Lou Silver Harrison (May 14, 1917 – February 2, 2003) was an American composer, music critic, music theorist, painter, and inventor of special musical instruments. Early in his career, Harrison wrote music with unusual, very modern sounds similar to his teacher and contemporary, Henry Cowell. Later, he included music from other cultures in his work. For example, he composed pieces for Javanese-style gamelan instruments after meeting the famous gamelan musician Kanjeng Notoprojo. Harrison worked with his partner, William Colvig, to create his own musical groups and instruments. Together, they are now recognized as founders of the American gamelan movement and world music. They are also joined by composers Harry Partch and Claude Vivier, and ethnomusicologist Colin McPhee.

Most of Harrison's music and instruments are written using just intonation, a system different from the more common equal temperament. This made him one of the most well-known composers to explore microtones, which are very small musical intervals. He was also among the first composers to write music in the international language Esperanto and one of the first to include themes about homosexuality in his compositions.

Early life and career

Harrison was born on May 14, 1917, in Portland, Oregon, to parents Clarence "Pop" Harrison and Calline Lillian "Cal" Harrison (née Silver). His family had money from past inheritances but faced financial difficulties before the Great Depression. Harrison lived in Portland for nine years before moving with his parents and younger brother, Bill, to several places in Northern California, including Sacramento, Stockton, and finally San Francisco. At the time, San Francisco had a large Asian American population, and Harrison was often influenced by Eastern culture. His mother decorated their home with Japanese lanterns, Persian rugs, and replicas of ancient Chinese artifacts. He was exposed to a wide variety of music, such as Cantonese opera, Hawaiian kīkākila, jazz, norteño, and classical music. He later said he heard more traditional Chinese music than European music by the time he was an adult.

His parents supported his early interest in music. Cal paid for piano lessons, and Pop drove him to study traditional Gregorian chant at Mission San Francisco de Asís for a short time. However, the family moved often in search of work, making it hard for Harrison to form long-term friendships. He often felt like an outsider and relied on his own judgment to make artistic choices. He grew more distant from Western artistic styles and focused on self-education, spending time at the library reading books on topics like zoology and Confucianism. He read two books a day and connected different influences throughout his life, which later appeared in his compositions. His loneliness as a child may have contributed to his dislike of city life.

Harrison discovered he was gay while attending Burlingame High School after developing feelings for a male classmate. By the time he graduated in December 1934 at age 17, he had told his family and decided not to hide his identity, which was rare for gay men at that time.

After graduating in 1934, Harrison enrolled at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University). He took Henry Cowell’s course on “Music of the Peoples of the World” through UC Berkeley Extension and became one of Cowell’s most enthusiastic students. Cowell later appointed him as a class assistant. Harrison attended a performance of Cowell’s piano and percussion piece in 1935 and called it one of the most extraordinary works he had ever heard. He later used similar techniques in his own music. In 1935, Harrison began private composition lessons with Cowell, forming a lasting professional and personal friendship that lasted until Cowell’s death in 1965. Cowell published Harrison’s music through his publishing house, New Music Edition. When Cowell was imprisoned in 1942 for a morals charge related to homosexual acts, Harrison publicly supported his release and visited him for lessons through the prison bars.

At age 19, Harrison became an interim professor of music at Mills College in Oakland from 1936 to 1939. In 1941, he moved to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he taught Laban movement analysis and played piano accompaniment. He studied theory with Arnold Schoenberg, which increased his interest in twelve-tone technique. He later said, “It was no jump at all to learn to write twelve-tone music; Henry [Cowell] taught me.” At this time, Harrison created percussive works using unusual materials, such as car brake drums and garbage cans. Few of his surviving pieces, like Prelude for Grandpiano (1937), followed the twelve-tone style. He used tone clusters in his piano works, similar to Cowell’s methods, but introduced an “octave bar” to make the sound louder and more gong-like. His experimental style led to works like Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra (1940) and Labyrinth (1941). His avant-garde music caught the attention of John Cage, another of Cowell’s students, and the two later collaborated.

Harrison was encouraged several times to study in Europe but chose to stay in the U.S. to support American composers. In 1943, he moved to New York City and worked as a music critic for the Herald Tribune, at the request of composer Virgil Thomson. There, he met modernist composers like Charles Ives. Harrison helped bring Ives’s work to public attention, including conducting the premiere of Ives’s Symphony No. 3 (1910) with Cowell’s help. Ives later gave Harrison half of his Pulitzer Prize money for that piece. Harrison also edited many of Ives’s works and earned more than he was paid for the work.

