Artist Biographies: Lou Harrison

Lou Harrison was born in Portland, Oregon in 1917, but spent his formative years in California where his family moved when he was 9. His musical style was shaped by the San Francisco of the 1930's. There he studied composition with Henry Cowell; accompanied such dancer/choreographers as Carol Beals, Bonnie Bird, Bella Lewitzky and Lester Horton; and staged high profile percussion concerts with John Cage. Harrison and Cage spent hours rummaging through junkyards seeking out found "instruments" that would ring or resonate with various musical qualities. By the time Harrison left San Francisco in 1942, he had composed over 175 works, including several 12-tone compositions and even some quarter tone pieces. He spent the year 1942-43 in Los Angeles where he studied with Arnold Schoenberg. He then followed Lester Horton and his dance troupe to New York, reviving his association with Cage and Cowell, and developed a close friendship with Virgil Thomson. Through Thomson, Harrison would ultimately contribute over 300 music reviews to the New York Herald Tribune. He also wrote articles for Modern Music, Listen, and View, and published an extended essay About Carl Ruggles. In 1946, Harrison conducted the premiere of Ives' Third Symphony which he had edited from the manuscript score. The following year, Ives was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for this work which he shared with Harrison.

Despite the successes and productivity, Lou found the noise and stress of New York depleting and unhealthy. He sought respite in a more rural environment through a faculty position at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. There, he completed several earlier compositions and wrote a host of new ones, among them his chamber opera Rapunzel – an aria which won a 20th Century masterpiece award, presented by Stravinsky in Rome in 1954.

Harrison moved back to California in 1953, settling in the (then) rural village of Aptos where he has lived ever since. His return to the west coast marked a renewal of his ties to Asia. During trips to Japan, Korea and Taiwan in 1961-62, he studied native instruments including the cheng and the p'iri. Back in California, he enthusiastically presented concerts and lectures on Korean and Chinese music, and experimented in his own works with hybrid instrumental ensembles.

In 1975, Harrison met the renowned gamelan master and teacher K.R.T. Wasitodiningrat (Pak Cokro) and began an intensive study of traditional Javanese gamelan techniques. He soon began to explore ideas of cross fertilization, adapting the concerto principle to the Indonesian orchestra by composing works for western soloists accompanied by gamelan, and later using gamelan melodic practices in compositions for western instruments.

In recent years, however, Harrison has increasingly turned to composing for western ensembles. Between 1975 and 1996 he wrote three symphonies, a piano concerto, and a host of chamber compositions.

Harrison was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1973, and has, over the years, received numerous awards and commissions including two Guggenheims, two

Rockefeller grants, a Fulbright fellowship, and three honorary doctorates.

In April of 1999, he received the American Humanist Award between premieres of a collaborative with dancer/choreographer Mark Morris (Rhymes with Silver) and A Concerto for P'i -p'a with String Orchestra commissioned by Lincoln Center.

In August of 2000, Harrison received the MacDowell Medal of Honor at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

The Cabrillo Music Festival will present Harrison's opera Rapunzel in 2001, and the Lincoln Center Summer Festival will present his opera Young Caesar in July of 2002.