Albert Alan Owen's Keyboards and Strings (1979) -- Masterpiece alert

This remarkable Welsh artist is probably mostly known for his 1980s library albums, of which there are quite a few, to me, mostly generic to the point of inexcusable.  I'll add a couple at the bottom.  On the other hand, as a young man (aged 29) full of promise and obviously full of university musical education, he created this light magical chamber music masterpiece, in 1979, mostly acoustic piano with melodies on violin very emotionally played by Katherine Sweeney, but with the addition of some electronic keyboards.  It's very similar to the advanced, classical modern compositions of Francis Monkman or the Krark composition by Tony Hymas.  It's almost as good as the earlier masterpiece by the latter I posted long ago called Aspects of Paragon.

Side a is called Mysteries and for once the blurb on the back is right on the money with the comment: "this work is a concept of startling originality."  Its first part:





Side b, called On Muted Strings, opening with a clear evocation of Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit, is in memory of his father who is described as "distinguished Latvian composer, Albert Jerums."  Note that on discogs his name is spelled slightly differently.

As usual it's important to read the blurb on the back with all the bio info.  Of note is the following passage:

Albert Alan Owen's music has now reached a point where, while still tonal, it is free from many of the formal limitations imposed by the tonic-dominant axis. He believes that tonality, thus freed, provides the means of writing music that is at once modern, with new forms, harmonic relationships and rhythmic structures, but is still expressive and spontaneous.  In this, and other respects, A A O's music presents an important and interesting approach to the problems facing the present day musical scene.  He is a new breed of composer whose language is not the exclusive product of a tired European tradition, but rather represents a successful amalgam of many cultural traditions.

It's such a good description of what we're looking for here on this blog.  Freed tonality is indeed one of the keys to progressive composition.  It would've been hard to believe back then that rather than pointing to a way forward for both European traditional classical and popular music, the glorious era of inventive and creative progressive music that began in the fifties in jazz and sixties in rock was soon to end completely with a disgusted, disgustingly dumb populace for whom 'prog' and 'fusion' would become dirty words, nostalgic for the pure simplicity of the most basic tonal music along the lines of I-IV-V, simpler even than Mozart, who always put key modulations into his pieces no matter how short.  And tell me how much more stupid has music become now 40 years later?

Those who listen carefully to the entirety of the first side, Mysteries, will notice how accurate that description is of changing tonalities. Notice there is a wikipedia page for him with surprisingly detailed information.