S O L E M N   P L A Y

A Life of Cross-Cultural Synthesis



INTRODUCTION

   Art, says Lou Harrison, can be understood as an extension of the solemn play of children.1 "I cannot conceive of a more absorbing play and one more delightful," he notes, "than assembling a phrase, a section, a form" from tiny melodic bits, "a play in which the moves are alluring and the results beyond all effort rewarding."2 Harrison frequently compares his compositional process to the card game of solitaire, governed by strict rules of his own devising—and he rarely tolerates any cheating.3 These rules form a set of "controls," limiting the potential realizations of his musical material and permitting Harrison to manage the array of possibilities offered by his historical research, his cross-cultural studies, or simply his imagination. He may, for instance, severely restrict the set of permissible harmonic or melodic intervals, or confine himself to a limited number of rhythmic figures, a prescribed division of measures or beats, or even a technical restriction suggested by a particular instrument. (In the first movement of his Suite for Cello and Harp, for example, he challenged himself to keep the harpist’s hands fixed in one position.) Harrison’s goal is to create a tightly-controlled framework which he can then grace with elegant surface materials, giving the listener a sense of improvisatory freedom girded by an internal logic. The rules themselves often remain hidden: "I don’t want to wear my compositional tools on my sleeve," he says.4
   With the rules in place, Harrison selects his compositional game pieces from a variety of sources he has assembled over the years: the music of Handel, Rameau, Cowell, Ives, Ruggles, and Schoenberg; dance traditions of the Middle Ages and the Baroque, or of India, Turkey, and Java; songs of Native Americans or Medieval Europe; Korean court music, Chinese theater, Japanese gagaku, and Indonesian gamelan; the tuning theories of Harry Partch; the protest poetry of Robert Duncan; and the international language Esperanto. "There is nothing labored about all this," wrote Virgil Thomson in 1987; "Lou Harrison is not making plastic roses for funeral parlors. He is simply speaking in many personae and many languages."5
   Harrison’s stylistic path has been less a linear progression than a series of dynamic thrusts—each occasioned by a musical concept, timbre, or tradition that intrigued him at a particular moment (what he calls the "me too" phenomenon), each leading to intensive research and study, and each linked in novel ways to its predecessors. A chronological overview of Harrison’s compositional style6 shows clusters of works building on successive areas of interest. From the late 1930s to the early 1940s, he composed a series of percussion works—for percussion alone, percussion as vocal or dance accompaniment, and percussion as the orchestra in concerti. In the mid to late 1940s, he explored dissonant counterpoint and twelve-tone serialism often with more debt to the style of Carl Ruggles than to that of his own teacher, Arnold Schoenberg.7 In the 1950s, Harrison focused on tuning systems, from septatonic and pentatonic scales in just intonation to his own "Free Style," in which pitches are related mathematically only to their immediate neighbors.8 Trips to Japan, Korea, and Taiwan in 1961 and 1962 prompted him to study and perform Korean and Chinese music on native instruments and to compose works for instruments such as the Korean double reed p’iri and the Chinese cheng (psaltery),9 as well as for ensembles that combine instruments from a variety of cultural traditions. (Pacifika Rondo, composed in 1963, for example, calls for the Korean p’iri and kayagùm [psaltery], the Chinese cheng and sheng [mouth organ], and the Indian jalataranga [tuned bowls] as well as European string, wind, and keyboard instruments.) In 1975, after imitating the sound of the gamelan on Western instruments for years, he embarked on a disciplined study of this traditional Indonesian percussion orchestra with the renowned native teacher, Pak Cokro. Harrison’s works for gamelan, inspired by his studies, now number over fifty and include pieces in traditional style as well as hybrid compositions. Other influences appear consistently throughout his career: dance, for example, or the music of the French Baroque; instrument-building, which he has explored since childhood; and his pacifism, manifest in his many political compositions.
   The object of Harrison’s musical gaming is to project an original and distinctive voice through the creative integration of seemingly incongruous influences. He wanders in what he views as a compositional playground, choosing the elements that strike his fancy at the moment and linking them in new and sometimes whimsical combinations—such as intercultural concerti in which violin, viola, cello, piano, french horn, saxophone, and trumpet are accompanied by gamelan, or conversely, where the Chinese p’i-p’a is accompanied by a Western string orchestra (1997). "Early on I laid out my toys on a wide acreage," Harrison says. He intermingles forms and compositional practices as well: the p’i-p’a concerto includes a medieval European estampie; his Psalter Sonato for Chinese cheng (1961) is written in a Scarlatti-type binary form; and his Piano Trio (1990), Varied Trio (1986–87), and Fourth Symphony (1990), though scored for European instruments, all use gamelan ornamental figuration.
