Harrison, Lou (Silver)

(b Portland, OR, 14 May 1917). American composer. He is recognized particularly for his percussion music, experiments with just intonation and syntheses of Asian and Western styles. His works have employed Chinese, Korean and Indonesian instruments as well as Western instruments and those of his own construction. Harrison's style is marked by a notable melodicism: even his percussion and 12-note compositions have a decidedly lyrical flavour.

Harrison spent his formative years in northern California, where his family settled in 1926. Before graduating from Burlingame High School, in December 1934, he had studied the piano and violin, sung as a treble soloist, and composed keyboard and chamber works, including several quarter-tone pieces. In 1935 he entered San Francisco State College (now University), and in his three semesters there studied the horn and clarinet, took up the harpsichord and recorder in an early music consort, sang in several vocal ensembles and composed a number of works for early instruments, including a set of six cembalo sonatas.

In spring 1935 Harrison enrolled in Cowell's course entitled ‘Music of the Peoples of the World’ at the University of California extension in San Francisco. He soon began private composition lessons with Cowell, with whom he developed an enduring friendship. In 1936, at Cowell's suggestion, Harrison wrote to Ives requesting music for performance and, after an exchange of correspondence, received a crate of photostat scores including the songs, most of the chamber music and some orchestral works. During the next ten years he studied these compositions avidly, editing several for performance and/or publication. Through Cowell he also developed a fascination with Amerindian and early Californian culture, reflected in works throughout his career, among them the Mass to St Anthony whose vocal lines suggest indigenous melodic types that had been incorporated into 18th-century Californian mission services. The work's opening motif – a ‘cry of anguish’ occasioned by Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939 – is also one of Harrison's earliest political compositions.

While in San Francisco, Harrison collaborated with several West Coast choreographers: Bonnie Bird, Carol Beals, Tina Flade, Marian van Tuyl and Lester Horton. In 1937 he was engaged by Mills College as a dance accompanist; he also taught courses in a composition for the dance at its summer sessions. Cage sought him out in 1938 on the recommendation of Cowell, and it was through Harrison that Cage was hired by Bird at the Cornish School in Seattle. At the Mills College summer sessions in 1939 and 1940, and in San Francisco in 1941, Harrison and Cage staged high-profile percussion concerts, which Harrison continued in 1942 after Cage had moved to Chicago. For a 1941 performance they jointly composed Double Music for four percussionists, each independently writing two of the parts. Here and in works wholly his own, notably Canticles nos.1 and 3, Song of Queztalcoatl and the Suite for percussion, the traditional battery is expanded to encompass ‘found’ instruments, such as brakedrums, flowerpots and metal pipes, as well as instruments from other cultures, such as the clay ocarina and the teponaztli, a wooden slit-drum from Mexico traditionally made from a hollow log.

In August 1942 Harrison moved to Los Angeles, where he was engaged by UCLA to teach Labanotation as well as musical form and history for dancers. He enrolled in Schoenberg's weekly composition seminar, which, he later noted, taught him the ‘importance of simplicity and method’ to complement the ‘licence for freedom’ he had learnt from Ives. The most notable work from his Los Angeles period is the Suite for piano, composed for Frances Mullen Yates.

The following year he moved to New York, where he became one of Virgil Thomson's ‘stringers’ at the New York Herald Tribune (1944–7). He also wrote for Modern Music, Listen and View (including studies on Ives, Varèse and Schoenberg) and published an extended essay ‘About Carl Ruggles’. On 5 April 1946 he conducted the première of Ives's Third Symphony, which he had edited from the original manuscript. For this work Ives received the Pulitzer Prize of 1947 which he insisted on splitting with Harrison. In spite of these successes, however, Harrison adjusted poorly to the stress and noise of New York, first developing an ulcer and then in 1947 suffering a nervous breakdown for which he was hospitalized for nine months. He used the experience as a catalyst for change in his compositional style, eschewing the dense dissonant counterpoint of his early New York years. The period immediately after his hospitalization was one of his most productive, with the composition of The Perilous Chapel and Solstice (for the dancer and choreographer Jean Erdman), two suites for string orchestra, the Suite for cello and harp, and the Suite for violin, piano and small orchestra. Summer residencies at Reed College, Oregon, in 1949 and 1950 led to the stage pieces Marriage at the Eiffel Tower and The Only Jealousy of Emer.

