Lou Harrison

American Musical Maverick

Bill Alves, Brett Campbell

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780253026439
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

A biography on the legendary gay American composer of contemporary classical music. American composer Lou Harrison (1917–2003) is perhaps best known for challenging the traditional musical establishment along with his contemporaries and close colleagues: composers John Cage, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Leonard Bernstein; Living Theater founder, Judith Malina; and choreographer, Merce Cunningham. Today, musicians from Bang on a Can to Björk are indebted to the cultural hybrids Harrison pioneered half a century ago. His explorations of new tonalities at a time when the rest of the avant-garde considered such interests heretical set the stage for minimalism and musical post-modernism. His propulsive rhythms and ground-breaking use of percussion have inspired choreographers from Merce Cunningham to Mark Morris, and he is considered the godfather of the so-called "world music" phenomenon that has invigorated Western music with global sounds over the past two decades. In this biography, authors Bill Alves and Brett Campbell trace Harrison's life and career from the diverse streets of San Francisco, where he studied with music experimentalist Henry Cowell and Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, and where he discovered his love for all things non-traditional (Beat poetry, parties, and men); to the competitive performance industry in New York, where he subsequently launched his career as a composer, conducted Charles Ives's Third Symphony at Carnegie Hall (winning the elder composer a Pulitzer Prize), and experienced a devastating mental breakdown; to the experimental arts institution of Black Mountain College where he was involved in the first "happenings" with Cage, Cunningham, and others; and finally, back to California, where he would become a strong voice in human rights and environmental campaigns and compose some of the most eclectic pieces of his career. "Lou Harrison's avuncular personality and tuneful music coaxed affectionate regard from all who knew him, and that affection is evident on every page of Alves and Campbell's new biography. Eminently readable, it puts Harrison at the center of American music: he knew everyone important and was in touch with everybody, from mentors like Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg and Charles Ives and Harry Partch and Virgil Thomson to peers like John Cage to students like Janice Giteck and Paul Dresher. He was larger than life in person, and now he is larger than life in history as well." —Kyle Gann, author of Charles Ives's Concord: Essays After a Sonata

PART 1

Oregon Trails

By the time he turned eighty in May 1997, Lou Harrison had reached a pinnacle few American musicians ever attain. San Francisco mayor Willie Brown declared June 14, 1996, Lou Harrison Day.¹ Across the street from City Hall, at a concert at Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco Symphony music director Michael Tilson Thomas read Brown’s proclamation to the audience at the orchestra’s American Mavericks Festival, which honored Harrison and his friends and fellow music pioneers Henry Cowell and John Cage. There, just steps from the War Memorial Opera House where, fifty-seven years before, Harrison had received his first orchestral performance, Thomas conducted several Harrison compositions, including Canticle #3, a now classic composition for percussion ensemble that San Franciscans had first heard a mile and a half away at the Fairmont Hotel’s auditorium in 1941, played by Harrison, Cage, and a group of amateur percussionist friends.

In New York, where Harrison lived for a decade, Lincoln Center presented an eightieth birthday exhibition of Harrison memorabilia, a solo recital by pianist Michael Boriskin, and the premiere of Harrison’s Concerto for Pipa and String Orchestra. A concert at the 92nd Street Y presented Harrison’s music for the “American Gamelan,” a set of percussion instruments Harrison had designed and built with his life partner, Bill Colvig. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the country’s most innovative dance group, led by Mark Morris, performed three evenings’ worth of dances set to Harrison’s music, including Rhymes with Silver, featuring superstar cellist Yo-Yo Ma, which had debuted earlier that year in Berkeley.

In between the start of his artistic life, living on the edge of poverty, and his celebration as one of America’s leading composers, Harrison helped bring American music from the generation of fearsome modernist iconoclasts to the generation of world music and minimalism. In 1930s San Francisco, he helped to pioneer music for percussion ensemble as well as a DIY mentality that extended to forming his own band and even making his own instruments long before classical composers did such things. His early explorations in noise, global music cultures, early music, and unusual musical tunings also anticipated the larger world by decades, as did his countercultural convictions of pacifism and open homosexuality. An unrepentant eclectic in a time that celebrated singular artistic visions, he composed propulsive dance scores and unabashedly modal melodies alongside his experiments in atonality. Also unlike many modernists, Harrison never thought of his many innovations as revolutionary musical statements, just the next potentially rewarding creative avenue to explore, often inspired by mentors and books that opened his imagination to new possibilities.

