EARLY WEST COAST YEARS (1917–1943)

   Lou Harrison was born in Portland, Oregon, on May 14, 1917, but spent his formative years in northern California, where his family relocated when he was nine. The Harrisons moved from one California town to another almost annually between 1926 and 1934: Woodland, Sacramento, Stockton, Berkeley, San Francisco, Los Gatos, Redwood City, Belmont, and Burlingame.15 Lou and his younger brother Bill had little opportunity to develop long-lasting friendships. Instead Lou carried a small trunk of mementos from place to place: "It was my little life. Since I ... had no chance to have a peer group or any roots ... I made an imaginary world and carried it around in paper and books."16 To this day, Harrison is a collector and accumulator—of books, artwork, and his own programs, scores, and reviews. Unlike many other composers, he has not destroyed notebooks, sketches, or early compositions, preserving the history of individual works as well as the development of his compositional process. When faced with a new commission, Harrison frequently revisits old pieces, at times selecting fragments from unfinished works and at other times refashioning completed pieces in new guises: "The gods are always kind and leave us with things to do," he says.17 He has kept many volumes of his writings as well—his early poetry, for instance, and even general musings on a wide range of topics, both musical and non-musical.    Harrison’s mother, Calline ("Cal") Lillian Silver Harrison, assured her sons a thorough grounding in the performing arts by sending them regularly to dance and music lessons, and encouraging their interest in the theater. Lou first appeared on the stage at the age of two-and-a-half in a production of Jean Webster’s Daddy Long Legs, and even toured the Northwest with the Portland stock company that mounted the show.18 (His improvisatory antics on the stage inspired delighted commentary from newspaper reviewers.) Cal also gave her sons an ecumenical religious training, changing denominations whenever they moved—and sometimes more often than that. Harrison also attributes to his mother his political consciousness, his embrace of racial and cultural diversity, and his love of Asian art. ("Mom also gave me her gene Xq28, which predisposes me to like other males," he announced in a 1997 talk; "It works too.")19
   After graduating from Burlingame High School in December 1934, Harrison attended San Francisco State College (now University) for three semesters, where he studied french horn and clarinet, took up harpsichord and recorder, and sang in several vocal ensembles. Throughout his San Francisco years he performed Renaissance and Baroque music on early instruments and wrote compositions for harpsichord, clavichord, recorder, and other historical instruments, among them a frequently-performed set of six harpsichord sonatas.20 Over the years Harrison has also built replicas of early instruments, including two clavichords and several versions of the ancient Greek aulos, efforts that set the stage for his later large-scale instrument-building projects (many completed in collaboration with his partner, Bill Colvig)— including harps, metallophones, Chinese and Korean instruments, and three gamelan.
   Pre-classical styles and formal structures have informed Harrison’s music ever since these San Francisco experiences: he has written sarabandes (several works from the 1930s), ductias (Suite for Symphonic Strings, 1960; Rhymes with Silver, 1996), and a conductus (Suite for Piano, 1943), as well as a dozen estampies (in works from 1960 to 1997)—lively medieval dances characterized by whirling melodies set against a rhythmic percussion accompaniment.
   A seminal event in Harrison’s career was his enrollment in the spring of 1935 in Henry Cowell’s course "Music of the Peoples of the World" at the University of California Extension in San Francisco. It was here that Harrison first heard gamelan music,21 from recordings that Cowell had brought back from his studies in 1931–32 at the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv (directed from 1906–33 by Erich von Hornbostel). The following autumn Harrison began private composition lessons with Cowell,22 who became (and would remain) one of the strongest musical influences in Harrison’s life. In addition to encouraging Harrison to explore new instrumental resources, Cowell taught his students the importance of melody and gave them guided exercises in writing diverse forms of counterpoint.23 He also helped Harrison forge important professional relationships, recommending him for a position as dance accompanist at Mills College24 and facilitating his interactions with Arnold Schoenberg, Edgard Varèse, Carl Ruggles, and Charles Ives.
   On March 25, 1936, Harrison wrote to Ives at Cowell’s suggestion: "I am a student at State College in San Francisco. It seems that there are favorable opportunities to perform your works on what we have as student recitals and in theory and history classes."25 Ives obliged by sending two piano sonatas, and in December 1936, after additional correspondence and requests, had his nephew Chester Ives send Harrison a crate of photostats that included most of Ives’s chamber music, songs, and several orchestral works. Harrison studied these pieces at the piano almost daily over a ten-year period. Despite the tentative nature of this initial contact, Harrison would eventually play an important role in the restoration and dissemination of Ives’s music, editing several works after he moved to New York in 1943. He orchestrated Ives’s song, They are There! and edited the Third Symphony, First Piano Sonata, and Second String Quartet. Working from a corrupt source, Harrison also reconstructed a portion of the Robert Browning Overture with such accuracy that when the original score of the work finally surfaced, the reconstruction was found to be nearly identical to the original.
