Lou Harrison (review)

Lou Harrison is the second book by Leta E. Miller and Fredric Lieberman detailing the life and work of this West Coast experimental composer and independent, the first being Lou Harrison: Composing a World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, hereafter Composing a World). After Harrison's death in 2003 and that of his partner William Colvig before him, Miller and Lieberman expanded and updated Composing a World as Composing a World: Lou Harrison, Musical Wayfarer in 2004 in paperback (hereafter Musical Wayfarer) for the University of Illinois's series Music in American Life. Lou Harrison (hereafter Harrison) is the launch book of another Illinois press series, American Composers. I will compare Harrison to Composing a World in order to establish any similarities and differences between them and to determine whether there is a need for two books from a single perspective (albeit from two authors) to appear in such a short space of time. I did not have access to Musical Wayfarer, so that all comparisons will be between the out-of-print hardcover edition and the 2006 publication.

In 1999, David Nicholls wrote in a review of Composing a World (Notes 56, no. 1 [September 1999]: 155–57) that Harrison, as an individualist, should be examined idiosyncratically. Miller and Lieberman are colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz and former colleagues of Harrison. They have the advantage of physical proximity to their subject and familiarity with both Harrison and the special arts culture of the Northern Californian coast. Miller is a musicologist who, as a flute player, has recorded Harrison's music. Lieberman is an ethnomusicologist whose work ranges from Asian music to copyright law. Both authors have studied Harrison since 1993. Composing a World (thus also Musical Wayfarer) and the present volume, Lou Harrison, benefit from the use of oral history to enhance the understanding of Harrison's life and work, as well as thorough archival work and analysis.

Nicholls was pleased that "Composing a World seemingly manages the impossible in striking a perfect balance between convention and alterity, seriousness and humor, scholarship and celebration, erudition and readability, macrocosm and microcosm" (p. 156). Miller and Lieberman begin Lou Harrison with a paraphrase of a statement that Harrison made to Miller in 2001: "On the question of clumpers vs. splitters, I definitely place myself among the former" (quoted in Miller, "Method and Madness in Lou Harrison's Rapunzel," Journal of Musicology 19, no. 1 [Winter 2002]: 123). This division, more commonly used in linguistics (where Harrison may have found it) and biology, refers to the tendency either to relate seemingly unrelated languages or species in a meaningful way (so "clumping" them), or to divide seemingly related languages or species ("splitting" them). Harrison's application of this distinction to his music describes his assimilation of various musical, literary, artistic, linguistic and other styles and methods, both establishment and independent.

The rather rough-hewn sound of the "clumping/splitting" distinction also smacks of independent American invention, especially as it existed in the Western United States in the twentieth century. Harrison epitomized that independence in an area three thousand miles from New York, the acknowledged center of American musical culture. Like the Los Angelino John Cage, Harrison, born in Portland, Oregon and raised in Northern California, moved to New York, where, like Cage, he found some acceptance of his work and much indifference. New York composition, especially in the 1940s, looked east to Europe; the city itself was fast moving and uncomfortable. Unlike Cage, Harrison could not cope with New York life and suffered a nervous breakdown in 1947. Miller and Lieberman maintain that Harrison's breakdown was caused by his inability to thrive in New York. In fact, many West Coast composers suffered severe culture shock in the city; their musical output was often viewed by New York composers as unsophisticated or even lazy. Virgil Thomson was one of the few New Yorkers to support and champion West...