Lou Harrison’s Oregon Trails

first the quaLity
             Of
           yoUr music
            tHen
       its quAntity
       and vaRiety
     make it Resemble
          a rIver in delta 
           liStening to it
       we becOme
         oceaN
—John Cage: “Many Happy Returns” for Lou Harrison

Even though he spent most of his career in California, Lou Harrison forged a lifelong relationship with his native Oregon. Born in Portland in 1917, he lived here until the family moved to California when he was 10.

This weekend — appropriately during Pride Week, as he was early on one of America’s out-est and proudest gay composers and worked for equal rights — Portland State University celebrates Harrison’s centennial in two concerts, a musical salon and academic symposium. The following tales of the composer's long relationship with Portland come from our book, Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick:

***

“Buster” Harrison, ready to steal
the show in a 1920 Portland
production of Daddy-Long-Legs.

Whenever Lou Harrison came home, it was like stepping into another culture. From as early in childhood as he could remember, wherever he looked in his family’s apartment in Portland, Oregon’s Silver Court Apartments, young Lou saw colorful paintings from various Asian cultures mounted on walls covered by Japanese grass wallpaper. Chinese carved teak furniture perched on Persian rugs, colorful Japanese lanterns dangled from the ceiling, cloisonné objects filled the mantel, and the rooms boasted other artifacts from Asia and the Middle East. Compared to the prosaic furnishings and fixtures of the rest of the young Harrison’s post-World War I Pacific Northwest life, his home was an almost magical place.

The exotic decor sprang from the ambitions of his mother. Born in Seattle in 1890, Calline Silver grew up in the Alaskan frontier with her sister, Lounette. Despite these rough circumstances, their father saw to it that both girls had music lessons, at a time when music was an important marker of good breeding and refinement for young women. After her father died and Cal raised herself from this rustic beginning to a middle-class ideal, she became a woman of strong will and determination, qualities that her son would inherit. She married affable, fair-skinned Clarence Harrison, a first-generation American born in 1882, whose Norwegian father had, like many immigrants, changed his surname from exotic (de Nësja) to blend-in conventional: Harrison.

Like many upwardly mobile West Coasters, Cal Harrison was attracted to the allure of Asia and regarded exotic artifacts as exemplars of refined taste. Such decorations were common in Portland homes since the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial and American Pacific Exposition and Oriental Fair. Japan alone spent a million dollars on its exhibit, which featured exotic (to American eyes) arts and crafts, sparking a local infatuation with Asian art and culture. Many middle- and upper-class houses boasted “Oriental Rooms” festooned with Asian and Middle Eastern furniture and art, “Turkish corners,” and other symbols of what many Americans still regarded as the mysterious East.

That Pacific exoticism also manifested in music. When Lou was born on May 14, 1917, Hawaiian music was the most popular genre in America. Radio broadcasts of Hawaiian slide guitars and the clacks of his mother’s mah-jongg tiles supplied the soundtrack to some of his earliest memories—and inspired one of his last compositions eight decades later.

The Silver Court’s surrounding Irvington neighborhood in northeast Portland had been developed as an exclusive enclave only twenty years before Lou was born. Connected to downtown Portland’s cultural riches by trolley, the “streetcar park” originally catered to the toffs (including lumber barons). During Lou’s childhood, however, the changing neighborhood’s new Queen Anne revival, Craftsman, and Prairie School-style homes welcomed more middle-class people like the Harrisons. They had built the handsome Silver Court Apartments (which still stand at 22nd and Hancock streets) shortly after Lou’s birth, when Calline received a substantial inheritance from her family in Ohio, who owned a manufacturing business; her grandfather’s widow’s death in 1910 led to a partition of the estate, and the Harrisons used their share to build the three-story, thirty-unit apartment building. The money allowed them to hire a family to take care of the apartments, including their own.

Harrison visiting Silver Court Apartments in 1987:
(l to r) Bob Hughes, Charles Shere, Harrison, Bill Colvig

Clarence and Calline did share a love of cars—she was reputedly the first woman to drive across Portland’s Steel Bridge—and the family enjoyed then-common Sunday drives and picnics in the country. They appreciated the scenic beauty—waterfalls, the spectacular Columbia River Gorge, Mt. Hood (which dominated the eastern skyline), and nearby Mt. Tabor—and gave Harrison and his brother, Bill (born three years later), a lasting love of the outdoors. Harrison never met his grandparents and had little contact with extended family during childhood, so his parents exerted the greatest family influence on their eldest son. Their two most persistent legacies were his lifelong loves: arts and reading. Aunt Lounette played violin, often accompanied by Calline on the piano, and little “Buster” Harrison would dance.

He took the stage early. Calline worked in a Portland beauty shop, and one of her regular customers, Verna Felton, ran a small theater company that in 1920 was producing Jean Webster’s 1912 play Daddy-Long-Legs. They needed a young boy for a silent walk-on role as a little orphan, and Calline volunteered two-year-old Buster, who, encouraged by candy, improvised his lines—for the irrepressible little Lou, it turned out not to be a silent role after all—and won the audience’s heart, getting his picture in the daily Oregonian newspaper and an invitation to reprise the role on a Northwest tour and in another production in Washington. The experience gave Harrison both a taste for performance and a deep set of separation anxieties that never left him.

Harrison’s Oregon upbringing left lasting impressions on the budding young musician: an inclination toward the outdoors and nature’s beauty, an affection for high-culture art and music, and a performer’s sense of the stage and the audience. Although his family moved to California when he was nine, Portland would always be a special place for him. After beginning his music career in San Francisco, Los Angeles (briefly) and New York, Harrison returned to Portland during the summer of 1949 and 1950 to compose for and accompany dance performances of his music at Reed College. There, he met Remy Charlip, a young dancer (in the company of their mutual friend Merce Cunningham, among others) and theater designer who became his lover.

Lou Harrison visiting Portland in the 1990s, with (l to r)
Nanik Wenten, Bill Colvig, I Nyoman Wenten, Harrison,
and Vincent McDermott, director of Lewis and Clark's
Venerable Showers of Beauty gamelan

Harrison moved back to the West Coast shortly after his Reed summers, settling in Aptos on Monterey Bay in 1953. He and Colvig (also a native Oregonian, from a Medford pioneer family) returned to Oregon often in the 1980s and ‘90s, working with the Portland Gay Men’s Chorus, Venerable Showers of Beauty Gamelan (which has often performed his music), and Oregon Repertory Singers and was composer in residence at the Oregon Bach Festival’s Composers Symposium. “He loved Portland and he was particularly excited that the Gay Men’s Chorus performed his opera [Young Caesar],” his friend and documentary biographer Soltes recalled.

Much later, toward the end of one of the richest lives ever lived in American arts, the then-octogenarian Harrison came to realize that in pursuing, studying, and ultimately creating original music deeply informed by the traditional sounds of Asia, he was “trying to recapture the lost treasures of my youth.”

“I was surrounded by a household of very fine Asian art,” he said, “and as I grew up, I wanted to reproduce that. My problem and my drama has been, could I recover the lost treasures of childhood? Well, I discovered that if I couldn’t make enough money to buy them, at least I could make some.”

Throughout his eventful career, Harrison would pursue the magic first experienced amid the Asian art treasures gracing his childhood home in Portland’s Silver Court apartments. He’d find it in mysterious shops in San Francisco’s Chinatown, in Korean temples and Indonesian percussion orchestras, Medieval musical modes, ancient Greek tunings, in new instruments contrived from junkyard detritus. From these unlikely ingredients, he would fashion beguiling new sounds far removed from the conventional music of his time and place. Like his mother, he would embrace beautiful strangeness — and make it feel like home.

***

On June 16-17, Portland State University hosts CeLOUbration, which brings together Venerable Showers of Beauty gamelan ensemble, Portland Percussion Group, PSU faculty and student performers (including FearNoMusic co-founder Joel Bluestone, guitarist Bryan Johanson, pianist Susan Chan, violinist Tomas Kotik and more), and other Portland musicians (singer Hannah Penn, cellist Diane Chaplin, percussionist Florian Conzetti, pianist Adrienne Varner, and more). The two concerts feature music by Harrison from the 1930s-1990s and new music by Cascadia Composers Bonnie Miksch, Susan Alexjander, Greg Steinke, Lisa Ann Marsh, and Matthew Andrews, written in the Harrison tradition.