Despite his creative success, Harrison struggled with loneliness and anxiety in New York. A romantic relationship with a dancer in Los Angeles ended when he moved, and he began to miss the West Coast. By 1945, he developed painful ulcers due to worsening nervous conditions. He destroyed many of his compositions out of self-doubt.

In May 1947, stress from homesickness, a busy schedule, and homophobia led to a severe nervous breakdown. Cage helped Harrison by taking him to a psychiatric clinic in Ossining, New York. Harrison stayed in the clinic for weeks before moving to New York Presbyterian Hospital. He wrote to Cowell and his wife, Sidney, expressing regret and depression over what he felt was a wasted career. His recovery took nine months of treatment and years of follow-ups. Many colleagues feared his breakdown would end his career, but Harrison continued composing. While in the hospital, he created works, including parts of his Symphony on G.

New life in California

During his time in New York, a difficult period led Harrison to rethink his musical style and approach. He decided to stop using the harsh, complex sounds he had previously used and instead focused on creating more melodic music using scales based on familiar notes. This choice made him different from other composers of that time, as he avoided the styles taught in music schools and the modernist composers he had studied. The two years after he left the hospital in 1949 were very productive for Harrison. He created works such as the Suite for Cello and Harp, The Perilous Chapel, and Solstice. Inspired by the work of his friend Colin McPhee, who studied Indonesian music in the 1930s, Harrison began to use sounds similar to those found in gamelan music, especially the unique tones of these traditional ensembles. He said, "It was the sound itself that attracted me. When I changed my style in New York, I explored these sounds. The gamelan parts in my Suite for Violin, Piano, and Small Orchestra [1951] are imitations of the general sounds of gamelan."

In the early 1950s, Harrison received a copy of Harry Partch’s book Genesis of a Music (1949) from Thomson. This book introduced him to the idea of using musical tuning based on simple ratios instead of the standard equal temperament system. He began writing music using these ratios, believing that music could be both emotional and mathematical. He once said, "I’d love to be a conductor and tell musicians, 'Now, cellos, you gave me 10:9 there, please give me a 9:8 instead.'"

Harrison taught music at several colleges and universities, including Mills College from 1936 to 1939 and again from 1980 to 1985, San Jose State University, Cabrillo College, Reed College, and Black Mountain College. In 1953, he returned to California and settled in Aptos near Santa Cruz, where he lived the rest of his life. He and his partner, William Colvig, bought land in Joshua Tree, California, and built a straw bale house called the "Harrison House Retreat." He continued working on experimental musical instruments.

Although he was deeply influenced by Asian music, Harrison did not visit Asia until 1961, when he traveled to Japan and Korea, and again in 1962, when he visited Taiwan and studied with the zheng master Liang Tsai-Ping. He and Colvig created a percussion ensemble using materials like aluminum keys, tubes, and oxygen tanks, calling it an "American gamelan" to distinguish it from Indonesian gamelans. They also built gamelan-like instruments using materials such as tin cans and aluminum tubing, tuned to just pentatonic scales. Harrison wrote La Koro Sutro (in Esperanto) for these instruments and a chorus, as well as Suite for Violin and American Gamelan. He also played and composed for the Chinese guzheng zither and performed over 300 concerts of traditional Chinese music in the 1960s and early 1970s, often with poet Kenneth Rexroth reading translations of classical Chinese poems.

Harrison was a composer-in-residence at San Jose State University during the 1960s. In 1969, the university honored him with a concert featuring dancers, singers, and musicians. The concert included the world premiere of his musical version of the story of Orpheus, performed by soloists, the San Jose State University a cappella choir, and a unique group of percussionists.

Harrison openly shared his political views, including his belief in peace and his support for the international language Esperanto. He was also active in politics and informed about gay history. He composed pieces with political themes, such as Homage to Pacifica for the opening of the Pacifica Foundation’s Berkeley headquarters. He accepted commissions from the Portland Gay Men’s Chorus (1988 and 1985) and the Seattle Men’s Chorus to arrange his Strict Songs for a chorus of 120 male singers.

Like many 20th-century composers, Harrison struggled to earn a living from his music alone. He worked other jobs, including selling records, working as a florist, caring for animals, and fighting fires in forests.