   Cultural pluralism is the hallmark of Harrison’s style, and synthesis is its essence. "Don’t underrate hybrid musics," he wrote, "because that’s all there is."10 For Harrison, diverse styles may coexist within a single composition: serialism finds reconciliation with melody, medievalism with modernism. At the same time, the resultant blend is distinctively personal. "The message," said Virgil Thomson, "is pure Harrison. And that message is of joy, dazzling and serene and even at its most intensely serious not without laughter."11
   The foundation for all of the major elements in Harrison’s music was laid down early in his career, before he left San Francisco in 1942. During high school he traveled each week from his home in Burlingame to sing Gregorian chant at Mission Dolores in San Francisco, and later, as an undergraduate, he studied early instruments and sang in a madrigal ensemble. In the late 1930s he frequented the city’s Chinese opera productions, heard a live Balinese gamelan at the Golden Gate Exposition on Treasure Island,12 and developed close working relationships with modern dancers in San Francisco and Oakland. Beginning in 1935, studies with Henry Cowell (1897–1965) introduced Harrison to the works of Schoenberg as well as a variety of world musics. Cowell, who fostered an experimental, open-minded attitude toward compositional technique, taught Harrison to compose by manipulating small melodic and rhythmic cells, to explore extended keyboard techniques, and to seek new sound media. (Harrison and John Cage would rummage through San Francisco’s automobile junkyards, hardware stores, and import stores together for anything that would ping, bong, or twang; and they spent hours testing the pitch and resonance of flower pots in local nurseries.)
   Harrison read voraciously—sometimes as many as two books a day—on a broad range of musical subjects. By the age of eighteen, he had already studied Plato’s writings on the social theory of music, ancient Chinese musical treatises (including the Li Chi, the classic Book of Rites, which explores, among many other issues, music’s role in society), and a host of historical and theoretical texts on Western music. He routinely borrowed piles of scores from the San Francisco Public Library, ranging from early keyboard music to the latest works of contemporary classical composers: "That was where I fell in love with Schoenberg’s music," he recalls; "The library had a very advanced director at that time, a lovely woman, and I always felt like I was presenting an application to the goddess. But she kept me in everything I needed. I went through all the Spanish organists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I went through all of the Lully and Rameau operas and ballets, and all of the French organ composers—Widor, etc. Plus the usual things: Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Gluck."13 Even Harrison’s later interest in just intonation was piqued in these early years by reading Joseph Yasser’s A Theory of Evolving Tonality (1932).14
   Given the many subcurrents in Harrison’s music, discussions of his work have tended, until recently, to be scattered in a wide variety of specialized sources: writings on intonation systems, percussion music, instrument building, gamelan, or Asian-Western cross-influences. His reputation, too, has often been fragmented. He is known to various constituencies as "the gamelan composer" or "the percussion composer," as a "tuning theorist" or a "harbinger of minimalism."
   Counteracting this eclectic imagery are the frequent references to Harrison as a quintessential "West Coast" composer—a facile oversimplification, yet one that has accumulated a range of connotations evoking enculturated sound-images, whether or not they adequately characterize the work of any individual composer. Harrison’s music reflects influences indigenous to California, especially those stemming from historical patterns of immigration (the strong Chinese presence in San Francisco, the Spanish mission culture, and the influence of Mexico). But his music also articulates more generalized qualities of texture and temporality often linked to the West Coast’s geography and relaxed lifestyle: spaciousness, open textures, a sense of timelessness, and an attraction to surface features. Yet the term "West Coast" has been used at times to dismiss this music rather than to understand it. To characterize Harrison as a "West Coast composer" is to ignore the diversity of his art—the intricate polyphonic textures of his works from the 1940s and early 1950s, for instance, or the animated rhythmic propulsion of his many estampies and percussion works. At the same time, even his most complex contrapuntal pieces are marked by a characteristic lyricism, and his most rhythmic ones by a sense of spaciousness. In the broadest sense, the West Coast heritage invites a mixing of influences, an approach Harrison finds ideally suited to his nature.