Friday’s concert showcases some of the pioneering percussion music Harrison and his musical partner John Cage wrote and performed in San Francisco in the late 1930s and early ’40, plus chamber music. Saturday’s show presents music for guitar, chamber music, and some of Harrison’s music for the melodic Javanese percussion orchestra called gamelan, with soloists on Western instruments like trumpet, saxophone, and voice.

Concert tickets are available online. The festival also includes a free salon and symposium, a screening of Eva Soltes’s 2014 film Lou Harrison: A World of Music, and talks and presentations about Harrison’s life and music. Copies of Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick and Venerable Showers of Beauty’s new CD containing previously unrecorded Harrison music for gamelan will be available for purchase.

©2017 Bill Alves & Brett Campbell. Book excerpt used by permission of Indiana University Press. A shorter version of this story appeared in The Oregonian/O Live. If you enjoyed reading about Harrison’s music, there’s a lot more where that came from. Our new biography of Lou Harrison is now available from Indiana University Press and elsewhere. 

Hail Caesar!

On Tuesday, June 13, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella series presents a new, “hybrid” version of Lou Harrison’s 1971 opera Young Caesar. Harrison originally created it as a puppet opera, which premiered at Cal Tech in Pasadena, but later refashioned it for more conventional, equal-tempered instruments and live performers. This version premiered in 1987, but Harrison worked on more substantial changes in response to a commission from Lincoln Center. This last version was not performed until 2007, after Harrison's death, at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The production premiering this week, created by the Los Angeles opera company The Industry, uses elements of the original and the revised versions. Here’s the story of the original production of Young Caesar, excerpted from our book: Lou Harrison:American Musical Maverick.

One day in the 1930s, while Lou Harrison was working as a dance accompanist at Mills College, he witnessed a group of young San Franciscans pull up to the college theater in their car. An older woman directed them to unload some pieces of wood from the back of their the car—and within minutes, it magically metamorphosed into an enchanting window onto a mythic world.

This was Harrison’s introduction to the Red Gate Players and their entirely portable production of Chinese shadow puppetry. The medium fascinated him even then; one of his favorite works was Manuel da Falla’s charming setting of the puppet scene from Don Quixote, El Retablo de Maese Pedro (Master Peter’s Puppet Show). Ever since, he had wanted to make his own puppet opera. His 1960s investigations of Asian music revived that notion: the ancient puppet dramas of China and Indonesia could represent far more elaborate settings and events than were practical to stage in conventional opera.

And now he’d have the chance, thanks to a commission from the Encounters new music series in Pasadena. Still, Harrison told his partner, Bill Colvig, one night, not long after one of their trips to the city to attend a gay rights function, he couldn’t find a suitable story.

“Why don’t you do a gay subject?” Colvig replied.

What a splendid idea, Harrison thought, and he searched his memory. He’d already used a story from the historian Suetonius’s chronicles of Rome about Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, Cinna, as source material for a dramatic production. Now he remembered another Suetonius story about Caesar’s dalliance with the King king of Bithynia, long before he became emperor.

As with Cinna, the ancient story suited the times. At the height of the Vietnam War, Harrison’s puppet opera would recount the tale of a young citizen of a powerful, militaristic Western kingdom, expected by society to fulfill the roles of a husband, father, and soldier. Yet first he is assigned to go and confront the king of a province of the sensual East, where he encounters beauty and love. Without abandoning his duty, Gaius (Julius Caesar) gives himself openly to these pleasures and suffers the contempt of Western society as a result.

As Harrison delved into the history, though, he realized that the story posed dramatic challenges. For audiences to understand the significance of the opera’s events, the libretto would have to explain unfamiliar history at the risk of overshadowing the characters’ conflicts and motivations. Writer Robert Gordon, approached Harrison at a San Francisco performance of a Satie puppet opera and volunteered to take on the tricky task. Gordon began by conscientiously and carefully researching the story and the period—maybe too carefully, because the first draft he sent Harrison read less like a libretto than a historical novel and was the size of the latter. At Harrison’s insistence, Gordon whittled at the text over and over, down to 14 fourteen scenes but resisted cutting any further.

 

Gaius in the Bythinian palace in the original production of Young Caesar.
The set design is by Harrison himself.

Next, Harrison had to find someone to make the puppets and puppeteers to realize a production about a gay love affair—decades before such themes were openly represented on the concert stage. Harrison enlisted an art director at San Francisco’s public television station, KQED, Bill Jones, to help create a set of over 20 twenty rod puppets, which ultimately required seven puppeteers to manipulate. Colvig helped out by building the stage and lighting, and as the increasingly elaborate project progressed, Harrison found himself painting the moving backdrops as well as composing.

Harrison’s do-it-yourself method, reminiscent of his old days in San Francisco making instruments from junk and rounding up dancers to play them, turned out to have downsides as well as advantages. Instead of simplifying the production, this puppet opera wound up entailing more work and maybe even more expense than if he had relied on a conventional opera company.

For months through 1970 and stretching into the next year, Young Caesar consumed Harrison, with the libretto proving especially knotty. To give the audience the complex background and context needed to understand the action, he proposed a narrator. After experimenting with using a male chorus to provide narration, Harrison decided to make the narrator a central solo role, patterned after the tayu storyteller of Japanese bunraku puppetry, who not only sets scenes but also describes action happening onstage. Narration also helped overcome another limitation: the puppets’ limited movement capabilities. An action as simple as Gaius picking up his infant son had to be described instead of acted, and at times the narration would crowd out the characters’ dialogue.

With so much explaining to do and an entirely prose text, Harrison decided, conventional arias, which generally use poetic texts to allow characters to express their emotional states, wouldn’t work. To get through the prose exposition as quickly as possible, Harrison relied almost entirely on recitatives (which sometimes obscure the opera’s most alluring musical moments), often modeling them on the psalmody of the Gregorian chant he had learned as a teenager. As in a chanted psalm, each line would have many rhythmically free syllables chanted on a central psalm tone or “tenor” surrounded by an introductory intonation motive and a termination motive.

Harrison added another exotic element to narration and dialogue that he remembered from the Chinese operas he had seen as a youth: punctuating the vocal melodies with percussive woodblock sounds, where percussion ostinatos bubbled under the onstage action, a technique in turn inspired by Japanese Noh drama. In Young Caesar, those ostinatos add texture and depth to the recitatives and sometimes suspense to the scenes.

But the opera still lacked what Harrison called the audience’s “take-home pay” of such a work: beautiful arias. “[W]hen I wanted to make an aria, I had to extract sentences and repeat them, take a phrase and make an aria out of that, and so on,” he remembered ruefully. “It was a very hard libretto to work with.” Even the few places where Harrison dwelled on the text long enough to grace it with snatches of lyricism—Gaius’s lullaby for his daughter, his sorrow when he learns of his betrothal, Nicomedes’s confrontation with the financiers—hardly qualify as full-fledged arias.

Without typical Harrisonian modal lyricism, it is left up to the central pitches (or “psalm tones”) of the recitatives to establish a tonic and mode and thus unify each scene. The characters firmly associated with Rome—Gaius’s aunt Julia, the tutor Gniphos, General Thermus—sing on diatonic scales, the class of modes used in classical Rome. These scales were supported by the new metallophones that Colvig had begun to build for Harrison’s Chinese ensemble using conduit tubes and aluminum bars cut to the lengths of a five-limit just-intonation diatonic scale.

The scenes depicting the despair of Gaius’s spurned fiancée Cossutia and Caesar’s escape from the dictator Sulla use the equal-tempered octatonic scale, popular with Russian modernists such as early Stravinsky but then unusual for Harrison. The scale’s alternation of half- and whole-tones half tones and whole tones creates a tense ambiguity appropriate for these painful moments without being entirely chromatic. In contrast, the characters associated with Bithynia and the East use colorful non-diatonic scales often associated with the Middle East. For these scenes, Harrison decided to build a new set of metallophones tuned to the harmonic series, and when the scene changes to Rome’s client kingdom of Bithynia in Asia Minor, they ring out the surprising sounds of harmonics seven and eleven. Gaius himself, the Roman who falls in love with the East, partakes of both types of scales.

West and East also collide in other instrumentation that Harrison collected for the production, for which he relied almost completely on the instruments in his own large collection: his Chinese zheng zither, sheng mouth organ, flutes, and various percussion; Korean piri and drums; percussion orchestra instruments including metal trash cans, cymbals, woodblocks, various bells, rattles, and rasps; European harp, violin, viola, and organ. Much of the score’s colorful character stems from these delightfully distinct and unusual timbres: the breathy sound of the syrinx (Greek pan flute) as sixteen-year-old Gaius processes to his manhood ceremony; the haunting ocarina and weird slide whistle accompanying his delirious dreams; a ram’s horn for the courtly procession; the sweet sensuality of the zheng together with an Indian ektara (plucked lute) and; elephant bells as Gaius moves in wonder through the Bithynian palace.