Later life

On November 2, 1990, the Brooklyn Philharmonic performed Harrison's fourth symphony, which he named "Last Symphony." He blended music from Native American traditions, ancient music, and Asian music, connecting them through rich orchestral compositions. The symphony included a series of "Coyote Stories," using texts from different sources. Harrison revised the symphony several times before finishing the final version in 1995. This version was recorded by Barry Jekowsky and the California Symphony for Argo Records at Skywalker Ranch in Nicasio, California, in March 1997. The CD also featured Harrison's Elegy, to the Memory of Calvin Simmons (a tribute to the former conductor of the Oakland Symphony, who died in a boating accident in 1982), as well as excerpts from Solstice, Concerto in Slendro, and Double Music (his work with John Cage).

From the late 1980s onward, William Colvig's health worsened significantly. He first lost his hearing, and Harrison taught them both American Sign Language. Though Colvig chose not to use ASL, Harrison continued learning because he was fascinated by the graceful movements of signing. In the 1990s, a series of surgeries to replace Colvig's weak knee joints caused allergic reactions that led to serious physical and mental health decline. Harrison cared for Colvig for months, even after Colvig could no longer recognize him due to dementia. Harrison was with Colvig when he died on March 1, 2000.

Harrison and his partner Todd Burlingame were driving from Chicago to Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, where a six-day festival celebrating Harrison's music—Beyond the Rockies: A Tribute to Lou Harrison at 85—was planned for the week of January 30, 2003. On Sunday, February 2, they stopped at a Denny's in Lafayette, Indiana, for lunch. While inside, Harrison suddenly felt chest pain and collapsed. Paramedics declared him dead shortly after, likely due to a heart attack. No autopsy was performed. He was cremated as requested.

Harrison's music

Lou Harrison created many early musical pieces for percussion instruments, often using items typically seen as waste or discarded objects, such as trash cans and steel brake drums. He also composed works using Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, including the opera Rapunzel and his Symphony on G (Symphony No. 1) (1952). Some of his works use a prepared piano called a "tack piano," where small nails are placed on the piano's hammers to create a more percussive sound. Harrison's mature style is based on "melodicles," short musical phrases that are reversed or flipped to form the foundation of a piece. His music is usually simple in texture but expressive, with harmony often minimal or absent, focusing instead on rhythm and melody. Ned Rorem noted that Harrison used many different methods in his music. He focused on creating melodies. Rhythm was also important. Harmony was not a main part, but tonality was. Harrison was among the first American composers to successfully blend Eastern and Western musical styles.

A technique Harrison often used is "interval control," where only a few specific melodic intervals, moving up or down, are used without flipping them. For example, in the opening of his Fourth Symphony, the allowed intervals were minor third, minor sixth, and major second.

Another aspect of Harrison's style is what Harry Partch described as "corporeality," emphasizing physical and sensory experiences, including live performances, improvisation, sound quality, rhythm, and the use of space in his music, whether played alone or with others. This is especially clear in his collaborations with dancers. Mark Morris used Harrison's Serenade for Guitar (with optional percussion) (1978) as the basis for a new type of dance performance.

Harrison and Colvig built two complete Javanese-style gamelan ensembles, modeled after the Kyai Udan Mas at the University of California, Berkeley. One was named Si Betty after art patron Betty Freeman; the other, built at Mills College, was named Si Darius/Si Madeliene. Harrison held the Darius Milhaud Chair of Musical Composition at Mills College from 1980 until his retirement in 1985. One of his students at Mills was Jin Hi Kim. He also taught at San Jose State University and Cabrillo College.

He was awarded the Edward MacDowell Medal in 2000.

Some of Harrison's well-known works include the Concerto in Slendro, Concerto for Violin with Percussion Orchestra, Organ Concerto with Percussion (1973), performed at the Proms in London in 1997; the Double Concerto (1981–82) for violin, cello, and Javanese gamelan; the Piano Concerto (1983–85) for piano tuned in Kirnberger#2 (a type of well temperament) and orchestra, written for Keith Jarrett; and a *Concert

Selected discography

• "ORIGINS2: Forgotten Percussion Works, Volume 2, by the Percussion Art Ensemble, led by Ron Coulter (Kreating SounD KSD 18, December 2020) https://percussionartensemble.bandcamp.com/album/origins2-forgotten-percussion-works-vol-2
• "ORIGINS: Forgotten Percussion Works, Volume 1, by the Percussion Art Ensemble, led by Ron Coulter (Kreating SounD KSD 4, December 2012) https://percussionartensemble.bandcamp.com/album/origins-forgotten-percussion-works-vol-1"

Films

• Lou Harrison: "Cherish, Conserve, Consider, Create" (directed by Eric Marin, 1986)
• Lou Harrison: A World of Music (directed by Eva Soltes, 2011)