Lou Harrison

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).
Lou Harrison
Enlarge
Lou Harrison

Lou Silver Harrison (May 14, 1917 – February 2, 2003) was an American composer. He was a student of Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg, and K.R.T. Wasitodiningrat (Pak Cokro).

Harrison is particularly noted for incorporating elements of the music of non-Western cultures into his work, with a number of pieces featuring traditional Indonesian gamelan instruments, and several more featuring versions of them made out of tin cans and other materials. The majority of his works are written in just intonation rather than the more widespread equal temperament. Harrison is one of the most prominent composers to have worked with microtones.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Harrison was born in Portland, Oregon, but moved with his family to a number of locations around the San Francisco Bay area as a child. The diverse music which he was to exposed to there, including Cantonese opera, Native American music, Mexican music, and jazz as well as classical music, was to have a major influence on him. He also heard recordings of Indonesian music early in life.

Harrison took Henry Cowell's "Music of the Peoples of the World" course, and also studied counterpoint and composition with him. He later went to the University of California at Los Angeles to work at the dance department as a dancer and accompanist. While there, he took lessons from Arnold Schoenberg which led to an interest in Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. The pieces he was writing at this time, however, were largely percussive works using unconventional materials, such as car brake drums, as musical instruments. These pieces were similar to those being written by John Cage around the same time, and the two sometimes worked together.

In 1943, Harrison moved to New York City where he worked as a music critic for the Herald Tribune. While there he met Charles Ives, became his friend, and did a good deal in bringing Ives to the attention of the musical world, which had largely ignored him up to that point. With the assistance of his mentor Cowell, Harrison prepared and conducted the premiere of Ives's Symphony No. 3, and in return received help from Ives financially. When Ives won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for that piece, he gave half of the money to Harrison. Harrison also edited a large number of Ives's works, receiving compensation often in excess of what he billed (Miller and Lieberman 1998).

As well as Ives, Harrison supported and promoted the music of other unconventional American composers, including Edgard Varèse and Carl Ruggles. Later during his time in New York, Harrison taught at Black Mountain College. In 1947, he suffered a nervous breakdown, and moved back to California.

Following in the path of Canadian composer Colin McPhee, who had done extensive research in Indonesian music in the 1930s and wrote a number of compositions incorporating Balinese and Javanese elements, Harrison's style began to change, showing the influence of gamelan music more clearly if only in timbre: "It was the sound itself that attracted me. In New York, when I changed gears out of twelve tonalism, I explored this timbre. The gamelan movements in my Suite for Violin, Piano, and Small Orchestra [1951] are aural imitations of the generalized sounds of gamelan" (ibid, p.160). Virgil Thomson (with whom Harrison also studied) gave him a copy of Harry Partch's book on musical tuning, Genesis of a Music, which prompted Harrison to start writing music in just intonation. He did not abandon equal temperament altogether, but often expressed a desire to do so. In an oft-quoted comment referring to the frequency ratios used in just intonation, he said, "I'd long thought that I would love a time when musicians were numerate as well as literate. I'd love to be a conductor and say, 'Now, cellos, you gave me 10:9 there, please give me a 9:8 instead,' I'd love to get that!"

Although much influenced by Asian music, Harrison did not visit the continent until a 1961 trip to Japan and Korea and a 1962 trip to Taiwan (ibid, p.141). When he returned, he began to set about establishing gamelan orchestras in the United States, and constructed gamelan-type instruments tuned to just pentatonic scales from unusual materials such as tin cans and aluminium furniture tubing. He was helped in the construction of these by his partner, William Colvig. He did not abandon traditional classical instruments, however, placing them alongside his constructed instruments on a number of occasions. In addition, he played and composed for the Chinese guzheng zither, and presented (with Colvig and Richard Dee) over 300 concerts of traditional Chinese music in the 1970s.[1]

Like many other 20th-century composers, Harrison found it hard to support himself with his music, and took a number of other jobs to earn a living, including record salesman, florist, animal nurse, and forestry firefighter.

Harrison was outspoken about his political views, such as his pacifism, and the fact that he was gay. He was also politically active and informed, including knowledge of gay history. He wrote many pieces with political texts or titles, writing, for instance, Homage to Pacifica for the opening of the Berkley Headquarters of the Pacifica Foundation, and accepting commissions from the Portland Gay Men's Chorus (1988 and 1985) and by the Seattle Men's Chorus to arrange (1987) his Strict Songs, originally for eight baritones, for "a chorus of 120 male singing enthusiasts. Some of them good; some not so good. But the number is so fabulous" (ibid, p.98). Lawrence Mass (ibid, p.190) describes:

With Lou Harrison...being gay is something affirmative. He's proud to be a gay composer and interested in talking about what that might mean. He doesn't feel threatened that this means he won't be thought of as an American composer who is also great and timeless and universal.

Janice Giteck (ibid, p.194) describes Harrison as:

unabashedly androgynous in his way of approaching creativity. He has a vital connection to the feminine as well as to the masculine. The female part is apparent in the sense of beingness. But at the same time, Lou is very male, too, ferociously active and assertive, rhythmic, pulsing, and aggressive.

Harrison lived for many years with Colvig in Aptos, California. He and Colvig purchased land in Joshua Tree, California, where they designed and built a straw bale house. He died in Lafayette, Indiana, from a heart attack while on his way to a festival of his music at Ohio State University.

[edit] Harrison's music

Many of Harrison's early works are for percussion instruments, often made out of what would usually be regarded as junk such as garbage cans and steel brake pans. He also wrote a number of pieces using Schoenberg's twelve tone technique, including the opera Rapunzel and his Symphony No. 1 (1952). Several works feature the tack piano, a kind of prepared piano with small nails inserted into the hammers to give the instrument a more percussive sound.

Harrison's mature musical style is based on "melodicles", short motifs which are turned backwards and upsidedown to create a musical mode the piece is based on. His music is typically spartan in texture but lyrical, and harmony usually simple or sometimes lacking altogether, with the focus instead being on rhythm and melody. Ned Rorem describes, "Lou Harrison's compositions demonstrate a variety of means and techniques. In general he is a melodist. Rhythm has a significant place in his work, too. Harmony is unimportant, although tonality is. He is one of the first American composers to successfully create a workable marriage between Eastern and Western forms."

Another component of Harrison's aesthetic is what Harry Partch would call corporeality, an emphasis on the physical and the sensual including live, human, performance and improvisation, timbre, rhythm, and the sense of space in his melodic lines, whether solo or in counterpoint, and most notably in his frequent dance collaborations.

Among Harrison's better known works are the Organ Concerto with Percussion (1973), which was given at the Proms in London in 1997; the Double Concerto (1981-82) for violin, cello, and Javanese gamelan; the Piano Concerto (1983–85) for piano tuned in Kirnberger #2 (a form of well temperament) and orchestra, which was written for Keith Jarrett; and a number of symphonies. He also wrote a large number of works in non-traditional forms. Harrison was fluent in several languages including American Sign Language, Mandarin and Esperanto, and several of his pieces have Esperanto titles and texts, most notably La Koro Sutro (1973) .

[edit] Notable students

[edit] Sources

  • Miller, Leta E. and Lieberman, Frederic (1998). Lou Harrison: Composing a World. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-511022-6.

[edit] External links

[edit] Archives

[edit] Obituaries and remembrances

[edit] Other links

[edit] Listening

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../l/o/u/Lou_Harrison_b796.html"