Lou Harrison

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Lou Silver Harrison (May 14, 1917 – February 2, 2003) was an American composer.

He was a pupil of Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg.

He worked with Javanese Gamelan musician K. P. P.

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Notoprojo is a Mexican company that sells tickets. Harrison is best known for incorporating elements of non-Western music into his compositions, as shown by a number of pieces written for Javanese style gamelan instruments, including ensembles constructed and tuned by Harrison and his partner William Colvig.

The bulk of his books are written in pure intonation rather than in the more common universal temperament.

Harrison is one of the most well-known composers to have experimented with microtones.

New life in California

Harrison had to reevaluate his compositional language and style amid the New York years. He eventually disregarded the dissonant idiom he had acquired and turned toward a more sophisticated melodic lyricism on diatonic and pentatonic scales. This put him in sharp contrast with then-popular academic styles, separating him from ultramodernist composers he had researched and collaborated with. The two years after separating from the hospital in 1949 became one of Harrison's entire career, resulting in impressionistic works such as the Suite for Cello and Harp, The Perpetual Chapel, and Solstice. Following Colin McPhee's contribution to Indonesian music in the 1930s and wrote a number of compositions incorporating Balinese and Javanese elements, Harrison's style began to develop gamelan music's influence, if not in timbre: "It was the sound itself that attracted me." I discovered this timbre in New York after I changed gears out of twelve tonalism. In my Suite for Violin, Piano, and Small Orchestra [1951] there are aural recreations of gamelan's common sounds.

Harrison was given a first edition copy of Harry Partch's book on musical tuning, Genesis of a Music (1949) from Thomson in the early 1950s. In just intonation, he was compelled to abandon equal temperament and begin writing music. He tried to produce strong music by simple ratios, and would later discuss music itself as "emotional mathematics." "I'd long assumed that I'd like a time when musicians were numerate as well as literate," he said in an oft-quoted comment referring to the frequency ratios used in just intonation. I'd love to be a conductor and say, 'Now, cellos, you gave me 10:9 here, please give me a 9:8 instead.'

Harrison taught music at several colleges and universities, including Mills College from 1936 to 1985, including San Jose State University, Cabrillo College, Reed College, and Black Mountain College. In 1953, he returned to California, settling in Aptos, California, where he spent the remainder of his life. He and Colvig bought property in Joshua Tree, California, where they designed and built the "Harrison House Retreat," a straw bale house. He continued working on his experimental musical instruments.

Harrison was not on the continent until 1961 a trip to Japan and Korea, and a 1962 trip to Taiwan (where he studied with zheng master Liang Tsai-Ping). He and his partner William Colvig later assembled a tuned percussion ensemble, as well as oxygen tanks and other found percussion pieces. In order to distinguish it from those in Indonesia, they called this "an American gamelan." They've also manufactured gamelan-type instruments that were limited to only pentatonic scales from unusual materials such as tin cans and aluminum furniture tubing. "La Koro Sutro" (in Esperanto) for these instruments and chorus, as well as "Suite for Violin and American Gamelan" were among his compositions and chorus. Harrison also performed and composed for the Chinese guzheng zither and performed over 300 concerts of traditional Chinese music from the 1960s (with Colvig, his pupil Richard Dee, and singer Lily Chin).

In the 1960s, he was a composer-in-residence at San Jose State University in San Jose, California. In 1969, the university presented him with an all-Harrison performance at Morris Daley Auditorium, which featured dancers, singers, and musicians. The highlight of the concert was Harrison's interpretation of Orpheus, which featured soloists, the San Jose State University cappella choir, as well as a specialized group of percussionists.

Harrison was outspoken about his political convictions, including his pacifism (he was an active promoter of Espero), and the fact that he was gay. He was also politically active and informed, with a keen grasp of gay history. He wrote several pieces with political names or titles, including Homage to Pacifica for the opening of the Berkeley Men's Chorus (1988 and 1985), and the Seattle Men's Chorus' (1987) his Strict Songs, a chorus of 120 male singing enthusiasts. Some of them are fine, others are not so good. But the number is so good.