   Among the other friendships instigated by Cowell was that between Harrison and John Cage. Early in the summer of 1938 Cage appeared unannounced at Harrison’s San Francisco apartment. He had sought out Harrison at Cowell’s suggestion: "I knew that [Lou] shared with me the love of the modern dance," Cage recalled many years later, "and I needed a job."26 As Cowell suspected, the two men found much in common and developed a close collaboration as well as a lifelong friendship. Harrison recommended Cage to the dancer and choreographer Bonnie Bird, who was seeking an accompanist for her classes at the Cornish School in Seattle (a job Cage held for two years),27 and made sure that Mills College, where Harrison was on the staff, invited Cage to its summer festivals in 1939 and 1940. (According to Bird’s biographer, the Cornish position was first offered to Harrison, who declined.)28 During these summer festivals and after Cage’s return to San Francisco in 1940, the two men staged high-profile percussion concerts using a variety of novel instruments. For one of these performances at the California Club in 1941, they even wrote a joint composition: the percussion quartet Double Music.29
   Harrison and Cage’s compositions for percussion were an outgrowth of their collaborations with modern dancers.30 In San Francisco, Harrison wrote music for Carol Beals and Lenore Peters Job; at Mills he collaborated with Tina Flade, Marian van Tuyl, and Los Angeles choreographer Lester Horton, who spent two summer sessions in Oakland with his assistant, the now renowned Bella Lewitzky. Harrison even danced in several staged productions—at the War Memorial Opera House (where he played the part of Winter in Harvey Raab’s opera Ming-Yi), at the Curran Theater (in Changing World ,for which he also wrote the score and helped with the choreography), and at the Lucie Stern Grove (in Green Mansions, where he played the role of Abel, dancing to his own music and performing in the percussion ensemble).31    Harrison also wrote percussion music for the concert hall. Among his works from this period are a number of concerti for solo instrument and percussion, including one for flute (1939), which is performed frequently and has been recorded three times, and an equally popular one for violin (completed in 1959).32 He also began a mass for voices and percussion, occasioned by Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 (although he changed its scoring to trumpet, harp, and strings in 1952). The opening motive in the "Kyrie" is his "cry of anguish" over the impending war, the "Gloria" his plea for world unity with an outburst of bells.33 This Mass to St. Anthony also reflects Harrison’s interest in Native American and California mission music, evidenced by other works throughout his career (Sanctus, 1940; Strict Songs, 1955; Fourth Symphony, 1990).    The many percussion works Harrison composed in the 1930s–40s not only have formed an essential core of the present-day percussion repertoire, but also have served as a continuing influence on his later compositions. In addition to substituting the percussion orchestra for the traditional orchestra in concerti,34 Harrison has often called on melodic instruments for percussive effects: tapping on the body of the instrument (String Quartet Set, 1979), beating the strings of a double bass with drumsticks below the bridge (Solstice, 1950), or striking rapid clusters on the keyboard with an octave bar (Concerto for Organ with Percussion Orchestra, 1973; Grand Duo, 1988; Piano Concerto, 1985). The percussion ensemble also served as a backdrop to his work with gamelan after 1975.    By the time Harrison left San Francisco in 1942 he had composed over 175 works (two of them published in the New Music Quarterly),35 including several twelve-tone compositions and even some quarter-tone pieces. He spent the year 1942–43 in Los Angeles, where he provided piano accompaniments for the dance studio of Lester Horton (an experimental West Coast choreographer who organized the first multi-racial dance troupe in the nation and explored cross-cultural themes in his works).36 Harrison also taught Labanotation, music history, and musical form to UCLA dance students, and he studied composition with Arnold Schoenberg. In contrast to Cage’s experience,37 Harrison found Schoenberg both supportive and helpful. Schoenberg praised Harrison’s published piano works during weekly seminars, helped him find his way through a compositional block, and cited him in a list of promising young composers in a letter to Roy Harris in 1945.38    In the spring of 1943 Horton moved his dance company to New York. Harrison followed some months later, initiating a ten-year residence on the East Coast that rounded out his musical education even as it proved to be the most difficult period of his life. Though he was successful professionally, Harrison’s New York years were for the most part troubled and unhappy, convincing him to return to the West. He ultimately recognized that he was unsuited to urban life on either coast and found a permanent residence in the quiet California coastal town of Aptos, about eighty-five miles south of San Francisco.