The set pieces played by these colorful instruments use forms similar to the miniature works Harrison had focused on during the 1960s, especially his lovely compositions for harp and for psaltery. A sensuous psaltery piece, “Palace Music,” accompanies Gaius’s wonder at the Bithynian opulence, with idiomatic slides but a very un-Chinese scale. The funeral procession (done in shadow) is set to a solemn melody on harp and violin with spare percussion ostinatos.

The episodic story that Gordon distilled from several years of Julius Caesar’s life lacks a conventional dramatic arc, juxtaposing several incidents in the first half and then showing the trip to Bithynia in the second. Caesar first appears in his manhood ceremony at age sixteen, then he hatches political schemes after the death of his father, and he reappears next with his new wife and daughter. Unfortunately, the real drama doesn’t begin until he defies the dictator Sulla and appears as a soldier preparing to charge a besieged city. Harrison’s scrolling backdrop mechanism depicted these grand settings.

Gaius is saved from this battle by orders to collect an overdue tribute of ships promised by the elegant and handsome king of Bithynia, Nicomedes. Overwhelmed by the opulent palace and the flirting king, the adolescent Gaius is treated to a lavish banquet, followed by entertainment of dancers to a “Whirling Dance” for violin, harp, and gongs in the form of an estampie, and then acrobats accompanied by a thrilling melody on the sheng. The celebrations intensify to a climactic “Eroticon” dream ballet in which Western strings and Eastern winds entwine lines in a sensuous musical intercourse.

“Here we find a young Roman noble of conservative and upper class parentage confronting, for the first time, an elaborately Asianized court by which he obviously found himself dazzled,” Harrison later described the scene—Determined to unflinchingly represent this (historically accurate) orgy, Harrison advertised the production as an “opera for X-rated puppets.” The flying phalli nevertheless so upset two of the original wealthy funders, Gordon said, that they withdrew their support.

Still, Gordon discreetly handled the ensuing love affair between Gaius and Nicomedes. Gaius’s dalliance at the court creates a scandal, but the future emperor faces up to gossipers, and in the end, by force of love instead of arms, he gets his ships, which cross the Mediterranean (to Harrison’s rousing barcarole) at the final curtain.

The audience at the California Institute of Technology, intrigued by such an unusual production, greeted the hour-long hourlong Young Caesar warmly, on the whole. After returning north, the troupe put together another performance, directed by gay poet Paul Mariah, in the auditorium at the Palace of the Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco.

The opera presented a contemporarily relevant, too-little known true tale featuring positive and historically accurate portrayals of homosexuality, peace, love, and intercultural understanding—along with some of Harrison’s most compelling dramatic music. Thanks to the homespun instruments and puppets, and occasional humor, despite Young Caesar’s ambitions, it retained an appealing intimacy lacking in such large-scale works as his symphonies.

But performances in front of audiences revealed some unforeseen weaknesses. The unexpressive puppets often made Harrison’s attempts to express love, sexuality, and other emotions clumsy or even unintentionally comical. And by devoting the first half of the opera to exposition of history, rather than the central drama (which really doesn’t ignite until Caesar meets Nicomedes, the natural starting point for a classic heart-versus-head conflict), the original Young Caesar spends too much time in chattering explanation and not nearly enough in singing and action.

Worse, “the crippling weakness of Young Caesar is its precious, self-indulgent libretto,” wrote critic John Rockwell (who decades later tried to revive the opera when he was running the Lincoln Center Festival) in the Los Angeles Times. While praising Harrison’s music and the singers, he noted that traditional Asian puppet theater works precisely because of its acceptance of its mythic assumptions, whereas Gordon’s realism produced only a “pervasive, embarrassing ennui.” In trying to make the story more approachable to contemporary audiences (by using colloquial language and realistic—for puppets, anyway—action), the production vitiated the suggestive power of its mythic theater origins.

More important than these dramatic failings, though, is the sheer audacity of Young Caesar. In the year that Richard Nixon was on his way to a landslide reelection, serial complexity was the new norm, and neither “world music” nor “gay rights” had entered the popular lexicon, Harrison had brought to a mainstream stage a homosexual puppet opera with unheard of unheard-of instruments and sensual melodies. But such an accomplishment, inconceivable by anyone but Lou Harrison, could not overcome Young Caesar’s fundamental flaws and practical difficulties. Its failure crushed Harrison, who had devoted two and a half years of his professional life—and some fine music—to a story he cherished. Like a father who refuses to give up on a problem child, Harrison continued to pursue opportunities to rehabilitate his beloved work for the rest of his life.

The Industry’s sold-out production of Young Caesar, featuring the LA Phil New Music Group, the men of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, dancers and actors, runs for one performance only, Tuesday, June 13, at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. The recording of the original version of Young Caesar, with its unusual just intonation instruments, is available at the Other Minds archive.

©2017 Bill Alves & Brett Campbell. If you enjoyed reading about Harrison’s music, there’s a lot more where that came from. Our new biography of Lou Harrison is now available from Indiana University Press and elsewhere. 

A Plucky Break

“I am plucking my way through the year!” — Lou Harrison, 1997.

On Friday, Ballet West’s National Choreographic Festival in Salt Lake City presented  a world premiere by world renowned choreographer Val Caniparoli inspired by Lou Harrison’s Concerto For Pipa and String Orchestra.

Wu Man

The 1997 piece contrasts with Harrison’s early pieces for Chinese and Korean instruments from the 1960s, where he more explicitly retained the traditional character of the instruments—the expressive pitch bends of the zheng, the slow slides of the piri, the simultaneous variations of the Confucian orchestra. In his long series of suites from the 1990s, Harrison used Asian instruments (and all instruments) more freely within whatever form he had plucked from around the world.

Harrison’s last completed work for orchestra arose from a suggestion by Harrison’s great friend and advocate, the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, that he write a concerto for Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man—reversing Harrison’s earlier process of pairing a Western solo instrument with an Asian orchestra.

“Well, I’m not going to write anything like pipa traditional repertoire, a lot of virtuoso kind of a style,” Harrison told Wu Man.⁠ Nevertheless, Harrison worked closely with Wu Man to adapt his work to the idiomatic idiosyncrasies of the instrument. “Do I do tremolo here?” she asked, describing their collaboration, “or do I do bending notes, do I do vibrato? You know, how can I make the piece more vivid, how can I put more sauce in this piece? Right now, it’'s just linguini, or the notes.”

Harrison owned a pipa, and though able to extract only the most rudimentary melodies from the instrument, he was able to understand what types of fingerings and chords would work. In the end, impressed by Wu Man’s artistry, Harrison allowed her considerable interpretive latitude for her solo part.⁠

His concerto’s first movement followed the traditional pipa music pattern, using Chinese pentatonics with occasional substitute tones. However, he structured the movement’s lyrical middle section like a Javanese lancaran eight-beat form, with the high violin and pipa melody set against a repeating bass melody in quintal counterpoint. The other movements use transpositions of a quirky six-tone mode that allowed Harrison to slip between a sense of tonality and more ambiguous sections.⁠

The second movement, another of Harrison’s “mini-suites” he used in his symphonies, where the traditional scherzo would be replaced with a series of short sub-movements. This one is called “Bits and Pieces” and comprises four sub-movements. In the first, “Troika,” the pipa assumes the role of a Russian balalaika in a woozy, drunken sleigh ride sleigh-ride dance, complete with (non-diatonic) oom-pah chords.⁠ A sort of percussion ensemble sub-movement follows, called “Three Sharing” because one each of a cellist, a bassist, and the soloist share a set of seven rhythmic patterns (Harrison called them "rhythmicles") played entirely by striking the body of the instrument or hitting the strings with the wood of the bow, turning them into percussionists as he had done as long ago as his San Francisco percussion concerts. In the middle section, Harrison arranged the rhythms as a fugue for the instruments, as he did as far back as his 1937 percussion ballet, Changing World. He dedicated the next evocative miniature to the composer Liu Tianhua, who played a central role in bringing the techniques of Western theory and orchestration to Chinese traditional instruments in the early twentieth century, in the same way that Harrison had brought Chinese techniques to the West. Harrison’s use of the pipa to evoke lute-type instruments around the world continues in the last section of the this movement, a romantic Neapolitan song with the pipa now in the role of a  tremolo-ing mandolin.

