Lou Harrison
Born May 14, 1917, Portland, Oregon.
Died February 2, 2003, Lafayette, Indiana.
Pipa Concerto (1997)
Long before he visited Asia for the first time, Lou Harrison had already incorporated the sounds of its music into his own work. Born on the West Coast, Harrison began, with his earliest works, to move toward a synthesis of the musical cultures bordering the Pacific. He never felt it necessary to acquire a European pedigree. His first musical mentor was the American pioneer Henry Cowell, who urged him to explore the world's many musics (Harrison took Cowell's course Music of the Peoples of the World in 1935) and encouraged him to find his own style by uniting disparate influences. (“Don't put hybrids down,” Harrison said in a BBC interview, “because there isn't anything else.”)
Harrison began to build his own instruments, starting with the “tack piano,” an upright with thumbtacks driven into the hammers. Cowell introduced him to John Cage, a kindred spirit, and the two worked together on a repertory of pieces for “junkyard” percussion ensemble—automobile brake drums, coffee cans, plumber's pipes, and flower pots. Harrison's own early works, mostly scored for everyday Western instruments, imitated the “honeyed thunder” of the gamelan that he first heard on Cowell's records. (He saw a real gamelan for the first time at the Golden Gate Exposition on Treasure Island in 1939.)
Harrison studied briefly with Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles and later moved to New York, where he was a music critic and won the admiration of Virgil Thomson. (At various times, he also worked as a florist, record clerk, poet, dance critic, playwright, and music copyist.) While in New York, he edited several of Ives's works for publication and conducted the world premiere of Ives's Third Symphony (in 1947, nearly fifty years after its composition).
On March 25, 1961, the forty-three-year-old composer boarded a freighter for Tokyo to attend the East-West Music Encounter Conference. As the recipient of a Rockefeller grant, for two years he immersed himself in a culture he had only imagined, studying Korean court music and Chinese classical music. After that, his own work snapped into focus, particularly in its quest for a new synthesis, not only of musical sensibilities, but also of Asian and Western instruments. He immediately wrote for a chamber orchestra of both kinds of instruments in Pacifika rondo, a work of staggering multiculturalism that also incorporates Mexican and Spanish colonial music, serialism, Chinese court music, and “common Atlantic modernism.” (In his vocal music, Harrison set Esperanto, the invented language that strives for a similar union of the different languages of the world.) In the early 1970s, he began to collaborate with William Colvig on the construction of an “American” gamelan. Harrison also has built jade flutes and entire families of instruments based on oriental wind and string models. In all its many phases, Harrison's music is, by his own definition, essentially “a song and a dance”—a view he owes to Cowell, who taught him that music around the world is primarily melody with a rhythmic accompaniment.
The pipa concerto, Harrison's last large-scale work, places a single Asian instrument against the Western symphony orchestra. Even without the mixture of disparate instruments that characterizes many of Harrison's earlier pieces, this concerto is one of his great unclassifiable, hybrid works. Although the opening movement suggests the formality of a “classical” concerto, the following movements are truly sui generis. The second movement is a highly varied mini-suite that treats the pipa as a cameo soloist in different settings—a pseudo balalaika in the “Troika,” a percussion instrument in “Three Sharing” (along with cello and double bass, all of them tapping out rhythmic patterns while the orchestra rests), an expressive Chinese soloist in “Wind and Plum,” and a make-believe mandolin in “Neapolitan.” The third-movement lament offers one of Harrison's characteristically generous melodic lines—what he regularly called “the audience's take-home pay.” The concerto finale is an estampie, a dancelike form from fourteenth-century France and Italy that here becomes a surprising virtuoso showpiece for the ancient Chinese lute.
Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
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