Lou Harrison

American classical and film-score composer and pianist

• Born: May 14, 1917
• Birthplace: Portland, Oregon
• Died: February 2, 2003
• Place of death: Lafayette, Indiana

Harrison created large- and small-scale musical compositions in a variety of modernist classical idioms and with elements of Asian musical practices. He was an early advocate of the study and the use of the Indonesian gamelan.

The Life

Lou Silver Harrison was born on May 14, 1917, in Portland, Oregon. His father, Clarence, was the son of an immigrant, Thomas Nëjsa, who had adopted the name Harrison because his Norwegian name was so often mispronounced. A second son, Arthur, was born to Clarence and his wife, Callie, in 1920.

In 1911, when Callie received an inheritance from the estate of a Midwestern relative, she had a handsome apartment building constructed in Portland. The family lived comfortably, and Callie was able to acquire Asian art and furnishings for her home as well as pay for music lessons for her older son. In 1926 the family moved to Woodland, California, and then to a succession of other cities and towns in the region, settling finally in Burlingame, where Harrison completed high school in 1934.

His early musical experiences included instrument-building and lessons in piano, violin, and voice. Harrison’s first compositions date from as early as his tenth year, and he was given private lessons in composition during high school. While attending San Francisco State College for three semesters in 1935 and 1936, he continued to study and to perform instrumental and vocal music, and he had pivotal exposure to aspects of modern music, including the works of the American composer Henry Cowell, who became a lifelong friend and teacher.

In 1942 Harrison moved to Los Angeles, where he taught a form of dance notation at the University of California, and he had an opportunity to study for six months with the legendary composer Arnold Schoenberg. The following year Harrison moved to New York City to further his musical career. However, the ten years he spent there brought creative and professional growth as well as personal distress. Obliged to take on part-time work to meet his living expenses and deeply unsettled by the noise of the city, he suffered a nervous breakdown that led to his hospitalization for a period of months.

Realizing that he needed to live in a rural environment, Harrison ended his East Coast sojourn in 1953 to move back to California, settling permanently in Aptos, a small community in the hills above Santa Cruz. In 1961 Harrison made his first trip to Japan; this was soon followed by periods of study in other Asian countries that deepened his relationship to Oriental musical traditions.

In 1967 Harrison met William Colvig, an electrician and amateur musician with whom he collaborated on acoustical and musical matters over the next three decades. Colvig and Harrison were life companions until Colvig’s death in March, 2000. Harrison died suddenly of heart failure at age eighty-five while en route to a music festival in his honor at the University of Ohio.

The Music

Harrison’s musical career began in young adulthood in San Francisco during the mid-1930’s, when he participated in vocal and in instrumental performances while studying composition and world music. Before his twentieth birthday, he had found work as a composer and an accompanist for dance groups, and in 1937 and 1938 he taught at Mills College in Oakland, California. Many of his early works were composed for the theater, and he achieved early critical notice for his percussion ensemble work. Third Symphony, begun in 1937, was not completed until 1982; Harrison had a well-known penchant for reconsidering early work in the light of subsequent musical explorations, and the chronology of his creative work is unusually complex.

Musical Influences. The composer’s moves to Los Angeles and then to New York were undertaken to enlarge his musical horizons. His education had from the beginning been unconventional. An early, intense involvement with the music of Charles Ives and a thorough engagement with the twelve-tone practices of Schoenberg placed Harrison solidly on the side of advanced modernism in the mid- and late 1940’s. In 1946 Harrison conducted the premiere of Ives’s Symphony No. 3 to critical acclaim, thus demonstrating both versatile musicianship and critical acumen, as he had been instrumental in preparing the work’s score for performance.

Music Reviews. A notable aspect of Harrison’s New York years is his work as a music reviewer. He was hired by the composer and critic Virgil Thomson to cover a range of musical events for the New York Herald Tribune, sometimes attending several performances in a single weekend. Thomson helped shape Harrison’s understanding of how to address a broad audience in his critical and his analytical writing, and Harrison remained a confident, eloquent writer on music and other cultural matters throughout his career.

Mass to Saint Anthony. In these years, Harrison’s compositions included a number of ballets and works for small instrumental ensembles. Work continued on a Mass to Saint Anthony that he had begun in 1939 in response to the beginning of World War II. Completed in 1952, it is a harbinger of subsequent works in which Harrison gives outspoken expression to political and social views. A Political Primer, for solo voice with chorus and orchestra, was begun in the early 1950’s, but it remained unfinished.

Rapunzel. Harrison’s opera Rapunzel, based on a retelling of the German fairy tale by the English writer William Morris, dates from 1952. An air from this work won a prize in Rome in 1954, when it was sung by Leontyne Price. Despite such artistic successes, the composer’s financial situation required that he sometimes take on everyday employment to make ends meet. Newly resettled in California in a small house that his parents had purchased for him, Harrison worked in an animal hospital and as a firefighter. He never regretted these circumstances, later stating that composing and performing music were pleasures that he was happy to pay for by such means.