In 1951 Harrison accepted a position at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, which he held for two years. There he completed several earlier works and wrote a host of new ones, including the chamber opera Rapunzel, a 12-note work with a melodic language that is at once rugged and lyrical. The opera's third act won a 20th-Century Masterpiece Award at the 1954 International Conference of Contemporary Music. Meanwhile the publication of Partch's Genesis of a Music in 1949 had stimulated Harrison's exploration of just intonation. These studies bore fruit in his Seven Pastorales (1949–51) and in Strict Songs (1955), which was composed for the Louisville Orchestra shortly after he had returned to California and settled in the rural town of Aptos. Strict Songs makes use of Harrison's own texts, inspired by Navajo ritual songs, and calls for the retuning of the fixed-pitch instruments in the orchestra to create intervals with vibration ratios in superparticular proportions (4:3, 8:7, etc.). He has not only called for similar retunings in many later compositions but has also developed a system he calls free style, in which individual pitches are determined purely by their proportional relationship to preceding and following pitches without adhering to a fixed tonal centre. His Simfony in Free Style (1955), a four-minute composition including viols with movable or independently placed frets and specially constructed flutes, has never been performed live with the correct instrumentation, but it has been recorded in a digital realization by David Doty. After Harrison returned to California in 1953, he for the most part abandoned 12-note serialism, which he used thereafter primarily for anti-war statements, often in the context of equal temperament, to symbolize the mechanization of Western industrial society.

During these early years in Aptos, Harrison composed two violin concertos with percussion and completed a Suite for Symphonic Strings. He also began to develop closer ties with Asia, which he visited for the first time in 1961 as a delegate to the East-West Music Encounter in Tokyo. In 1961 and 1962 Harrison spent several months in Korea and Taiwan studying, among other instruments, the double-reed Korean p'iri and the Chinese psaltery, zheng. A number of subsequent works, such as Nova Odo (1961–8), Pacifika Rondo (1963) and Music for Violin and Various Instruments (1967) call for ensembles of mixed Western and Asian instruments. A Phebe Ketchem Thorne award in 1966 allowed him also to spend six months in Mexico, where he wrote his Music Primer and composed a new finale for his Symphony on G.

In 1967 Harrison met William Colvig, an electrician and amateur musician, who became his partner, as well as a dedicated collaborator on instrument building and tuning experiments. In 1971 they constructed an ‘American gamelan’: a set of metallophones tuned to a pure D major scale and built from materials easy to procure (e.g. steel conduit tubing, aluminium slabs, and stacked tin cans as resonators). To these instruments they added galvanized garbage cans and cut-off oxygen tanks struck with baseball bats, thus integrating Indonesian sounds, junk materials, the percussion ensemble and just intonation (see Gamelan, §II, 2). Harrison composed three works for this novel ensemble: the puppet opera Young Caesar (1971, rewritten as a standard opera with Western instrumentation in 1988), La Koro Sutro (1972, a setting of the Buddhist Heart Sutra in Esperanto, a language in which Harrison is fluent); and the Suite for Violin and American Gamelan (1974). Harrison and Colvig later built two additional gamelans for San Jose State University and Mills College, both modelled on traditional Javanese instruments but tuned in just intonation. After studies with the renowned performer and teacher K.R.T. Wasitodiningrat in 1975, Harrison began to compose for traditional gamelan ensembles. He has since written over three dozen gamelan works, at times combining the ensemble with Western solo instruments.

At the same time Harrison has increasingly returned to composing for Western instruments, his later works including three more symphonies, concertos, and a host of chamber compositions (e.g. the String Quartet Set, the Varied Trio and the Piano Trio). He has explored cross-cultural applications of compositional techniques, such as utilizing traditional gamelan embellishment styles in works for Western instruments (e.g. Fourth Symphony and Piano Trio), and he enjoys setting for himself compositional strictures such as permitting the use of only a limited number of melodic intervals (a process he calls ‘interval control’) or constructing thematic material from a restricted set of melodic or rhythmic cells.

From his earliest years in San Francisco, Harrison has articulated political views of multiculturalism, ecological responsibility and pacifism in both writings and musical compositions. Many of his early works have political overtones (Waterfront – 1934, Conquest, France 1917 – Spain 1937), as do Pacifika Rondo, Nova Odo, the three Peace Pieces and Homage to Pacifica. Harrison has also been politically active in the gay rights movement: his opera Young Caesar deals with homosexuality and cross-cultural partnership by describing an affair between Caesar (representing the West) and Nicomedes, King of Bithynia (the East).

