Lou Harrison’s Music for Western Instruments and Gamelan: Even More Western than It Sounds

“. . . West and East, both in Harrison’s idiosyncratic style, meet in a ravishingly beautiful, unselfconscious and unforced way”

—Neil Sorrell (1992)

“Through his gamelan works Harrison completed his long-sought goal of uniting East and West”

—Leta E. Miller and Fredric Lieberman (1998, 173)

“So far I’m the first one, they keep saying, who has made—what is it?—a useful marriage between East and West”

—Lou Harrison to Richard Kostelanetz (1992, 398)

Critics and musicologists widely acknowledge composer Lou Harrison (1917–2003) as a pioneer in forging successful fusions between Eastern and Western music. Toward the end of his career, he focused much of his attention on composing music for gamelan, and among the most highly regarded of these fusion works are pieces that combine solo Western instruments and gamelan.¹

Nobody—least of all Harrison himself—would characterize these fusion works as “authentic,” and Harrison’s own goals in composing for gamelan were not to reproduce or even imitate traditional gamelan music. Yet Harrison relied extensively on traditional Javanese instrumental idioms, and on the competence of his musicians to fill in the details of their individual parts according to Javanese musical processes; the result was a musical surface with an exotic patina that many listeners perceived to represent authentic Javanese music. That Harrison seemed to put the Javanese elements of his music on the same footing as the Western elements led to assessments that the fusions were genuinely equitable blendings of East and West.²

Jonathan Bernard attributes the appeal of Harrison’s music to mainstream Western audiences to its ability to be “exotic and familiar at the same time” (Bernard 1998, 544). Much of what is familiar is rooted in Harrison’s compositional process, and the contexts in which his music are performed, which, as Dwight Thomas argues, are “strongly grounded in the Western art music tradition” (Thomas 1983, 100). What many hear as exotic—as Eastern—resides in the pieces’ soundscapes: the unfamiliar instrumental timbres, tunings, and compositional forms and techniques that Harrison deploys in his work.

But do these exotic sounds really come from somewhere else? Much attention has been paid, for example, to Harrison’s predilection for rational tuning systems (e.g., just intonations). In a brilliant analysis, Marc Perlman demonstrates how Harrison’s superposition of just intonation onto gamelan tunings is a clear continuation of a Western discourse about tuning that has little, if anything, to do with Javanese musical aesthetics; Perlman demonstrates that Javanese gamelan tuners apply their own approaches to temperament to accommodate various Javanese vocal modes and individual musicians’ personal interpretations (embat) of them (Perlman 1994). Harrison’s reputation as a gamelan pioneer, however, has led some critics to take at face value the utterly false implication that traditional gamelan music is justly intoned.³ Tuning, then, is one musical arena in which Harrison’s gamelan music makes the exotic seem familiar by masking non-Western approaches to music-making with existing Western discourses—a practice which has the potential to mislead its listeners into believing they are engaging with a non-Western musical aesthetic when, in fact, they are not.

In this article, I focus on another such musical arena: Harrison’s treatment of gamelan rhythm. First I describe some fundamental differences between Western rhythmic sensibilities and the treatment of time in gamelan music. Next, I discuss how Harrison treats this rhythmic sensibility in two of his pieces for solo Western instruments and gamelan to favor the Western rhythmic sensibility. Finally, I examine the significance of this Westernization of gamelan musical processes such as tuning and rhythm; I contend that it misleads many listeners to attribute a quality of authenticity to Harrison’s gamelan music that overstates the equity of the works’ fusion of West and East. Simply put: even the parts that Western audiences hear as authentic gamelan music are more Western than they sound.

End-Weighted Rhythmic Groupings

Many well-read Western musicians have learned that the complex layers of polyphony in gamelan music arise from the simultaneous playing of many elaborations on a slow...