The mood darkens in the slow movement, a “Threnody” (Harrison’s alternative name for an elegy, common to many of his suites), this one dedicated to the memory of San Francisco’s best-known AIDS activist, Richard Locke, who had died the previous September.⁠ Unlike Harrison’s mostly chromatic late elegies, this modal one sounds uncharacteristically sweet and wistful, though it ends on a chord as unresolved as the AIDS epidemic. The bright pipa sound, so well suited to the jocular earlier movements, would sound intrusive here, so Harrison restrains it to a few notes, letting the grave string melody set the melancholic mood. The dramatic finale rides another Harrisonian estampie, a medieval dance that was a favorite of Harrison's, to a surprisingly aggressive climax.

In this last of his great Asian–-European fusions, Harrison again contrived a creation from seemingly incompatible forces that feels different from any other music, yet simultaneously seems not only natural but even inevitable. Before the Concerto for Pipa with String Orchestra’s 1997 premiere at Berkeley, a journalist asked Wu Man, “What style of music is this? Is it Chinese music?”
“It’s Lou Harrison music,” she replied.⁠


©2017 Bill Alves & Brett Campbell. If you enjoyed reading about Harrison’s music, there’s a lot more where that came from. Our new biography of Lou Harrison is now available from Indiana University Press and elsewhere. 

Cinna Redeemed

Linda Burman-Hall accompanies Larry Reed's shadow puppet
production of Lou Harrison's Cinna on tack piano

On May 18 in San Francisco, in celebration of Lou Harrison’s centennial, two of his good friends will realize one of his most distinctive artistic ambitions,  a work that, though never completed in his lifetime,  includes some of his most unusual but enchanting music.

In the 1950s, Lou Harrison had retreated from the maelstrom of New York City and the pressures of the professional musical mainstream to a cabin in rural Aptos, California. There he befriended proprietors of the local cafe, some neighbors, and the local cats and foxes as he devoted his evenings to musical experiments, unconcerned with their dissemination or even performability. This attitude (learned from his hero Charles Ives), though, left little room for a medium like drama, which requires collaborators, a theater—and an audience.

Harrison had first fulfilled his ambition to write an opera in 1952, when he completed Rapunzel. But he soon learned how difficult it was to get a conventional opera company to look at producing a modern opera, even one Rapunzel’s relatively modest requirements, and it remained unperformed until 1959.

Now isolated in California and distant from the professional musical world, the impoverished Harrison pondered ways he might produce and perform a musical drama with only his local friends and a tiny budget. He remembered an event during his time as a composer at Oakland’s Mills College around 1938, when a handful of people drove up with a miniature stage that fit in the back of their truck. It was the Red Gate Players, a troupe founded by Pauline Benton, a practitioner of Chinese shadow puppetry. Soon the Chinese instruments sounded and a light switched on, casting the shadows of translucent flat puppets on the screen. Harrison was transfixed that such beauty could be conjured from such modest means. Perhaps it was something he could recreate himself.

Another of his preoccupations during this period of exile was the dark oppression of America's  McCarthy era. Accordingly, Harrison chose as his countervailing story a play that highlighted themes of reconciliation and forgiveness in the face of vengeance: Pierre Corneille’s 17th-century drama Cinna.

Harrison set to work on a score he could play himself, one that somehow evoked both the period of the source material and his current musical obsessions. First, he transformed his personal upright piano for into a “tack piano” by inserting thumbtacks into the felt hammers, creating a brittle, spidery tone closer in sound to the harpsichords of Corneille’s day. Next, he retuned the piano to a distinctive just intonation scale, making his score for Cinna the first modern piano work written explicitly for a specific non-standard scale.

The title page to Harrison's Cinna score, explaining the just intonation tuning

Harrison spent much of the 1950s exploring the crystalline sonorities possible by retuning instruments to these frequencies of the acoustic harmonics present in vibrating strings, known as just intonation, resulting in his Strict Songs and Simfony in Free Style. Cinna takes a different approach than either of these early efforts, creating a kind of tonal chromaticism, interlocking the various sorts of triads available in the distinctive scale. In particular, Harrison makes use of the natural seventh harmonic, a spicy interval nowhere even approximated in standard equal temperament. Harrison married this new sound world to evocations of the French 17th-century clavecinistes or harpsichord composers, who wrote the musical equivalents of gilded Louis XV furniture, dense with graceful ornaments and sinuous lines.

Although Harrison had enthusiastically contacted a local carpenter to construct a puppet stage,and perhaps sounded out other potential collaborators, he completed only the five entr’actes or musical interludes before abandoning the project. Harrison kept the pieces as an instrumental suite, but it remains unclear how he intended to expand it to a full production.

For the hundredth anniversary of Harrison’s birth (and the 60th anniversary of the composition of Cinna), Santa Cruz harpsichordist and Harrison’s friend Linda Burman-Hall decided to resurrect the dramatic context of the score. She contacted Bay Area shadow puppeteer Larry Reed, who has had a long career creatively applying the traditions of Indonesian and other shadow puppetry to modern dramas. Reed produced a condensed version of Corneille’s drama, and he and Burman-Hall (who recorded the Cinna music on her 2009 CD) devised a series of drones and melodic fragments to accompany the dialogue of the five acts. Reed built life-size shadow puppets out of wire to project remarkable modern line drawings of the characters on the screen, whose dialogue he voiced in the manner of an Indonesian dalang or traditional puppeteer-narrator.

This extraordinary production, premiered at last weekend's New Music Works concert in Santa Cruz, will come to San Francisco’s Center for New Music on Thursday May 18. It marks one of the last major realizations of Harrison's uncompleted works.

Unusually for such an assiduous re-purposes of past compositions and even fragments, Harrison seems never to have returned to this music. Years later, however, he did return to its ultimate source, the writings of the Roman historian Suetonius that had provided the basis of Corneille's play, for his next theatrical project. That, too, is being revived in this centennial year, and we'll tell you more about it soon.


©2017 Bill Alves & Brett Campbell. If you enjoyed reading about Harrison’s music, there’s a lot more where that came from. Our new biography of Lou Harrison is now available from Indiana University Press and elsewhere.

A Musical Garden

While our mothers were playing mah-jongg, my friends and I listened to the radio. Everywhere you dialed, you heard this wonderful Hawaiian slack guitar music. I am attempting to recapture that sound I’ve been carrying around all these years in my head. —Lou Harrison


Two central inspirations shaped the three-movement Scenes from Nek Chand. First, like Charles Ives’s many nostalgic works, it represented memories from Harrison’s own childhood, when the sound of the Hawaiian guitar dominated popular music he had heard on the family’s crystal set radio at the Silver Court in Portland. The swooping twang of the steel slide guitar reminded Harrison of that sound, though it also sounded at times a bit like a sarod, a instrument from India whose fretless neck makes possible long pitch slides.

The other inspiration was visual. Harrison had just been reading about the Indian artist Nek Chand Saini, who over years transformed junk and discarded building material from his town of Chandigarh into a magical garden with hundreds of fanciful sculptures of animals and people. This act of artistic and humanistic rebellion offended the power brokers of India’s planned city, which had been largely designed by modernist architect Le Corbusier, known for his use of irrational proportions and poured concrete, producing what critics saw as sterile, alienating cityscapes. When the local Chandigarh government discovered the unauthorized structures—“a wonderland, a bit of beautiful chaos in tidy Chandigarh”—and threatened to demolish the secret garden in 1975 to build a parking lot and roads, the local population protested, and the site was eventually turned into a public park that drew thousands of marveling visitors each year.

The water gathering women at Nek Chand's garden

When Harrison discovered Nek Chand’s colorful work in a book on outsider artists, he immediately recognized the artist as a fellow maverick, a kindred spirit, and one of the greatest artists of the era. A warm, organic, artistic sanctuary from cold, capitalistic modernism, Nek Chand’s garden echoed Harrison’s music and philosophy. Harrison swapped the book with Tanenbaum for a National steel guitar, so that composer and player could learn what they needed. Tanenbaum worked on the realization with Harrison, and he even visited a New York gallery that housed one of Nek Chand’s many colorful terracotta sculptures of water-gathering women.

From Nek Chand's garden

The statue’s name, “The Leaning Lady,” became the title of the opening movement of the spare Scenes from Nek Chand, which glistens with the pared-down purity of so many composers’ final works. Harrison asks the guitarist to use a steel (a glass or metal tube over the left pinky finger) to effect graceful slides, like the Hawaiian guitars of his youth but also his psaltery pieces of the 1960s, which, aside from the striking tuning, Scenes from Nek Chand also resembles.