Like other ambitious radical artists, he headed for the headwaters of American new music, New York City, but despite his formative connections and experiences there, he found a musical and personal dead end. He returned to California, leaving the musical mainstream both geographically and musically for the quiet solace of nature and a perspective looking out over the Pacific. His trajectory between these extremes was unlike that of any of his contemporaries—to outsiders, he seemed to have suddenly abandoned a seemingly promising career to pursue, in near isolation, eccentric interests in Asian music and tuning. At a time when the musical avant-garde exploded with futurist electronics, wild experimentation, and inscrutable complexity, Lou Harrison vacated “the overcrowded city space of modern music,” said New Yorker critic Alex Ross, “to camp out in a desert landscape of long drones and mesmeric patterns.”² A troubled life and a long wait for acceptance never shook Harrison from his stalwart faith in transcendent melody, a resolutely westward view (away from Europe and toward Asia), and an ideal of harmonic purity in music as well as society.

Through his isolation, he came to value the joys of making music with friends over a career in search of conventional markers of success. By the gentle gravitational attraction of his ebullient personality, Harrison drew a steadily widening circle of sympathetic fellow travelers to his side in his journey, often creating a supportive community to perform and listen to the new sounds he was conceiving. His contagious enthusiasm for ideas, artistic and beyond, inspired devotion and support from key figures who helped him throughout his life, because he made so many of those around him imagine that they could do what he did: continuously embrace the joy of exploring new horizons, and continuously reinvent himself throughout his long and fruitful life.

By the 1980s, Harrison’s recordings were winning legions of listeners beyond the hermetic Western avant-garde aficionados, and his multiculturalism was moving beyond the esoteric to the mainstream. At the San Francisco Symphony’s 1996 American Mavericks Festival, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas placed Harrison’s music squarely in the lineage of American music, alongside his mentors and musicians he influenced, from Charles Ives to John Cage, and even with Bay Area rock legends the Grateful Dead.

Throughout his long and meandering creative journey, Harrison never stopped learning and exploring, and the acclaim of the Davies Symphony Hall audience, Deadheads and all, showed that this path had found a surprisingly wide range of listeners. And that path’s direction was set nearly eighty years before, several hundred miles up the Pacific Coast, where his mother surrounded him with the elegance of Asian art and his father read James Joyce out loud to the family.

1

THE SILVER COURT (1917–1934)

Whenever Lou Harrison came home, it was like stepping into another world. From as early in childhood as he could remember, wherever he looked in his family’s apartment in Portland, Oregon’s Silver Court Apartments, young Lou saw colorful paintings from various Asian cultures mounted on walls covered by Japanese grass wallpaper. Chinese carved teak furniture perched on Persian rugs, colorful Japanese lanterns dangled from the ceiling, cloisonné objects filled the mantel, and the rooms boasted other artifacts from Asia and the Middle East. Compared to the prosaic furnishings and fixtures of the rest of the young Harrison’s post-World War I Pacific Northwest life, his home was an almost magical place.

The exotic decor sprang from the ambitions of his mother. Born in Seattle in 1890, Calline Silver grew up in the Alaskan frontier with her sister, Lounette. Despite these rough circumstances, their father saw to it that both girls had music lessons, at a time when music was an important marker of good breeding and refinement for young women. After her father died and Cal raised herself from this rustic beginning to a middle-class ideal, she became a woman of strong will and determination, qualities that her son would inherit. She married affable, fair-skinned Clarence Harrison, a first-generation American born in 1882, whose Norwegian father had, like many immigrants, changed his surname from exotic (de Nësja) to blend-in conventional: Harrison.

Like many upwardly mobile West Coasters, Cal Harrison was attracted to the allure of Asia and regarded exotic artifacts as exemplars of refined taste. Such decorations were common in Portland homes since the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial and American Pacific Exposition and Oriental Fair. Japan alone spent a million dollars on its exhibit, which featured exotic (to American eyes) arts and crafts, sparking a local infatuation with Asian art and culture. Many middle- and upper-class houses boasted “Oriental Rooms” festooned with Asian and Middle Eastern furniture and art, “Turkish corners,” and other symbols of what many Americans still regarded as the mysterious East. That Pacific exoticism also manifested in music. When Lou was born on May 14, 1917, Hawaiian music was the most popular genre in America. Radio broadcasts of Hawaiian slide guitars and the clacks of his mother’s mah-jongg tiles supplied the soundtrack to some of his earliest memories—and inspired his final great composition eight decades later.¹

