Musicians - Lou Harrison

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	Musicians - 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 other 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, making Harrison one of the most prominent composers to have worked with microtones.

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 him to the attention of the musical world, as he had largely been ignored up to that point. He prepared and conducted the premiere of Ives' 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' pieces, 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.

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 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. One of his most often quoted comments on this is "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!", referring to the frequency ratios used in just intonation.

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.

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