The Nek Chand Arcade

In a departure from the typical fast-slow-fast format, Harrison follows the contemplative first movement with a quick bar-line-less tribute to the “Rock Garden” of Nek Chand, similar to his Avalokiteshvara and similar pieces with their engaging, shifting meters. He named the last movement (an estampie, naturally) “The Sinuous Arcade with Swings in the Arches.” “The arcade is two-sided,” explained Harrison. “That is to say, there are arches, and a roof with banisters so you can promenade on the top. In every arch there is an iron-chained swing for two people. It’s just beautiful.”
A magical garden of music and dance for friends was Lou Harrison’s paradise.

National Steel

John Schneider playing Harrison's refretted National Steel guitar

For Scenes from Nek Chand, Harrison wanted the guitar to be tuned in just intonation, in particular a six-tone mode tuned to pitches six through twelve in the harmonic series. This requirement presented more of a problem, since no such resonator guitar with just-intonation fretting existed. Harrison’s friend and student Bill Slye, a guitarist who had written a thesis at UCSC on microtonal guitars, contacted Don Young, the CEO of National Reso-Phonic Guitars, the makers of the National Steel Guitar, the successor to the original Reso-Phonic instrument of the 1920s. Its factory just happened to lie only a few hours south in San Luis Obispo. Young agreed to build an instrument (actually five copies) with frets especially for this project. Slye and others worked out a tuning that expanded Harrison’s hexatonic scale to twelve pitches, so that the “Harrison model” National steel would be available to other composers and performers after the work’s premiere.

For last Friday’s Microfest concert at Pasadena’s Boston Court theater and for New Music Works in Santa Cruz, Schneider brought to life the unusual, sparkling sonorities of Scenes from Nek Chand and suites of other Harrison just intonation guitar music.


©2017 Bill Alves & Brett Campbell. If you enjoyed reading about Harrison’s music, there’s a lot more where that came from. Our new biography of Lou Harrison is now available from Indiana University Press and elsewhere.

Happy Birthday Lou!

Lou Harrison

Lou Harrison spent most of his life living near Santa Cruz, California, and one of his great friends and supporters there, Phil Collins, is curating of the many tribute concerts to Lou Harrison on this centennial weekend. (Events are also taking place this weekend in Seattle, San Francisco, Berkeley, Joshua Tree and more.) The two-concert tribute features one of Harrison’s greatest and most enchanting ballet scores, and some of his seldom-performed choral music.
Solstice
 
“I was interested in the ways that the abstract language of dance could reveal realms of experience antecedent to words,” choreographer Jean Erdman said later about her ballet Solstice, and Harrison shared this vision. She remembered that Harrison “always seemed to understand what the dance was about. He’s very sensitive to movement.” Solstice was another abstraction from Erdman’s husband and Harrison’s friend Joseph Campbell’s ur-myths. Reluctant to take on a large commission when he was immersed in his studies in scales and medievalism, Harrison quoted Erdman twice his usual fee, expecting rejection—but Erdman accepted. Then he told her that he would need twice the number of musicians as in their previous collaboration, The Perilous Chapel. Again, she unexpectedly agreed. Cornered, Harrison put aside his pastoral experiments and began work on Solstice.

Jean Erdman (right) and her dance company

The myth Erdman devised for Solstice, like The Perilous Chapel, depicts a Campbell-esque cyclic journey from light to darkness and back again, but here the cycle is that of the seasons. The athletic Merce Cunningham applied his feline movements to the part of the invented mythological beast the Sun-Lion, representing the light of summer in a struggle with the Moon-Bull, danced by nineteen-year-old Donald McKayle. McKayle had a “powerful attack with its rhythmic reverberations,” but Cunningham was a “strange, disturbing mixture of Greek god, panther and madman.” In Erdman’s vision, the new year’s god of spring doesn’t achieve true renewal, because the old year’s god of winter isn’t so easily vanquished.

Suggestions of rape and violent destruction—antithetical to nature—require winter’s destruction of all the living, sort of a Noah’s Ark scenario. The female, fertile vision of spring restores wholeness and achieves true renewal in this “eternal seesaw of energy.” Harrison’s “haunting score, wonderfully sensitive to the choreographic rhythms,” set out to depict not only this “cosmogonic cycle” (Campbell’s term) musically, but also the contrast between light and darkness, summer and winter. To create the cyclic sense of the turn of the seasons, Harrison mapped out a plan of tonalities and modes. These contrasting tonalities—and the sometimes frequent polytonal clashes when they overlap—mirror the cosmic struggles of the ballet’s story.

This score marks a significant point in Harrison’s career, because it is his first explicit imitation of the music of the Indonesian gamelan orchestra. But whereas he would become known for his association with the meditative sounds of the Javanese variety of gamelan, this movement represents the bright and dynamic music of the neighboring island of Bali. “The form is based on the successive use of five Oriental-sounding scales,” wrote Henry Cowell in his review. “The scales are used, however, not as exotic impressions but as necessary basic materials. The music is charming and varied, and the suggestion of Eastern materials is woven into a fabric related to the Occidental medieval as well as Occidental modern styles.” 

Although Harrison had only reluctantly undertaken Solstice, the score turned out to be one of his finest compositions and one of the loveliest American ballet scores of that rich era. And although New York’s new radical arts scene took little notice of Harrison’s sweetly tonal pastorales and ballet scores at their late 1940s and early 1950s premieres, their sunny textures and attractive explorations of modes would form a crucial foundation for his later career. Eventually, fashion would catch up with Harrison, rather than the other way around. Sunday evening is a rare opportunity to hear this historic and lovely score.

Choral works 

Also on Sunday's program are a selection of rarely heard Harrison choral works performed by the Ariose Singers. Harrison composed Haiku shortly after accepting a position at San Jose State College in 1967 at the invitation of the college’s choral conductor, William Erlendson. It shares its title, brevity, and sparse texture with several works by Harrison’s good friend John Cage. Harrison had arranged for the publication of one of Cage’s haiku when they were at Black Mountain College in 1952. The wistful text of this miniature is by Kay Davis. 

Harrison composed White Ashes as he mourned the passing of several close friends in 1992, including John Cage. It was commissioned by Harrison’s good friend, pianist Rae Imamura, whose parents were important leaders in the Berkeley Japanese Buddhist Church. She planned a collection of modern settings of Buddhist hymns for amateur singers that could used in their services. Harrison’s contribution is a pentatonic setting in an austere but touching counterpoint of fifths and seconds. 

Robert Duncan

The chordal style sections contrast with an accompaniment of a simple ostinato (repeating pattern) suggestive of eternity. Harrison’s “In Praise of Orpheus” is from a large oratorio for choir and percussion orchestra (not used in this movement) titled Orpheus: For the Singer to the Dance. The text comes from “A Set of Romantic Hymns” by poet Robert Duncan, who was a good friend of Harrison’s and had even given him some poetry lessons. Duncan was at the center of the post-war rise of avant garde poetry in the region that became known as the San Francisco Renaissance, though his work, unlike many of his Beat poet colleagues, was often filled with dense imagery, juxtaposing allusions to classical mythology and modern life. In this hymn, Duncan imagines Orpheus, after returning from the underworld without his love, reincarnated and haunted by vague recollections of his terrible loss. Half of the chorus takes the place of the percussion orchestra, rhythmically speaking and shouting in their role as Orpheus’ nagging memory. His memory of his former life come back in images of Orpheus as a shaman who, like Harrison, “turnd anew the keys, the strings / shadowd, the rays of Apollo’s mode / alterd.”

©2017 Bill Alves & Brett Campbell. If you enjoyed reading about Harrison’s music, there’s a lot more where that came from. Our new biography of Lou Harrison is now available from Indiana University Press and elsewhere. 

A World of Music

Lou Harrison and Eva Soltes

Sunday marks the 100th birthday of the subject of this blog and our new book, Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick. Naturally, the occasion is being celebrated by events around the world, some chronicled here.

The biggest birthday party, a 24-hour celebration at the straw bale house in Joshua Tree California that Harrison designed, is being staged by the indefatigable keeper of Harrison’s legacy, Eva Soltes. Meanwhile, this Saturday, May 13, a couple hundred miles north and west, New Music Works in Santa Cruz, California will screen Soltes’ 2012 film, almost 30 years in the making, Lou Harrison: A World of Music along with an earlier documentary, Cherish, Consider, Conserve, Create, by Los Angeles filmmaker Eric Marin. The creation of Soltes’s film is a story almost as epic as the career of its subject.