The Silver Court’s surrounding Irvington neighborhood in northeast Portland had been developed as an exclusive enclave only twenty years before Lou was born. Connected to downtown Portland’s cultural riches by trolley, the “streetcar park” originally catered to the toffs (including lumber barons). During Lou’s childhood, however, the changing neighborhood’s new Queen Anne revival, Craftsman, and Prairie School-style homes welcomed more middle-class people like the Harrisons. They had built the handsome Silver Court Apartments (which still stands at 22nd and Hancock streets) shortly after Lou’s birth, when Calline received a substantial inheritance from her family in Ohio, who owned a manufacturing business; her grandfather’s widow’s death in 1910 led to a partition of the estate, and the Harrisons used their share to build the three-story, thirty-unit apartment building. The money allowed them to hire a family to take care of the apartments, including their own.

They also bought the tire business where Lou’s father worked, inculcating a lasting family tension: Cal never let Clarence forget that it was her money that put him in business. “It was mother’s belief that the man should wear the skirts,” Lou wrote in his journal many years later.² After all, the apartment building they lived in and managed was called Silver Court, not Harrison House—and it later seemed to Lou that his father was always on trial.

Clarence and Calline did share a love of cars—she was reputedly the first woman to drive across Portland’s Steel Bridge—and the family enjoyed then-common Sunday drives and picnics in the country. They appreciated the scenic beauty—waterfalls, the spectacular Columbia River Gorge, Mt. Hood (which dominated the eastern skyline), and nearby Mt. Tabor—and gave Harrison and his brother, Bill (born three years later), a lasting love of the outdoors.

Calline had intended to name the baby for her sister Lounette, but “when they discovered I was a male, they cut off the ‘nette.’ I became Lou, so I’m not Lou-vig, or Louis, or any of that, just plain Lou.”³ Like their apartment building, Lou was also named for his mother’s maiden name, giving his name a uniqueness that was later commemorated in the title of his ballet Rhymes with Silver. In childhood, though, Lou Silver Harrison was mostly called by his nickname, Buster. Harrison never met his grandparents and had little contact with extended family during childhood, so his parents exerted the greatest family influence on their eldest son. Their two most persistent legacies were his lifelong loves: arts and reading. Aunt Lounette played violin, often accompanied by Calline on the piano, and little Buster would dance.

He took the stage early. Calline worked in a Portland beauty shop, and one of her regular customers, Verna Felton, ran a small theater company that in 1920 was producing Jean Webster’s 1912 play Daddy-Long-Legs.⁴ They needed a young boy for a silent walk-on role as a little orphan, and Calline volunteered two-year-old Buster, who, encouraged by candy, improvised his lines—for the irrepressible little Lou, it turned out not to be a silent role after all—and won the audience’s heart, getting his picture in the daily Oregonian newspaper and an invitation to reprise the role on a Northwest tour and in another production in Washington.⁵ The experience gave Harrison both a taste for performance and a deep set of separation anxieties that never left him.⁶

Aged three

I was on stage

& touring with the troupe—

the child’s still me in my rounds and duties

The stage

was large, the scene

was dim, the actress was,

I knew, woman my mother

much loved.

frightened

by commotion

in the hall—applause

laughter?—loud, so many grown-ups

clapping!

So large

the stage! the plot

unknown, the lines unsure,

& the scenes done as reverse glass

paintings.

So much

for all the pain—

costumes and glitter keep

our solemn frivolity

alive.⁷

LOST TREASURES

Along with the Asian art in her home and the European art in the Silver Court lobby, Calline imparted artistic culture to her children. Just two and a half miles away and over the Broadway or Steel bridges across the Willamette River that separated the Irvington neighborhood from downtown’s theaters and studios, the city’s relatively rich classical music, dance, and theater scenes provided an outlet for Calline’s ambitions for her family’s artistic enlightenment.

Oregonians liked to say that when the pioneers moved west over the Lewis and Clark Trail, the settlers who wanted gold turned left and headed for California, while those who wanted to set up a culture turned right and brought their schools, pianos, and other cultural trappings to Oregon. Portland fancied itself as more cultured than other West Coast ...