joshua Pierce has a notable interest in quarter-tone keyboard music, and clearly there has been undoubted enthusiasm for work in this medium by a wide range of composers, several included on this innovative disc. Once the ear is attuned, the music becomes fascinating and, when seriously composed, it is well worth the exploration. Alan Hovhaness (who told me he often dreamed his music and sometimes had to rewrite when he had the dream again!) produced as his opus 276 (his total at his death in 2000 was over 500) three beautiful little pieces called O Lord, Bless Thy Mountains played on this disc, as all the duet pieces, by Pierce and Dorothy Jonas.

A group of pieces by Swiss composer Roland Moser include breathtaking snapshots, and Stepan Konicek, a composer from Czechoslovakia, has compiled three fine pieces -- Praeludium, Blues und Toccata -- from which this is the hectic Toccata.

There are also duets by Charles Ives (Three Quarter-tone Pieces of 1921) and a solo piece by John Cage, Daughters of the Lonesome Isle written for prepared piano as a dance piece in 1945.

Pierce is joined by composer Johnny Reinhard on bassoon for his own arrangement of Meditation on deux themes, written in 1917 by Ivan Wyschnegradsky, and by cellist Jodi Beder for Maurice Ohana's Syrtes, a piece commissioned in 1970 by Rostropovich.

A curious and evocative piece by Robert Bonotto for viola, cello, piano and bells takes as its starting point an apparent appreciation by Sibelius for the cuckoo he heard in woodlands around his home -- Sibelius and the Cuckoo of Jarvenpââ -- an intriguing five minutes.

Record Box is Music & Vision's regular series of shorter CD reviews