One day in the late 1970s, Lou Harrison phoned Eva Soltes, then a student in her late 20s. “Hello, dear,” the deep jolly voice boomed. “Glub glub glub, I’m drowning in papers. Can you save me?” Harrison’s growing fame as a pioneering figure in American music, coupled with a car accident that reminded him of his mortality, spurred him to start getting his papers (music, files, correspondence) in order, and Soltes, who was producing 100 concerts a year at Berkeley’s chamber music organization, 1750 Arch Street, seemed to him to offer a solution.

They’d met earlier when Soltes was studying classical Indian dance with the famed teacher and dancer Balasaraswati at Berkeley’s Center for World Music. One day after leaving the class, she walked across the street and saw two bearded men making musical instruments, and occasionally playing them. The center had given the great composer Lou Harrison (1917-2003) and his partner Bill Colvig the workshop space as part of Harrison’s teaching assignment there. Soltes often stood in the doorway, just to watch and listen.

They grew closer when she produced a concert celebrating the centennial of the pioneering American composer Charles Ives. Harrison edited much of Ives’s work and conducted the 1943 premiere of Ives’s Third Symphony that won Ives the Pulitzer Prize in music.

Soltes recognized the respect the brilliant, charismatic polymath Harrison commanded. “When you were in Lou’s presence, you’d stand straighter or sit taller or listen a little better,” she remembers. Despite hating paperwork and already having a full time job, she agreed to help. Eventually she found Harrison an assistant, but Soltes stayed in his orbit for the rest of his life, producing concerts around the country for him, bringing some order to the chaos of his burgeoning career and contributing significantly to Harrison’s emerging recognition as the grand old maverick of American music.

In 1984, Harrison invited Soltes to an event honoring his old mentor, composer and critic Virgil Thomson, who was visiting San Francisco. She brought a video camera that she’d been given by a foundation to document the life of her dance teacher -- who had died a week before they were to begin. And Harrison was a year older than Balasarawati. If her life deserved preserving on film, Soltes reasoned, then surely so did those of America’s homegrown creative geniuses like Harrison

That day, she shot footage of Harrison and Colvig walking arm in arm in a church — her first video of the legendary Aptos-based composer. But far from the last.

Soltes brought her camera to hundreds of events Harrison participated in, from concerts to lectures to residencies to hikes in the woods to the building of the beautiful straw bale house he designed for himself in Joshua Tree, completed not long before his death, and which now hosts an artist residency program that Soltes administers and which the film premiere event benefits.

But she didn’t initially regard her frequent documentation as part of a film biography. Then Harrison spent a year in New Zealand on a Fulbright grant. “I realized how much I missed him and his music,” she recalls, and she realized that his amazing generation of maverick West Coast artists would be disappearing soon.

“I understood the impact his music had on people, like it had on me. He was a really great composer who touched people in a deep way. Little by little I came to the idea that we were the first generation that had the ability to preserve the music and words of our treasured artists.We’re in the same clan, and he's my elder. If I didn't do it, no one else was going to do it.”

With no background in filmmaking, Soltes assumed that she would eventually hire professionals to make the real documentary, but a film editor who saw her work urged her to make it herself. “Your work has the life in it,” he told her. “Filmmaking is like dance,” she says. “It’s music and movement and content.”

She wound up teaching herself much of what she needed to learn, at first by producing radio documentaries for the BBC (about West Coast composers) and National Public Radio. She made a short film about another composer she worked with, Conlon Nancarrow, that he could take with him on tour, and a longer one about Indian dance. She also enlisted experienced film editor Robbie Robb, who co-edited the film with her.

Harrison allowed Soltes to use his voluminous address book to contact his friends for support. She also obtained grants from the Hewlett Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, along with investing her own time and money into the long-gestating project.

The bigger obstacle turned out to be the sheer wealth of material she gathered. Harrison lived a long, rich, full, active life — and Soltes was there to film much of it. “It was like trying to eat a whale all by myself,” she says.

How to cut it down to manageable length? She solved that problem by deciding to make not one but 10 films from the material, including one about his relationship with Colvig, another about the long, troubled creation of his opera *Young Caesar*, and more. This one focuses on the development of his music.

Sometimes working up to 20 hours per day, Soltes completed the last marathon round of major editing after moving her editing equipment to Harrison’s straw bale house in 2010, which provided the isolation, focus and inspiration (portraits of Harrison and Colvig gazed down at her from the walls) she needed.
LOU HARRISON: A World of Music (a film by Eva Soltes) ~ Film Trailer from Eva Soltes on Vimeo.

Soltes’s favorite moments include moving shots documenting his 33-year partnership with Colvig, who died in 2000. “I was happy that I was close enough to them to be a fly on the wall,” she says. Harrison always refused to allow her to film him actually composing “those things are private,” he told her — but finally relented, yielding a precious sequence.

Harrison earned a lot of fans during his decades in the Bay Area, but even those who don’t know his fascinating life or his alluring music will find much to enjoy, Soltes says. “He was not only a great composer but also a personality who’s fun to watch. He was always a performer, onstage from the time he was two years old,” she says.

“He was a visionary, a hugely important musical figure, and his life is very inspiring — how he persevered in finding his own path. Like MTT [SF Symphony music director Michael Tilson Thomas] said, he not only always marched to his own drum —he even made his own drum.”

©2017 Bill Alves & Brett Campbell. If you enjoyed reading about Harrison’s music, there’s a lot more where that came from. Our new biography of Lou Harrison is now available from Indiana University Press and elsewhere. 

Portions of this post originally appeared at San Francisco Classical Voice.
Learn more about Soltes’s film at Harrison documentary project.

Rare Gems of Lou Harrison in Pasadena, California

Harrison, Colvig, and some of their instruments.

Now that we are in the midst of Lou Harrison centennial celebrations, his music is everywhere. Yet many significant and high quality pieces of Harrison's are rarely performed. They often demand unusual or homemade instruments frequently tuned to the non-standard scales of just intonation. The fearless musicians of Los Angeles' MicroFest specialize in exploring these regions that lie between the keys of the piano, so it will be a unique treat to hear Los Angeles ensembles Varied Trio and Just Strings resurrect some of Harrison's most lovely chamber music May 12 at the Boston Court in Pasadena California.

Harrison's Tenor Bells instrument

Harrison always loved the tintinnabulous timbres of metal bells, which led to his romance with the Javanese gamelan. One of the types of instruments Harrison constructed with his partner, Bill Colvig, was a xylophone-like set of aluminum conduit pipes tuned to the crystalline sonorities of just intonation. Two of these instruments (named "soprano bells" and "tenor bells") formed part of a larger ensemble that became what Harrison referred to as his American Gamelan, but he also sometimes used them individually and with other instruments.

Just Strings: John Schneider, T.J. Troy, and Alison Bjorkedal

Harrison's first composition with these bell instruments was his puppet opera Young Caesar, where they rang out together with a panoply of unusual Western and Asian instruments. This version of the opera has remained unperformed since its 1971 premiere (also in Pasadena), but on May 12 we will hear a suite of the work's most entrancing instrumental interludes performed on reconstructions of the original instruments. Harrison considered Young Caesar one of his greatest works, and it was one of his life's regrets that it was never again produced in his lifetime. Our book tells the whole turbulent story of this opera's various incarnations—including the tale of the flying phalli.

The radiant sounds of the bell tube instruments also show up in a 1972 Solo and in the quirky score Harrison wrote for James Broughton's 1987 film Scattered Remains. (MicroFest screened the original Scattered Remains at UCLA last month.) Although the ever-practical Harrison later adapted this score for conventional chamber orchestra, the more intimate original version includes unusual percussion, retuned harpsichord, and the sonorities of the justly tuned bells. It's possibly the closest Harrison ever got to the then-popular minimalist style.

Varied Trio: Yuri Inoo, Aron Kallay, and Shalini Vijayan

But the real gem of this extraordinary concert is the original version of Harrison's 1987 Varied Trio (the namesake of one of the performing ensembles). Harrison's good friend Willie Winant suggested the piece, and Harrison decided he wanted to write something that would be fun to play with his friends. So he added  violinist David Abel, pianist Julie Steinberg, his partner Bill Colvig, and himself to create an exotic ensemble of violin, retuned harpsichord, retuned harp, bell instruments, and percussion. This Varied Quintet, its original title, premiered at Harrison's 70th birthday concert in Berkeley, California.