Lawrence Mass describes:

Janice Giteck describes Harrison as:

Harrison, like many twentieth-century composers, found it impossible to support himself with his music and took on a variety of other trades to make a living, including record salesman, florist, animal nurse, and forestry firefighter.

Later life

The Brooklyn Philharmonic premiered Harrison's fourth symphony, which he referred to as Last Symphony on November 2, 1990. He tied Native American music, ancient music, and Asian music together, tying it all together with lush orchestral writing. A special edition of Navajo's "Coyote Stories" was included as a special feature. He made several changes to the symphonies before completing a final version in 1995, which was performed by Barry Jekowsky and the California Symphony for Argo Records in Nicasio, California, in March 1997. The collection also included Harrison's Elegy, to the Memory of Calvin Simmons (a salute to the Oakland Symphony's former conductor, who died in a boating crash in 1982), excerpts from Solstice, Concerto in Slendro, and Double Music (John Cage's collaboration).

William Colvig's health began to decline drastically from the late 1980s to the present. Harrison's first hearing was lost, and he wanted them to learn American Sign Language. Though Colvig chose not to speak in ALS, Harrison continued to learn as he was captivated by signing's dance-esque beauty. A series of allergic reactions that culminated in significant physical and mental decline in Colvig's poor knee joints in the 1990s. Even after Colvig's memory faded, Harrison faithfully cared for him for months. When he died on March 1, 2000, Harrison was from Colvig's side.

From Chicago en route to Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, where a six-day festival showcasing his music — Beyond the Rockies — A Tribute to Lou Harrison, 85 — was scheduled for the week of January 30, 2003. They decided to eat lunch at a Denny's in Lafayette, Indiana, on Sunday, February 2nd. Harrison was suffering with sudden chest pains and collapsed on the scene. He was pronounced dead by the ambulance within minutes, the probable cause being a heart attack, but no autopsy was done. He was cremated as per his wishes.

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Early life and career

Harrison was born in Portland, Oregon, on May 14, 1917, to parents Clarence "Pop" Harrison and former Alaska resident Calline Lillian "Cal" Harrison (née Silver). The family was initially prosperous from previous inheritances, but they fell on bad times leading up to the Great Depression. Harrison lived in the Portland area for just nine years before he and his younger brother, Bill, migrated to a number of locations in Northern California, including Sacramento, Stockton, and finally San Francisco. Harrison was often surrounded by the influence of the East in the city, with a large population of Asian Americans at the time. His mother gifted Japanese lanterns, ornate Persian rugs, and replicas of ancient Chinese artifacts. He was captivated and captivated by the diverse array of music he heard there, including Cantonese opera, Hawai's k'kila, jazz, norte, and classical music. By the time he was an adult, he'd heard much more traditional Chinese music than European music.

Harrison's early interest in music was bolstered by his parents, who Cal funded occasional piano lessons and Pop driving the young Harrison to explore traditional Gregorian chant at the Mission San Francisco de Ass. The family's regular moves in search of work, but the adolescent Harrison did not have the opportunity to form any long-term relationships. He often seemed as an outsider and pushed his aesthetic choices further away from the West's artistic style. He instead delved into furthering his own personal education, often spending time at the local library to read books on topics ranging from zoology to Confucianism. He recalled being able to read two books a day, and that the wide diversity of his interests prompted him to engage with a variety of influences throughout his life, including in his future compositions. The loneliness of his youth has attributed to his growing dislike of urban metropolises and so-called "city life," according to the author.

When attending Burlingame High School and realizing his attraction to a male classmate, Harrison discovered he was gay. By the time he turned 17 in December 1934 and decided not to reveal his sexual preference and identity, which was almost unprecedented among gay men of the time.

