Home | Archive | In memoriam

Lou Harrison 1917–2003

Long before the record industry’s aggressive promotion of ‘world music’, Lou Harrison was already celebrating the richness and diversity of non-Western musics through his own idiosyncratic creations for eastern and western forces. He was extraordinarily prolific: he wrote over 300 works in all the main classical genres – symphonies, concertos, suites, songs, choruses, opera, ballet, and theatre and film scores – in addition to a diversity of pieces for non-western instruments and gamelan. And his influence and example were an inspiration to many musicians and artists impatient with the obiter dicta of the western classical tradition.

Harrison was by no means the first American musician to seek creative nourishment across the Pacific, and the experimental aesthetic he upheld has itself become something of a tradition. These experimental leanings can be traced back to his high school years in north California, when in addition to developing skills on piano and violin he essayed some tentative compositional efforts employing quarter-tones. During his three semesters at the San Francisco State Conservatory he acquired a proficiency in horn, clarinet, and harpsichord, immersed himself in
the new discipline of early music, and composed a number of works for early instruments, including six cembalo sonatas.

But it was a meeting with Henry Cowell, whose course ‘Music of the peoples of the world’ he had attended, which decisively set the co-ordinates of Harrison’s future development. Not only did Cowell alert him both to the possibilities of Asian musical traditions and such advanced western techniques as the tone-cluster,
but it led to a close involvement with the music of Ives, as yet uncatalogued, underperformed and hardly published. Harrison went on to prepare an edition of the Third Symphony, conducting the first performance in 1947, and helped bring the Fourth Symphony towards its legendary, posthumous premiere. At the same time he acquired a grounding in western composition from Schoenberg, then resident in Los Angeles. Another formative influence from this period was John Cage.

Like Cage, Harrison gravitated to New York, where, thanks to the patronage of Virgil Thomson, he made a living as a music critic on the New York Herald Tribune and wrote music in a radical, though non-dogmatic, twelve-note style. New York proved less amenable to his health, however, and he succumbed to a stress-induced ulcer and nervous breakdown. But the nine months’ stay spent in a private clinic, organised by Cage and paid-for by Ives, and an absorption in the ideas of Harry Partch, whose Genesis of music had recently been published, provoked Harrison into a complete reassessment of his life and values.

The result was a simplification of compositional style, a hands-on involvement in the creation of new instruments and tunings and a surge of creativity. He left New York, and composed his first opera, Rapunzel, which he described as ‘in part self-analysis’, holding ‘implicit in it some of the problems, tortures, and false rapture that I was myself experiencing in analysis and psychotherapy’. A concert performance was given in Rome, with Leontyne Price in the title role, and the third act won a prize, conferred by Stravinsky, at the 1954 ISCM.

The twelve-note Rapunzel was something of a farewell to his former life, which henceforth saw his musical radicalism complemented by a similar commitment to radical social causes. His next major work, Seven pastorales, consolidated his commitment to non-standard tunings, and this was soon followed up by another exploration of just intonation, the Navajo-inspired Strict songs, which he wrote in the rural Californian town of Aptos, his home for the rest of his life.

In 1961 a visit to the Far East, where he became bewitched by Korean court and Chinese classical music and studied instruments such as the p’iri and the zheng, provided the catalyst for number of significant ‘fusion’ works, notably Nova odo (1961–68), Pacifika rondo (1963), and Music for violin and various instruments (1967).

A few years later, in 1967, Harrison met his companion of thirty-three years, William Colvig, an electrician and amateur musician, and four years later they built their first, American, gamelan from steel tubing, tin cans and dustbins. Three major works from the 1970s make memorable use of the new resource: the gay puppet opera Young Caeser [sic] (1971), La Koro Sutro (1972), which showed off Harrison’s fluency in Esperanto, and the Suite for Violin and American Gamelan (1974).

Latterly he returned to composing for Western musical forces, applying the musical techniques of Asian music, such as repetitions, drones, and an emphasis on melody, to western forms and genres. The Piano Concerto, for example, marries eastern music to medieval dance forms and 19th-century concerto gestures. His Organ Concerto of 1973 pits the ‘king of instruments’ against a battery of gamelan-inspired percussion.

Harrison was a popular campus lecturer and on the day of his death was en route to a festival of his music at Ohio State University. His views on music are set down in Music primer: various items about music to 1970 (1971), and a selection of his poetry, Joys and perplexities, was published in 1992. His life and work have been the subject of many articles, several doctoral theses and, most extensively, a major biography, Lou Harrison: composing a world, published by Oxford University Press in 1998.

Lou Harrison: born 14 May 1917, Portland, Oregon; died 2 February 2003, Lafayette, Indiana.