Even so, the original version presented difficulties to Steinberg, Abel, and Winant if they wanted to tour with the piece, so Steinberg arranged it for their trio with a piano in the standard tuning of equal temperament. As far as I know, the original version has never been performed since its original performances in 1987. The difference in instruments makes the Trio and Quintet almost completely different compositions. For example, the first movement pairs one of Harrison's alluring violin melodies with an ensemble based on the forms and patterns of Javanese gamelan (its title, "Gendhing," is the Javanese word for gamelan composition). In the Quintet version to be revived this month, the interweaving just intonation bell instruments sparkle within an entirely different texture than what can be coaxed from the conventional piano.

Harrison was a prolific composer (the works list in our book contains over 400 entries), and he often did not shy away from exotic demands even in some of his most enchanting works. I hope you can join us at this unusual opportunity in Pasadena May 12.

©2017 Bill Alves & Brett Campbell. If you enjoyed reading about Harrison’s music, there’s a lot more where that came from. Our new biography of Lou Harrison is now available from Indiana University Press and elsewhere. 

Lou Harrison's La Koro Sutro

The Rutgers Kirkpatrick Choir and Rutgers Percussion Ensemble perform Harrison's La Koro Sutro.

Lou Harrison's most famous legacy may be his long romance with gamelan music of Indonesia, yet he first wrote not for the well known Javanese or Balinese varieties of this orchestra of gongs and metallophones but for a set of instruments he called his "American Gamelan." Yet these remain some of his least performed works, but not because of their quality. The Rutgers Kirkpatrick Choir and Rutgers Percussion Ensemble recently performed Harrison's La Koro Sutro, or The Heart Sutra, a major work that combines his love of Buddhist wisdom, Esperanto, pure harmonies, and these homemade instruments, at Trinity Church Wall Street in New York, along with his Suite for Violin and American Gamelan. (See the video here, 1:19:00 for La Koro Sutro and 44:00 for the Suite.) The same two pieces will be featured on the West Coast at San Francisco's Mission Dolores on May 20.

The origins of these instruments extend back to Harrison's 1970s experiments with his instrument-building partner Bill Colvig when they performed in a Chinese music ensemble. Tired of trying to keep his instrument of porcelain bowls in tune, Colvig suggested a similar instrument of aluminum. Harrison remembered that the ancient Korean orchestras have an instrument of tuned metal bars called a fangxiang.

Colvig set to work on what would become a set of tuned aluminum conduit pipes that rang out in pure bell-like tones. Just as important to Harrison, they could be precisely tuned to just intonation. Soon Colvig also built instruments of deep sounding metal bars and added gongs made from oxygen tanks. They first resounded in the quirky orchestra largely of homemade and Asian instruments featured in his puppet opera Young Caesar in 1971, but Harrison wanted to feature the instruments as a self-contained orchestra, like Indonesian gamelan. Just as the varieties of gamelan are often named by their region of origin—the Javanese gamelan, the Balinese gamelan, the Sundanese gamelan—Harrison named this metal orchestra the American Gamelan

Later, after having built several other ensembles in the following years, Harrison and Colvig would sentimentally refer to this original set of instruments as "Old Granddad." Unlike those later instruments, the Old Granddad instruments were not intended to imitate, be tuned like, or function like the instruments of Indonesian gamelan, leading to some confusion over Harrison's use of the term.

The American Gamelan instruments

Harrison's chance to compose for the instruments came from an unusual source: his contacts in the World Congress of Esperanto, the international language. Harrison had been a devotee of Esperanto for years, and when many Esperantists were gathering for a summer program at San Francisco State University in 1972, Harrison proposed a concert with his instruments and choir (singing in Esperanto, naturally). He chose for his text one of his most beloved Buddhist scriptures, familiarly known as the Heart Sutra. It elegantly distills the 100,000 lines of the Perfection of Wisdom literature down to just 14 verses. “It’s called that because it’s the heart of the matter,” Harrison explained. “It concentrates all of the paradoxical beauty of this whole area of philosophy into a very brief, sharp space.”  He commissioned an Esperanto translation from his linguist friend Bruce Kennedy.

The text of the “Heart Sutra,” rendered in Bruce Kennedy’s Esperanto translation as “La Koro Sutro,” divides into seven sections Harrison called paragrafoj. To these he added an opening invocation and an epilogue for a total of nine movements, ranging from celebratory tintinnabulations to dark meditations. The second paragrafo pays homage to the early 13th-century conducti of Perotin, in which interlocking voices weave a rich tapestry of sound. In the mesmerizing fourth paragrafo, La Koro Sutro’s balancing point, the deep bass metallophones resolutely sway back and forth between the tonic and fifth, providing the eternal stability of wisdom, even as the meter of the melody shifts above them. This midpoint, the heart of the Heart Sutra, gives us the central paradox of Buddhism: if the phenomena of our lives do not exist in the void, neither does suffering nor the attainment of Nirvana itself.

Bill Colvig working on one of the American gamelan instruments

The last paragrafo, which might be expected to bring a comfortable return to the opening tonality, instead launches into the startling realm of F minor, a tonality distant from the Heart Sutra’s prevailing tonality as represented on the American Gamelan, as if the wisdom of the sutra has provided a new view of the world.  When Harrison realized the necessity of the key, rather than asking Colvig (who was off leading a Sierra Club hike) to build a new set of instruments for this single movement, Harrison decided to include a harp. Only the reed organ and harp (which is otherwise silent through the performance) accompany the choir’s polyphonic fantasia on the transcendental wisdom of the following mantram (that is, a mantra or sacred repeated formula). Without pause, the choir strikingly modulates back to the home prime pentatonic and the epilogue. The bass instruments announce a gently repeating pattern that underlie the final passage’s concluding chaconne (a favorite Harrison ending form). To Harrison, the movement represented “the smile on the face of the Thai Buddhas. There are kind of alleluias in the air.”

Despite the difficulty of performing with a unique set of homemade instruments, the glorious La Koro Sutro would become one of Harrison’s best-loved compositions, embracing some of his most characteristic passions: peace, universality, homemade instruments, just intonation, bell sounds, Asian influences. Somehow, Harrison had taken a text that counsels indifference to desire and created a gripping paean to peace.

Which brings us back to the opening question: why is one of Harrison's greatest achievements performed so seldom? The problem is that none of the American gamelan pieces can be performed on any other instruments, because they're turned differently from standard Western instrument tunings. Even though several copies of these instruments now exist, anyone who wants to perform the music Harrison wrote for Old Granddad must own or ship one of the four sets of American Gamelan instruments. So if you have a chance to hear these pieces performed in San Francisco next month, or anytime, seize it!

©2017 Bill Alves & Brett Campbell. If you enjoyed reading about Harrison’s music, there’s a lot more where that came from. Our new biography of Lou Harrison is now available from Indiana University Press and elsewhere. 

A Wonderful Whirligig: Lou Harrison discovers San Francisco

Lou Harrison in San Francisco, 1940.

With Lou Harrison's 100th birthday coming up next month, concerts celebrating his music are happening all over the world, from Ohio to Lapland (!) this year. But Ground Zero (hmm, maybe not the best choice of terms when the subject was an early and ardent opponent of nuclear weapons beginning even before they were first used in 1945) for Lou Harrison celebrations is the San Francisco Bay Area. Several Harrison concerts have already taken place there this year, with more to come.

Harrison's seven crucial formative years in the city of San Francisco set the course for his long, colorful, creative career. Here's a glimpse of his first few years there, originally published at San Francisco Classical Voice and freely adapted from our new book, which contains many more details, anecdotes, and adventures artistic and amorous in the life of the young (late teens to mid 20s) composer on the cusp of creative ascent.

City of Art

Although Harrison’s family had lived in the environs of San Francisco since he was 12 years old, their move into the city itself, in January 1935, revealed to Harrison a vibrant cultural world. The next seven years — the period that shaped his career — would introduce him to the elements he combined in fruitful fusion for the rest of his life: dance, percussion, European and American avant-garde music, early music, Asian music. In his old age, he called San Francisco “the city where I attained my maturity — I can’t say I grew up here, because I haven’t yet.”