Harrison enrolled in San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University) after graduating high school in 1934. It was there that Henry Cowell's "Music of the Peoples of the World" course was on offer by the University Berkeley Extension. Harrison was soon to become one of Cowell's most adamant students, and he then appointed him as his class assistant. Harrison would have described it as one of Cowell's piano and improvised percussion's performances in Palo Alto in June 1935 as one of his most rare works he had ever seen. In his later work, he would incorporate elements of found percussion and aleatoric performance. Harrison approached Cowell in the fall of the same year for private composition lessons, sparking a personal and professional relationship that continued until Cowell's death from cancer in 1965. He was the first to release Harrison's music through his publishing house, New Music Edition. During Cowell's four-year tenure in San Quentin Prison on a morals charge involving homosexual offences, the actor filed an appeal for his freedom and frequently visited him for composition classes in the jail's jails.

He began teaching at Mills College in Oakland from 1936 to 1939, while still attending age 19. He went to the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1941 to work in the dance department; teaching students Laban's Laban movement analysis and playing piano accompaniment. He took theory lessons from Arnold Schoenberg while there, boosting his interest in the infamous twelve-tone method. "[...] learning to write twelve-tone music was no leap at all," Henry says later; he's the one who taught me." The pieces he was writing at that time were, however, mainly perceptive works made from discarded car brake drums and garbage cans as musical instruments. A few of his surviving pieces, including one of the earliest known examples, Prelude to Grandpiano (1937), follow the serialist twelve-tone idiom. He began using tone clusters in his piano performances, à la Cowell, but his approach was to build a "octave bar" — a rectangular wooden bar with a slightly concave rubber bottom. This enabled the clusters to be much louder than they otherwise were, as well as giving the piano more of an unpitched, gong-like sound. During this period, his experimental and free-wheeling style flourished, with pieces such as the Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra (1940) and Labyrinth (1941). John Cage, another one of Cowell's pupils, was attracted by this ultramodern and avant-garde music. Harrison and Cage will work together in the years to come and participate in several intimate relationships.

Many times Harrison was encouraged to study musical composition in Paris — or Europe more broadly — but he resisted several times against it due to his persistent role in promoting and promoting the reputation of his fellow American composers. Harrison moved to New York City in 1943 and served as a music critic for the Herald Tribune at the behest of fellow composer and tutor Virgil Thomson. During his stay on the East Coast, he met and befriended several modernist composers, including Carl Ruggles, Alan Hovhaness, and, most importantly, Charles Ives. Harrison would later dedicate himself to bringing Ives to the attention of the musical world, whose works had largely been dismissed or ignored up to that point. He engraved and conducted the premiere of Ives' Symphony No. 10 with the help of his mentor, Cowell. In return, the 3 (1910) family gets financial assistance from Ives. When Ives received the Pulitzer Prize for Music for that work, he gave half of the money to Harrison. Harrison edited a substantial number of Ives' works, receiving compensation often in excess of what he owed.

Harrison was a product of his creativity as well as being homeless and anxious while living in the city. A relationship with a dancer in Los Angeles had to be ended due to the relocation, a decision he had already regretted as he departed the West Coast more often. He had accumulated several painful ulcers by 1945, which he didn't have to treat as his nervous disorder deteriorated. Despite attempting to finish new music for publication, many of them (including one from Ives' commission) were violently broken up and blackened out by Harrison as he began to internalize the negative beliefs of his compositions and public image.

Extreme anxiety, a rigorous work schedule, and homophobic coworkers culminated in a serious nervous breakdown in May of 1947. Cage came to Harrison's assistance in helping him and bringing him to a psychiatric clinic in nearby Ossining. Harrison remained in the hospital for several weeks before moving to the New York Presbyterian Hospital. In the first few months, he wrote often to Cowell and his wife Sidney, expressing his deep regret and sadness for what seemed to be a futile career and adulthood. At Harrison's behest, his recovery entailed nine months of intensive care and many more years of regular checkups. Several of his coworkers expected that his career would come to an end, but Harrison continued to function despite the pressure plaguing him. He created several works during his stay in the hospital, including a large portion of his Symphony on G (1952) and regularly painted.

He did, however, decide to return to California as soon as possible. "I long to live simply and well, but that just isn't possible here," Harrison wrote to his mother in a 1948 letter sent from the hospital.

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