Gamelan Music. In 1960 Harrison received a grant to study in Japan, China, and Korea. His decisive turn in the following years toward Asian musical culture accorded with his long-standing interests and with the Pacific Rim orientation of his West Coast milieu. Harrison had heard gamelan recordings as early as 1935, and he was captivated by live performances of Balinese gamelan at an international exposition in San Francisco in 1939. The gamelan, a kind of percussion orchestra, offered the composer both beauty of sound and complexity of rhythm, and its status as a popular social institution in Indonesia reinforced his belief in the connection between musical performance and everyday life.

Musical Acoustics. Related to Harrison’s involvement in Asian music was his growing attention to musical acoustics, in particular to the concepts of tuning and intonation. In 1949 he read Genesis of a Music, by fellow California composer Harry Partch. Partch advanced the idea of dividing the musical octave into forty-three steps. Beginning in the 1920’s, Partch had forged a musical language using novel, homemade instruments to perform in this unorthodox intonation. In sympathy with Partch’s notion that European-based musical language was tonally exhausted, Harrison advocated the use of tuning systems of varied historical and geographical origins. He especially promoted just intonation, a tuning that ensures that instruments produce pure, harmonic tones rather than intervals adjusted to the system of equal temperament that has for centuries been the mainstay of Western instrumental music.

La Koro Sutro. From the 1960’s, Harrison produced dozens of compositions employing his alternative tuning ideas. Over the years Harrison and Colvig built several gamelans that successfully adapted basic Indonesian concepts to contemporary materials; these are heard in numerous recordings of Harrison’s compositions. Among these, of particular note is La Koro Sutro; the text of this majestic composition is the Buddhist “Heart Sutra” translated into the modern, invented language called Esperanto. In some cases only gamelan influences, rather than the instruments themselves, are heard in Harrison’s compositions: an acclaimed and popular Piano Concerto, composed in 1985 for the pianist-composer Keith Jarrett, blends elements of nonstandard instrument tuning and large-scale orchestral idiom with the spirit of the gamelan ensemble.

Musical Legacy

Harrison’s motto, “Cherish, conserve, consider, create,” illuminates the scope of his contribution to music as well as his impact on the social and cultural climate of his times. His embrace of elements of Asian music was a facet of Harrison’s respectful attention to cultural traditions outside his own, and he is recognized as a pioneer in the fusion of Western music with what is known as world music. Though he was not the earliest American advocate of the gamelan, he was perhaps its most articulate and creatively persuasive modern one.

For Harrison, the commitment to “conserve” and “consider” applied equally to Western as to world traditions, and it caused him to resist the musical partisanship that characterized aspects of the twentieth century classical music scene, notwithstanding his early mastery of the twelve-tone idiom descending from Schoenberg. If his music was inherently eclectic in its sources and inspiration, it was never conceived to occupy an aesthetic middle ground, and his compositions are noted for sonorities and structures that are highly personal. Much of Harrison’s work embraces a simplification and purification of musical materials that have directly influenced late twentieth century minimalism.

Harrison was as concerned with the totality of his musical life and its ethical consequences as he was with the production of a definitive body of compositions. Nonetheless, these number in the hundreds. The relatively limited number of his works that are regularly performed is balanced by a widespread appreciation for the range of his creative work and the lifetime of study that underlay it.

Principal Works

ballets:Green Mansions, 1939 (scenario and choreography by C. Beals); In Praise of Johnny Appleseed, 1942 (for flute and percussion; scenario and choreography by Beals); Solstice, 1949 (scenario and choreography by Jean Erdman).

chamber works:The Winter’s Tale, 1937; Electra, 1938 (for chamber orchestra; incidental music for Euripides’ play); The Beautiful People, 1941 (for trumpet and piano); Alleluia, 1945; Western Dance (The Open Road), 1947; The Perilous Chapel, 1948; Seven Pastorales, 1952 (for flute, oboe, bassoon, harp, and strings); The Only Jealousy of Emer, 1957 (for piano, flute, cello, bass, and percussion); Elegy to the Memory of Calvin Simmons, 1982 (for oboe, vibraphone, harp, and strings); New Moon, 1986 (for flute, clarinet, brass, strings, and percussion); Ariadne, 1987 (for flute and percussion).

choral works:Political Primer, 1951 (for solo voice, chorus, and orchestra); Mass to Saint Anthony, 1952 (for chorus, trumpet, harp, and strings); Four Strict Songs, 1955 (for chorus and orchestra); Nak Yang chun, 1961 (Spring in Nak Yang; for chorus and chamber orchestra); Easter Cantata, 1966 (for chorus and chamber orchestra); Haiku, 1968 (for chorus, Chinese flute, harp, and percussion); Peace Piece One, 1968 (for chorus and chamber orchestra); Orpheus, 1969 (for chorus and percussion); La Koro Sutro, 1972 (for chorus, organ, harp, and gamelan); Scenes from Cavafy, 1980 (for chorus, harp, and gamelan); Faust, 1985 (for solo voices, chorus, orchestra, harp, and gamelan); Three Songs, 1985 (for chorus, piano, and strings); Homage to Pacifica, 1991 (for chorus, bassoon, harp, percussion, and gamelan); White Ashes, 1992 (for chorus and keyboard).