To the voluble, energetic young Harrison, San Francisco was “a lavish, very social city with friendship and pleasure above all.” In the quarter century since it had been leveled by an earthquake and fire, the city had developed into a busy metropolis of art deco skyscrapers and cable cars, jazz clubs and Victorian row houses. Traditional musicians played along the fragrant alleyways of Chinatown, and sizable communities of immigrants from Japan, the Philippines, and India contributed their flavors to the port city’s cultural stew. Until the completion of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge in 1936 and the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937, ferries crisscrossed the bay, with small musical ensembles often furnishing entertainment for the passengers.

WPA orchestra in San Francisco's Civic Auditorium, 1938

Harrison soon became friends with the artists who created San Francisco’s thriving, underground arts community in downtown lofts and high school auditoriums. Much of their work was made possible by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which in 1935 established federal projects for the arts. Unlike today’s National Endowment for the Arts, “the projects” directly employed artists as craftspeople to do what they did best — paint, compose, write, stage plays, play music. The Bay Area’s several WPA orchestras employed scores of musicians and, in keeping with the program’s philosophy, tended to play new American music, a rarity on most other symphony programs.

“We all went to WPA concerts and ballets because there was minimal admission,” Harrison recalled. “It was a wonderful period for American arts. They had the notion that an artist was also a workman and craftsman and deserved to be paid just like any working craftsman. For a young person growing up in that atmosphere and with friends who were working with WPA and giving concerts and exhibitions and decorating public buildings, it was really quite an insight into what the arts can be, and I’ve never forgotten it. Art was part of our daily lives.”

Chinatown's Mandarin Theater (as it appeared in Orson Welles'
The Lady From Shanghai), where Harrison saw many Chinese
opera performances.

Chinatown Charms

As Lou Harrison and his young friend entered the theater, they saw a turquoise silk stage curtain with embroidered dragon and phoenix on both sides—and the word “Bromoseltzer” in giant silver letters. The curtain and its advertisement was the Chinatown theater’s sole concession to Western culture. At night, a quarter bought you a table with snacks of candied coconut and sugarcane, pumpkin seeds and dried plums.

One night in 1935, Harrison enjoyed a bowl of ginger ice cream as the curtain rose and giant, pantomime paper dragons danced onstage. Flames of yellow and red silk gushed from their nostrils, lights flashed, smoke poured out. Actors tumbled acrobatically across the stage; others danced or broke into song, accompanied by supple, falsetto voices singing and narrating, in Cantonese, the highly-stylized drama. A half dozen musicians played instruments like the lute-like yueqin or the jinghu, a two-string fiddle. Clattering cymbals and gongs punctuated the actors’ movements. By the end, long after midnight, the heroes had won, peacock feathers adorning their crests.

Music in Chinatown, 1941

Clamorous, colorful, the music seemed a world away from refined Western string quartets or piano recitals. Instead of the quiet reverence that accompanies European opera, Chinese opera competed with children lining up by the stage, friends gossiping — but no one applauded. Huddled together in the unheated building, most of the Chinese patrons knew the ritualized stories of the opera and were there to experience the atmosphere of the performance or perhaps the solo of the top-billed singer.⁠ Other than the occasional tourist, Harrison and his friends usually found themselves the only non-Chinese patrons in the theater.

Before he ever saw a European opera, Harrison had seen dozens of productions of Chinese opera. Harrison and his friends would come to these thrilling performances at least once a week, at a time when European opera was expensive, infrequent, and, in Harrison’s opinion, “pretty stuffy.”

Early Music Encounters

San Francisco State College offered no music major, so Harrison took courses in anything that interested him — astronomy, classics, a journalism course (which he failed) — while taking lessons in horn and clarinet in the music department and singing in campus choral groups.

San Francisco's Ancient Music Ensemble with
Eileen McCall (on lute). Harrison is second
from the right, playing bass recorder.
From the Oakland Tribune, 1936

But the college’s “ancient music” ensemble attracted him more than anything else. Beguiled by the Baroque, Harrison was lucky to find one of America’s rare early music groups at the time that paired period instruments with a historically informed approach. Harrison learned harpsichord and recorders, in addition to singing bass parts. The group performed Renaissance music as well as Baroque masters; Harrison arranged and occasionally even composed works for the group, which he played with even after he left college. The ensemble also used meantone temperament (generated from slightly flattened perfect fifths), which showed Harrison a viable alternative to ordinary equal temperament.

Harrison scoured the San Francisco Public Library for information about early music. He made an intense study of the entire collection of English Tudor-era madrigals and church music and English viol consorts of the 17th century, including the works of John Jenkins and William Lawes, culminating in the fantasias of Henry Purcell. This uncompromisingly concentrated polyphony greatly influenced his own compositions.

The director of the early music ensemble, Eileen McCall, nurtured Harrison’s composing as well. 17th-century dances and musical forms—sarabande, fugue, concerto grosso, passacaglia — marked his compositions from the 1930s. His sketchbooks from the period include a “Pavan” for two recorders and bass viol and a later Suite for Recorder and Lute that included an “Alman,” a “Pavan,” and a “Bourée.” He played one of his Cembalo Sonatas as part of a college noon concert.

Social Circles

Harrison also pursued other wide-ranging intellectual interests, such as “the little blue books” — radical or progressive monographs by writers such as Sinclair Lewis that introduced Harrison to the liberal and socialist ideals that informed some of his work from then on.⁠ His friend, John Dobson, wore a button for Socialist candidate Upton Sinclair, and they boycotted a restaurant because it refused to serve black people. Harrison was always carrying books and scores home from the library. Harrison remained a bibliophile and a library supporter ever after.

Along with his intellectual and artistic pursuits, Harrison enjoyed a thriving social life, much of it in private house parties where people from the theater, dance, and art scenes congregated over wine and cheese, music and poetry, and lots of heavy smoking.

“Everybody was having a good time all the time,” he remembered. “Sometimes parties were where you met your next lover!” He elaborated, “I met dancers, set designers, artists, other musicians, writers. This was fairly common. You’d get one idea after another — constant ideas and learning, learning all the time. For example, that’s where I found out about Hart Crane. Someone at a party said he was gay, and I looked him up for that reason.”⁠

A man he met at a theater party introduced Harrison to the city’s gay underground. Homosexuality was so accepted within Harrison’s social circles that he never hid his orientation from most friends and acquaintances. The first gay bars sprung up after Prohibition was repealed, and in the 1930s and 1940s, the city’s gay and lesbian communities frequented the same bars, including the “quasi-dangerous” Mona’s (“where we encountered many a fistfight”). Although many of his friends were gay, “all of us were part of the straight world,” he explained. “Our oddity was acceptable coin. We were musicians, poets, artists, and so on, and there was no problem about our boyfriends or girlfriends.”⁠

Though these artists were creating a vibrant modernism, neither Harrison nor his friends adopted the self-consciously avant-garde identity common among inhabitants of other bohemias. “It was no big deal. We were just having fun,” Harrison said. “We were occupied doing what we were doing. And we had friends who liked doing it, too, and that constituted a party. Absolutely, it was a big community thing … If you don’t feel you can play some things with your friends, what’s the point?”

By the end of his second year in San Francisco, immersed in an astonishingly dynamic new world of fascinating art and ideas and people, Harrison had rekindled his passion for Asian arts, acquired his first real lover and identity as a gay man, joined a vibrant and varied circle of young artists and other intellectually and artistically voracious Bohemians, and developed a deep affection for nature. From the lonely, friendless adolescent who had sequestered himself with music and mementos had emerged a breathlessly energetic, charming young artist now surrounded by convivial and sympathetic friends.

“I was giddy at that time — being interested in almost everything,” he remembered. “I spent many a night and day just burrowed in books and thinking and writing. But I was also out and about all the time. It was a grand time then, no doubt of that. And I realized it then. It was a wonderful whirligig.”⁠

In the 1950s, after an eventful, sometimes tumultuous, decade in New York City and at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, Harrison returned to California. He lived for the rest of his life outside the village of Aptos, overlooking Monterey Bay. He wrote more dance music, symphonies, concertos, Chinese and Korean music, and become a pioneer in alternative tunings, with his friend Harry Partch. By the time he died, in February 2003, Lou Harrison had reached an artistic pinnacle. San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown declared June 14, 1996, Lou Harrison Day — an appropriate tribute for a composer whose music owed so much to the wonderful whirligig of the city where he never grew up.

©2017 Bill Alves & Brett Campbell. Originally published in San Francisco Classical Voice and adapted from Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick (Indiana University Press 2017).

If you enjoyed reading about Harrison’s music, there’s a lot more where that came from. Our new biography of Lou Harrison is now available from Indiana University Press and elsewhere.