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Lou Harrison, California Eclectic
| Article
# : |
20451 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1992 |
2,864 Words |
| Author
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Richard Kostelanetz
Richard Kostelanetz is a writer/composer living in New
York. His recent books include On Innovative Music(ian)s
(Limelight). His latest composition, Kaddish, was commissioned
by Westdeutscher Rundfunk. |
In the driveway of Low Harrison's compound, just east of Santa Cruz, is a geriatric Mercedes who California license plate reads COMPOSR1. This might seem immodest, were he not indeed his state's principal composer, and one whose music has been profoundly reflective of its culture.
Born seventy-five years ago this month in Portland, Oregon, Harrison, the son of a businessman, graduated from high school in a Bay area suburb and attended San Francisco State University. As a child, he had taken both dance and music lessons and had performed in plays. As a young adult, he studied French horn, clarinet, harpsichord, recorder, and percussion instruments. He also studied privately with composer Henry Cowell.
Having already established himself as an accompanist for modern dance, Harrison was hired as an accompanist, composer, and teacher by Mills College before he turned twenty, incidentally terminating his formal education. In 1936 he met John Cage, five years his senior, and collaborated on a percussion piece that is still played, Double Music (1941), in which he wrote two of the four sections and Cage, the others. Harrison spent 1941-42 in Los Angeles working for choreographer Lester Horton and studying with Arnold Schoenberg, who told him, "Only the essentials. Avoid complication."
In 1943 Harrison moved to New York, where he met the composer Virgil Thomson, who introduced him to the idea of writing for a living. As Thomson was also the music critic of the New York Herald Tribune and preferred on principle to hire composers as reviewers, Harrison succeeded Paul Bowles, then a composer who had not yet become a novelist in addition to contributing reviews, profiles, and previews to other magazines. Looking back, Harrison regards his experience as a music writer in New York as a kind of education at once literary and musical. "It was wonderful to be able to review the 'Waldstein' as though I'd heard it more than once." He must have cut a commanding presence through the New York art world, because he haunts The Diaries of Judith Malina,1947-1957 (1984), which the cofounder of the Living Theater reports in loving detail Harrison's changing moods and appearance.
Ives' Successor
Back in 1937, Cowell had urged Harrison to write to composer Charles Ives, then better known as a retired insurance salesman. He did so and in response received a crate of photostats. Harrison "lived with this material for a decade," as he put it, preparing
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