In Notes, September 1999:
Lou Harrison: Composing a World. By Leta E.
Miller and Fredric Lieberman. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998. [xiv, 385 p. + 1
compact disc. ISBN 0-19-5110226. $35.]
"To those of us who glory in Lou Harrison's
willful and wonderful shunning of musical
convention, the appearance of Composing a World
is potentially disturbing. Harrison has, after
all, consistently de-emphasized "the role of the
individual [in] his personal conduct
[,] ... has expended little effort in
self-promotion and has opted for the isolation
of Aptos [Calif.] over the stress, but
high visibility, of city life" (p. 186).
Harrison has therefore become a hero of the
counterculture; and, as a consequence, much
previous commentary on this archetypally West
Coast figure-Heide von Gunden's rather staid
Music of Lou Harrison (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow
Press, 1995) notwithstanding-has tended to be as
colorful as its subject. The most obvious
example of such literature is Peter Garland's
delightful Lou Harrison Reader (Santa Fe:
Soundings Press, 1987), a deliberately
antischolarly nonfestschrift. But now we are
presented with a large hardback book,
beautifully produced by a major academic
publisher and written by two university
professors: is Harrison being appropriated by
the establishment or, worse still, neatly
packaged and marketed for mass consumption? The
answer, which comes as a blessed relief, is a
resounding no. Indeed, far from academicizing or
otherwise constraining Harrison by placing him
between its solid covers, Composing a World
seemingly manages the impossible in striking a
perfect balance between convention and alterity,
seriousness and humor, scholarship and
celebration, erudition and readability,
macrocosm and microcosm."
"How, then, has this minor musicological
miracle been achieved? The key perhaps lies in
the authors' immensely sensible and selfless
decision to take their lead from Harrison
himself: rather than being inhibited by his
multifaceted world, Leta Miller and Frederic
Lieberman have turned it to their advantage.
This tactical stroke of genius manifests itself
in two important ways. First, just as Harrison
has been unusually committed throughout his
creative life to artistic collaboration-with
dancers, choreographers, instrument makers,
performers, and even other composers-so have
Miller and Lieberman produced an almost seamless
coauthored text. Indeed, this authorial
collaboration and cooperation goes even further:
a major source of primary material is a series
of interviews conducted with Harrison and his
associates; chapter 8, "The Gamelan Ideal:
Imagined, Imported, Invented," has a third
coauthor, Jonathon Grasse; the very substantial
"Catalog of the Works of Lou Harrison" (pp.
267-315) was compiled by Miller and Charles
Hanson, Harrison's archivist; after the book was
drafted, Harrison himself "read and discussed
its contents with us, correcting errors or
misconceptions but never attempting to censor
what we had written" (p. xiv); and, perhaps most
remarkably, in recognition that "we have
doubtless erred ourselves at times either by
omission or commission," Miller and Lieberman
"welcome responses from readers" (p. xiii). This
approach works splendidly to misappropriate a
remark concerning Henry Cowell's view of world
musics, "synthesis frequently yields new
expressions of beauty" (p. 60)."
"Second, Harrison's fecundity in a dazzling
array of disciplines (Carter Scholz describes
him as "the nearest thing to a Renaissance man I
have ever met" [p. x]) is matched by the
variety of topics covered here. Significantly,
the three chapters that make up part 1,
"Biography," occupy less than one-fifth of the
book's pages, whereas nearly one-half is taken
up by the nine chapters of part 2, "The Artist's
World." Here we encounter highly readable, yet
extremely detailed, discussions of "Turning and
Temperament" (chap. 5), the terminology and
techniques of gamelan (8), and "Assembling the
Pieces: The Compositional Process" (11). These
are complemented by further chapters addressing
"Music and the Dance" (4), instrument building
and adaptation (6), "Lou Harrison and East Asian
Music" (7), the composer's views on and
involvement in politics (9) and gay issues (10),
and "Not Just Music: Criticism, Poetry, Art, and
Typography" (12). Potential duplications among
these topics have been carefully avoided, as
have overlaps with the biographical chapters.
These latter, in turn, contain much fascinating
and important material not simply on Harrison
but also on his milieu. We learn a great deal
about Cowell and John Cage (to name but two) and
about the profound differences between East
Coast and West Coast life in the thirties,
forties, and fifties. Moreover, the breadth of
topics is matched by a richness of supplementary
material: in addition to its voluminous prose,
Composing a World contains many figures and
music examples, a generous selection of endnotes
and appendixes, and a seventy-four-minute
compact disc, whose diverse contents are
purposefully integrated with the authors'
arguments."
"Inevitably, though, it is Harrison's
remarkable music that commands most attention.
To the average musician or music lover,
Harrison-like his mentor, Cowell-must appear
rather bewildering in his salmagundic approach
to style. Typical examples include the Piano
Concerto with Selected Orchestra (1985) and the
Concerto for P'i-p'a with String Orchestra
(1997). The former touches on Brahmsian
counterpoint and Javanese garapan, while the
latter's quadripartite second movement, "Bits
and Pieces," includes sections titled "Troika"
and "Neapolitan." Both works contain a wild
"Estampie" or Stampede." If this seems eclectic
to the point of eccentricity, we need to listen
with different ears, for as Miller and Lieberman
rightly note, "the music's diversity is its most
defining characteristic: the musical-cultural
mosaic is precisely its essence" (p. 254).
Harrison's own response would no doubt be that
"We have been trained ... to value
standardization over diversity (p. 103), a
comment as applicable to matters of style as to
tuning and temperament. Hence, too, Harrison's
"love of acoustically pure, nonbeating
intervals" (ibid.), to which he has been devoted
since 1949, when Virgil Thomson passed on the
first edition of Harry Partch's groundbreaking
Genesis of a Music (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1949). Some of the astonishing
results of Harrison's experiments, such as the
Two Improvisations in Greek Tunings (early
seventies) and David Doty's electronic
realization of the Simfony in Free Style (1955),
can be heard on the compact disc."
"Of course, one has a few minor quibbles. For
instance, in what is possibly this coauthored
book's only visible prose seam, the text has a
tendency to lurch unpredictably from the
formality of "Harrison" to the chumminess of
"Lou." And one wonders whether "aleatoric
composition" on page 53 is quite the right
phrase to characterize the style Harrison
rejected when he returned to the West Coast in
the fifties. But overall, this book is a
wonderful and most welcome celebration of a
remarkable artistic polymath. Although Harrison
"[i]n the fullness of eighties ... may
no longer dance with the grape of the sylph he
was in his twenties.... he still dances through
life with his hands" (p. 250). Thanks to the
extraordinary thoroughness and sensitivity of
Miller and Lieberman, Composing a World grants
us the enormous pleasure of dancing with
him."
David Nicholls
Keele University