Lou Harrison
Parade
Lou Harrison's myriad musical influences included Native American songs,
Cantonese opera, Gregorian chant, Mexican folk music, and Indonesian gamelan.
Yet the eclectic music he made from these many sources was always his own.
Fellow composer Virgil Thomson said of him: "He is simply speaking in many
personae and many languages. The message itself is pure Harrison. And that
message is of joy, dazzling and serene, and even at its most intensely serious,
not without laughter."
Born in Portland in 1917, Harrison moved often throughout northern California
as a child. The melting pot of the San Francisco Bay Area affected him greatly.
He first heard gamelan music at the Golden Gate Exposition in 1939, and fell in
love with its pure tones and percussive elements. That love, combined with the
penchant he developed with composer John Cage for creating instruments from
materials like brake drums from auto yards, led to his later constructing an "American
gamelan" with his life partner, William Colvig, in the 1970s out of conduit
tubing, aluminum slabs, and tin cans. He and Colvig would ship the instrument,
dubbed "Old Granddad," to any orchestra that wanted to perform the music
Harrison wrote for it, such as La Koro Sutro (1972, for chorus and gamelan) and
Young Caesar (1971, a puppet opera dedicated to gay rights).
Harrison's generally joyous musical style was born after a difficult period
in New York, where he moved in 1943. He never felt at home there, even though he
was welcomed by Virgil Thomson and quickly took a job writing reviews for the
New York Herald Tribune. He also worked with Charles Ives, editing the composer's
Third Symphony from a jumbled manuscript and conducting its first performance in
April of 1946. When Ives won the Pulitzer Prize for the piece, he split the
prize money with Harrison. But by 1947 Harrison suffered a breakdown that caused
him to leave New York and to move from the strict theoretical influence of
modern music to what composer John Adams has called a model of "expressivity and
sheer beauty." Harrison's dance piece from this period, The Perilous Chapel
(published in 1971), depicts the soul's struggle against evil, ending with a
glorious alleluia that Harrison described as "a dance on the floor of heaven."
After teaching in North Carolina, Harrison returned to California in 1953,
settling in Aptos with Colvig and teaching at Stanford and San Jose State
Universities, Mills College, and Cabrillo College, where he helped found the
Cabrillo Music Festival. He continued to synthesize his own vibrant rhythms and
melodies from many influences. "These are melodies that stick with you," wrote
Michael Tilson Thomas, one of Harrison's champions. When Tilson Thomas became
conductor of the San Francisco Symphony in 1995, the Symphony commissioned
Harrison to write Parade for the season's opening concert. The work is pure
Harrison, with brilliant, percussive melodies, some in pentatonic scale,
juxtaposed against a short reflective section of great tonal beauty. Its joy may
reflect what Harrison said about his life in 1997, when he turned 80: "I can
only say, Lou Harrison is an old man who has had a lot of fun."
November 11, 2003
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