In addition to his musical compositions and prose writings, Harrison is a published poet, and a painter whose works have been exhibited frequently. He is renowned for his calligraphic script and has designed several computer fonts. He has taught courses in composition and world music at San Jose State University, Stanford University, Cabrillo College, the University of Southern California and Mills College.

WORKS

WRITINGS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LETA E. MILLER (work-list with CHARLES HANSON)

Harrison, Lou

WORKS

(selective list)

for fuller list including juvenilia and lost works see Miller and Lieberman (1998)

dramatic

orchestral

vocal

western instrumental ensemble

percussion ensemble

gamelan

other works with non-western instruments

keyboard

Harrison, Lou

WRITINGS

About Carl Ruggles (Yonkers, NY, 1946); repr. in The Score, no.12 (1955), 15–26, and in Garland (1987), 39–45

‘Refreshing the Auditory Perception’, Music East and West: Tokyo 1961, 141–3

‘Creative Ideas in Classical Korean Music’, Korea Journal, ii/11 (1962), 34–6

Korean Music (MS, c1962, US-LAuc)

‘Some Notes on the Music of Mouth-Organs’, Umakhak ronch’ong: Yi Hye-Gu paksa song’su kinyom [Essays in ethnomusicology: a birthday offering for Lee Hye-Ku] (Seoul, 1969)

Music Primer: Various Items about Music to 1970 (New York, 1971, 2/1993)

‘Thoughts about “Slippery Slendro”’, Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology, vi (1985), 111–17

‘Cloverleaf: a Little Narrative with Several “Off-Ramps”’, 1/1: the Quarterly Journal of the Just Intonation Network, v/2 (1989), 1–2, 14–15; repr. in Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought, i, ed. J. Paynter and others (London, 1992), 248–55

Joys and Perplexities: Selected Poems of Lou Harrison (Winston-Salem, NC, 1992)

‘Lou Harrison’s Political Primer’, Frog Peak Anthology, ed. C. Scholz and L. Wendt (Hanover, NH, 1992), 77–83

Articles in ACA Bulletin, Dance Observer, Ear, Impulse, Listen: the Guide to Good Music, Modern Music, View and Xenharmonikon

For fuller list of writings see Miller and Lieberman (1998).

Harrison, Lou

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P.Yates: ‘Lou Harrison’, Arts and Architecture, lxi/2 (1944), 26, 37

P.Yates: ‘A Trip up the Coast’, Arts and Architecture, lxxiv/12 (1957), 4ff

P.Yates: ‘A Collage of American Composers’, Arts and Architecture, lxxv/12 (1958) and lxxvi/2 (1959) [complete issues]

P.Yates: ‘Lou Harrison’, American Composers' Alliance Bulletin, ix/2 (1960), 2–7

V.M. Rathbun: Lou Harrison and his Music (thesis, San Jose State U., 1976)

W. Leyland: ‘Lou Harrison’, Gay Sunshine Interviews [San Francisco], no.1 (1978)

L.V. Celso: A Study and Catalogue of Lou Harrison’s Utilization of Keyboard Instruments in his Solo and Ensemble Works (thesis, San Jose State U., 1979)

P.G. Gardner: ‘La Koro Sutro’ by Lou Harrison: Historical Perspective, Analysis and Performance Considerations (DMA diss., U. of Texas, Austin, 1981)

V. McDermott: ‘Gamelans and New Music’, MQ, lxxii (1986), 16–27

P. Garland, ed.: A Lou Harrison Reader (Santa Fe, NM, 1987)

D. Keislar: ‘Six American Composers on Nonstandard Tunings’, PNM, xxix/1 (1991), 176–211

D.L. Brunner: ‘Cultural Diversity in the Choral Music of Lou Harrison’, Choral Journal, xxxii/10 (1992), 17–28

H. Von Gunden: The Music of Lou Harrison (Metuchen, NJ, 1995)

D. Nicholls, ed.: The Whole World of Music: a Henry Cowell Symposium (Amsterdam, 1997)

L.E. Miller and F. Lieberman: Lou Harrison: Composing a World (New York and London, 1998)

L.E. Miller and F. Lieberman: ‘Lou Harrison and the American Gamelan’, American Music, xvii/2 (1999), 145–77

L.E. Miller: ‘The Art of Noise: John Cage, Lou Harrison and the West Coast Percussion Ensemble’, Perspectives on American Music, 1900–1950, ed. M. Saffle (New York, 2000), 215–63