Lou Harrison

Lou Harrison became recognized particularly in three broad areas: music for percussion ensemble, experiments with just intonation, and syntheses of Asian and Western styles. His works at times call for Chinese, Korean, and Indonesian instruments along with Western ones, and many pieces feature instruments of Harrison’s own construction. His style is marked by a notable melodicism: even his percussion and 12-tone compositions have a decidedly lyrical flavor.

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

In spring 1935 Harrison enrolled in Henry Cowell’s course “Music of the Peoples of the World” at the University of California Extension in San Francisco. There he first heard recordings of the Indonesian gamelan, an ensemble for which he would ultimately compose extensively. His fascination with the gamelan was reinforced four years later when he saw a Balinese group at the Golden Gate Exposition on Treasure Island. In 1935 Harrison began private composition lessons with Cowell, with whom he developed an enduring friendship. The following year, at Cowell’s suggestion, he wrote to Charles Ives requesting music for performance; after an exchange of correspondence, Harrison received a crate of photostat scores including Ives’s songs, most of his chamber music, and some of his orchestral works. During the next ten years Harrison studied these compositions avidly, editing several for performance and/or publication. Through Cowell, Harrison also developed a fascination with American Indian and early Californian culture, reflected in works throughout his career, among them the Mass to St. Anthony for voices accompanied by percussion ensemble (rescored in 1952 for voices, strings, trumpet, and harp). The Mass’s vocal lines suggest indigenous melodic types that had been incorporated into 18th-century Californian mission services. The work’s opening motif—a “cry of anguish” occasioned by Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939—is also one of Harrison’s earliest political statements.