film scores:Nuptiae, 1968 (for two voices, chorus, and kulintang); Beyond the Far Blue Mountains, 1982 (for gamelan); Devotions, 1983 (for gamelan).

operas (music): Rapunzel, 1952 (for voice and chamber orchestra; libretto by William Morris); Young Caeser, 1971 (libretto by Robert Gordon).

orchestral works:Suite for Symphonic Strings, 1936; Suite No. 1, 1947 (for strings); Suite No. 2, 1948 (for strings); The Marriage at the Eiffel Tower, 1949 (for orchestral suite; incidental music for Jean Cocteau’s play Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel); Suite for Cello and Harp, 1949; Nocturne, 1951; Praises for Hummingbirds and Hawks, 1951 (for small orchestra); Suite for Violin, Piano, and Small Orchestra, 1951; Symphony on G, 1952; At the Tomb of Charles Ives, 1963 (for trombone, psalteries, dulcimers, harps, tam-tam, and strings); Suite for Violinand American Gamelan, 1973; Elegiac Symphony, 1975; Praise for the Beauty of Hummingbirds, 1975 (for two violins, flute, and percussion); Bubaran Robert, 1976 (for gamelan); Third Symphony, 1982; Fourth Symphony, 1990; Suite for Four Haisho with Percussion, 1993; New First Suite, 1995 (for strings); A Parade for M.T.T., 1995; Suite for Cello and Piano, 1995.

piano works:The Trojan Women, 1939 (incidental music for Euripides’ play); Gigue and Musette, 1941 (for solo piano); Suite for Piano, 1943; Cinna, 1957 (incidental music for Pierre Corneille’s play); Piano Concerto, 1985; Tandy’s Tango, 1992 (for solo piano).

vocal works:Sanctus, 1940 (for voice and piano); King David’s Lament, 1941 (for voice and piano); May Rain, 1941 (for voice, piano, and percussion); Pied Beauty, 1941 (for voice, trombone or cello, flute, and percussion); Fragment from Calamus, 1946 (for voices and piano); Alma Redemptoris Mater, 1951 (for voice, violin, trombone, and piano); Peace Piece Three, 1953 (for voice, harp, and strings); Holly and Ivy, 1962 (for voice, harp, and strings); Joyous Procession and Solemn Procession, 1962 (for two voices, brass, and percussion; Peace Piece Two, 1968 (for voice and chamber orchestra); Io and Prometheus, 1973 (for voices and piano); Ketawang Wellington, 1983 (for voice and gamelan); The Foreman’s Song Tune (Coyote Stories), 1987 (for voice and gamelan); A Soedjatmoko Set, 1989 (for voices and gamelan).

Bibliography

Garland, Peter, ed. A Lou Harrison Reader. Santa Fe, N.Mex.: Soundings Press, 1987. A volume issued in celebration of Harrison’s seventieth birthday, this book includes essays, photographs, drawings, poems, correspondence, examples of Harrison’s excellent calligraphic writing, and other memorabilia.

Kostelanetz, Richard, with Lou Harrison. “A Conversation, in Eleven-Minus-One-Parts, with Lou Harrison about Music/Theater.” The Musical Quarterly 76, no. 3 (Autumn, 1992): 383-409. This vivid, informal interview of Harrison by a noted poet and critic provides an indispensable view of Harrison both as a composer and as a personality. The transcription contains a few minor and inconsequential errors.

Miller, Leta E., and Fredric Lieberman. Lou Harrison. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. The first in a series of short, readable books in the American Composers series, this volume recapitulates the material in the authors’ 1998 book, adding some important biographical details while consolidating much technical material for the general reader. It does not supersede the earlier study and is better integrated. A compact disc of musical examples is included.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Lou Harrison: Composing a World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Published five years before the composer’s death, this book documents and celebrates Harrison’s life while selectively exploring the range and quality of his work. Based in part on Harrison’s conversations with the authors over a period of years, it presents a well-written, integrated view of Harrison’s personal and professional experiences. A compact disc with selections of representative works by Harrison is included.

Perlman, Marc. “American Gamelan in the Garden of Eden: Intonation in a Cross-Cultural Encounter.” The Musical Quarterly 78, no. 3 (Autumn, 1994): 510-555. This wide-ranging scholarly article provides a cross-cultural and historical background to Harrison’s investigation and use of intonation and the gamelan, with substantial attention to his predecessors and contemporaries.

Von Gunden, Heidi. The Music of Lou Harrison. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1995. The author is a musicologist with an interest in just intonation, and she pursues technical matters to a degree that will satisfy a specialist reader. Like Miller and Lieberman, she demonstrates a keen grasp of the broader cultural and issues at work in Harrison’s complex body of work. While this study is parallel to Miller and Lieberman’s slightly later work, its scholarly emphasis makes it equally valuable.