I'm sorry to hear this. Oddly, he's one of the only composers I ever wrote to, but that was to enquire about where I could get a copy of a particular piece (a setting of a poem by Robert Duncan, who I was quite enthusiastic about at the time). He responded, telling me who to write to, and I ended up with a copy on cassette (which a college DJ later absconded with).
In high school "Three Pieces for Gamelan" was my favorite music by Harrison. I somehow developed an association between their slow bittersweet sound and the light of late afternoon, when the radio show that played these pieces would come on.
I think my current favorite may be the piece "The Perilous Chapel."
Sad to say it, but maybe his death will inspire a more systematic release of his music. I suspect that the recorded representation of his work doesn't really do justice to what he's written over the years.
― Rockist Scientist, Monday, 3 February 2003 14:16 (twenty-three years ago)
Lou Harrison, 85, Dies; Music Tied Cultures
By JOHN ROCKWELL
Lou Harrison, a distinguished composer in all genres of classical music, founder of the American gamelan movement and a leading exemplar of the marriage of Asian and Western music, died on Sunday evening at a Denny's restaurant in Lafayette, Ind. He was 85 and lived in Aptos, Calif.
The apparent cause was a heart attack, although there will be no autopsy and he will be cremated in Indiana, said Eva Soltes, an arts producer long associated with Mr. Harrison who had been videotaping him for two decades. Mr. Harrison was en route to a festival of his music at Ohio State University. He was accompanied by his companion and only survivor, Todd Burlingame, and two Ohio State music students.
Mr. Harrison's primary contribution to Western music, aside from the sheer beauty of his works, was his wide-ranging, deeply felt connection to the musics of non-Western cultures, Asian especially. He studied in Taiwan and South Korea and was deeply immersed in Javanese music.
He built several gamelans, or Indonesian percussion orchestras, spawning a movement that spread through North America (there are some 200 ensembles built in direct emulation of Mr. Harrison's). They play both traditional pieces and newly composed music.
His own music ranged with a giddy indifference to musical polemics, from Serialism to folkish tonality in the manner of Aaron Copland to Ivesian collage to percussion, along with the many pieces for non-Western instruments. He prized just intonation, meaning pure intervals uncompromised by the Western tempered scale. He sought universal peace and brotherhood, writing or titling several of his works in Esperanto. Above all, he reveled in melodic sensuality and timbral extravagance, born from the pitch-purity of his tunings and the enormous variety of instruments and combinations that he employed.
In his instrument-building he was abetted by William Colvig, a craftsman who died in 2000 after 33 years as Harrison's companion. Colvig also helped design a house of straw bales in Joshua Tree, in the California Mojave Desert, which Mr. Harrison used as a studio in recent years and offered as a retreat to other artists.
Personally, Mr. Harrison was warm and embracing, beloved by his many friends. Of a generation of homosexuals who often sought to mask their preferences, Mr. Harrison was an outspoken gay, marching annually and happily in the San Francisco gay pride parade.
One of his last projects was the expansion, commissioned by the Lincoln Center Festival, of his 1971 puppet opera with chamber ensemble of Asian instruments called "Young Caeser" (his spelling) into a full-scale opera. He called "Young Caeser" "the only opera with an overtly presented gay subject from history," in the composer Ned Rorem's words in the Grove Dictionary of Opera.
Lou Harrison was born on May 14, 1917, in Portland, Ore. He studied in San Francisco with Henry Cowell (an important predecessor in the championing of Asian music) and Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles, where he organized concerts of percussion music with John Cage. On the side he worked as a florist, record clerk, poet, dancer, dance critic, music copyist and playwright.
Moving to New York in 1943, he fell into the circle of the composer and critic Virgil Thomson, although the influence of Thomson's music was less marked than Thomson's personage and patronage. Mr. Harrison wrote music criticism (including a stint in Thomson's collection of composer-critics at The New York Herald Tribune), and prepared and conducted the first performance of a complete symphony by Charles Ives, the Third, in 1947.
But the atmosphere of New York and his life there proved stressful, and eventually the lure of the West Coast and its position on the Pacific Rim reclaimed him. He settled in Aptos, south of Santa Cruz.
For a while he survived on the occasional grant and odd job, including a three-year period working by day in an animal hospital and composing by night. Gradually, however, teaching jobs came his way — various visiting professorships and more extended positions at San Jose State University and, after 1980, Mills College in Oakland.
His extensive oeuvre includes everything from ballets to operas to symphonies to concertos to instrumental suites to innumerable pieces for gamelan. A particularly charming and characteristic work is "Pacifika Rondo" from 1963, a suite featuring different Asian instruments. The title is Esperanto.
In his later years Mr. Harrison continued composing. In 1995 he composed "Parade for MTT," the first work conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas as music director of the San Francisco Symphony. Mr. Thomas has been an active champion of Mr. Harrison's music.
Mr. Harrison also enjoyed a productive relationship with the choreographer Mark Morris, who used several of his works for dances and commissioned "Rhymes With Silver," a 1996 piece for chamber ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma as cellist.
Just last year Mr. Harrison completed a new work called "Nek Chand," for specially constructed just-intoned Hawaiian slack guitar. Next month a book called "Poems and Pieces" will appear in a limited edition, interleavening some of Mr. Harrison's poems, gamelan scores and drawings. Many of the drawings, Ms. Soltes said, are of Colvig.
― Rockist Scientist, Tuesday, 4 February 2003 23:20 (twenty-three years ago)
nine months pass...
one year passes...