Lou Harrison

1. Prelude

 1 Prelude in a world divided between splitters and clumpers, Lou Harrison placed himself squarely among the latter. Harrison spent most of his creative life bringing things together: diverse art forms, contrasting musical styles, and instruments or compositional processes from different cultures. His Fourth Symphony (1990), for instance, includes a medieval dance from Western Europe along with Native American Coyote stories chanted in Gregorian style over an accompaniment imitating the Indonesian gamelan (an orchestra composed primarily of percussion, which we describe in chapter 4). He wrote a concerto for p'i-p'a (Chinese lute) with string orchestra, featured Western solo instruments with the gamelan, and composed a violin and percussion work in an Indonesian mode following the form of a Vivaldi concerto. Harrison often juxtaposed disparate resources: his Varied Trio for violin, piano, and percussion (1987), for instance, includes a Javanese-style opening movement, an Indianinspired movement for tuned rice bowls, a solo violin elegy, a French baroquestyle rondeau, and a polka during which the percussionist bangs on five baking pans sounding random pitches. Music’s inclusivity—its potential to unite cultures, disciplines, and individuals —formed one of the overriding principles of Harrison’s life. Cross-fertilization arose from his collaboration with modern dancers, beginning in the 1930s l o u h a r r i s o n | Prelude  and continuing through the 1990s. Furthermore, many of his early percussion ensemble works were social as well as musical adventures: Harrison and friends built instruments; found sound-makers in junkyards, hardware stores, and import stores; and performed the pieces themselves in San Francisco area concerts. He considered “the so-called avant-garde as a research and development section of a bigger enterprise, which is the whole world of music.”1 Harrison made disciplinary inclusivity a principle throughout his career: in addition to his primary role as composer, he was a published author and poet, as well as a painter; he danced in public performances; and he designed sets for theatrical works. In 2001 he completed a getaway residence in the Mojave Desert, which he designed after the style of Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy (ca. 1900– 89). In keeping with his devotion to ecological responsibility, Harrison built the house from straw bales, which have a high insulation value, rendering heat and air-conditioning unnecessary. Equally important for Harrison was music’s inherent beauty, hence his longterm love for gamelan. When he first heard this music on records in the late 1930s and saw a Balinese gamelan performance on Treasure Island in 1939, he thought the ensemble’s sound was the most beautiful he had ever heard. His initial response was to imitate its textures and timbres on Western instruments in works such as the Suite for Violin, Piano, and Small Orchestra (1951) and the Little Gamelon [sic] for Katherine Litz (1952) (CD, tracks 7 and 8). Later he began to investigate gamelan modes (Strict Songs, 1955; Concerto in Slendro, 1961). In the mid-1970s, renowned composer and teacher K. R. T. Wasitodiningrat (Pak Lou Harrison’s straw bale house in Joshua Tree, California. (Photo by Janet Johnston. Used by permission.)  Cokro) suggested that Harrison write new works for Indonesian instruments. In the dozens of gamelan pieces that followed, Harrison focused on constructing coherent and beautiful melodies. Such devotion to melodic beauty consistently marks Harrison’s music. His dissonant contrapuntal works from the 1940s and early 1950s prompted comments from critics about their surprising (and compelling) lyricism, and even his percussion pieces feature tuneful motives. “Melody is the audience’s take-home pay,” he’d quip—an affirmation that subjected him to marginalization by some mainstream composers and critics who dismissed him as simply a tunesmith. In the late twentieth century, though, the post-modern aesthetic began to catch up with Harrison. Recent forays into user-friendly melodic music by younger composers such as David Del Tredici, Terry Riley, and Michael Torke revisit paths Harrison trod fifty years earlier. Harrison felt that American and European (or what he called “Northwest Asian”) composers had for centuries downplayed melodic and rhythmic potentials to worship instead at the altar of harmony. In his last years he envisioned writing a book on melody, summarizing his explorations over the past half century . “I am, after all, basically a melode,” Harrison confessed.2 Some of his most attractive pieces—from duos to full orchestra—feature melody as their dominant focus. A stunning example is the...