Customer Reviews

Lou Harrison: Composing a World

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In 1947, composer Lou Harrison suffered a "nervous breakdown." If he had never recovered from this event, Lou Harrison would still rank as a significant figure in American music. In other words, by the time he was 30, Harrison had already accomplished more than other composers accomplish in their entire careers. (This included inventing, with John Cage, the percussion ensemble, taking over the editorship of Henry Cowell's very influential publication New Music Quarterly, the editing of Charles Ives' 3rd Symphony - which won the Pulitzer Prize that year - and working as a reviewer for the New York Herald with Virgil Thomson. Considering that Harrison turned 80 in 1997, a thorough study of his life and work was long overdue. Miller and Lieberman have done an excellent job, considering how little has been previously written about Harrison's life and work, and the CD that accompanies the book is a particularly helpful touch. (For the average reader, the discussion of tuning systems in the book will seem obscure, but the CD, gratefully, makes some of those issues audible.) My only criticism of the book is that it is neither a full-fledged, fleshed-out biography (and Harrison's life is certainly colorful enough to merit such a thing), nor an in-depth analysis of his musical accomplishments. On the one hand, since the composer himself is such a chameleon, perhaps a hybrid volume is appropriate. But I can't help but wonder if Lou didn't deserve two books instead of this one. In the mean time, this is an informative, essential study for anyone interested in understanding what it means for a creative artist to be truly "multicultural."

This is a delightful book, scholarly yet fully accessible to the layman. It deals with a contemporary American composer, Lou Harrison, who is finally getting the critical recognition he deserves as the creator of one of the richest, most melodic, most wide-ranging and eclectic musical canons of our time. This is the first significant critical work on Harrison and is important just for that. But it will also appeal to those interested in the interplay between politics and music in the 20th century, especially pacificism and the arts, and to those interested in the gay rights movement and the key role of gay artists in contemporary music. Though co-authored, the book is written in a seamless, graceful style, and it is organized for easy skimming and sampling. Nevertheless, it is fully documented and full of ideas and directions for further scholarship and research. The wonderful accompanying CD enriches the book enormously and makes the whole package a bargain.

After the release of this volume in Autumn, 1998, I wrote a review that ran in Coast Weekly (see archives, 10/29/98, coastweekly.com) in which I expressed not only admiration toward authors Miller and Lieberman but amazement over the countless other details of Lou's life that I had not previously known. Amazement, because I knew the man for forty years, starting in 1963 when I was a student at San Diego State University and he was touring a program of Chinese music with Richard Dee, a long-time associate. Lou once descibed himself to me as a "glandular optimist," and so he was, in every creative and thoughtful way. His artistic example will continue to influence the music, and other arts in which he excelled, far into the future.

With the death this year of composer Lou Harrison, the West coast lost one of the most inventive and seminal figures who have ever graced its soil. Happily, Harrison's music remains, but, while enormously sensuous and attractive, it is also an enormously complex music--borrowing from the finest of avant-garde American traditions as well as from the East. Harrison has rarely been written about with such sensitivity and understanding as one finds in "Lou Harrison: Composing a World" by his friends Leta E. Miller and Fredric Lieberman. The book also contains a wonderful CD-- itself worth the price of the book--which is a kind of chronicle of Harrison's development. "Lou Harrison: Composing a World" is a marvelous introduction to a great American composer whose work is only now beginning to be understood in its true range. The book is simultaneously excellent biography, fine musical criticism (both authors are musicians), and intelligent, shameless promotion for a great artist whose work deserves no less.

In this book, Leta Miller and Fredric Lieberman have given the music-historical community a much-needed (and to be sure, a greatly appreciated) account of a composer who is essential to American art music of this century. Combining biography, aesthetic studies, music analysis and even newly recorded material in a thoughtful and clear manner, Miller and Lieberman have set a standard that later scholars will no doubt find a challenge to equal. Both worked closely with Harrison, yet their work is not a passive recounting of his words; both are trained scholars of contemporary music, yet their prose avoids all needless jargon for the sake of true communication. It is a book of tremendous importance, and has been and continues to be rightly admired by enthusiasts of American and/or contemporary art music. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

As near to a pageturner as a music history book gets, this book is more than a reader-friendly biography of one of America's best and most interesting composers. It's also an absorbing account of how music was made in the mid-20th century.

The authors speak with authority, and they do so because they did their homework. The book is well-documented, but the footnotes are not intrusive: they carry the big stick gracefully. The sections in this book on tuning and theory change what can be stupifying dullness into fascinating discussion that occasionally verges on the poetic: in Miller and Lieberman's hands, music becomes an important holistic means to personal and interior exploration and growth rather than an increasingly marginalized status-defining activity for the social dinosaur. The author also do not shy away from the social and political context of Lou Harrison's life. In this book, the reader learns that American composer Henry Cowell (the instructor of such as Harrison and John Cage) was imprisoned for 4 years in San Quentin on charges related to his homosexuality, as one example, and how that affected his work.

In music as in poetry, context is important. Of poetry it has been said that each new poem modifies all of the poems that came before it. In music, until recently, people have perhaps not been as willing to acknowledge the same. The service that Miller and Lieberman perform through their work is to place 20th century music in a larger historical context of activity and thought, and to acknowledge and describe one of the most interesting networks of musical activity of our time. By using Lou Harrison's life as the center of this hyperbolic architecture, the authors have given us a large and transparant window in to how music's made.

Miller and Lieberman's biography of Lou Harrison has become the definitive work on this California composer. Rather than simply writing a chronology of his life, the book provides a brief biography and then tackles different aspects of his work in a series of brief chapters. These include tuning systems, calligraphy, instrument building, political activism, dance, gay rights, and many more.

The result is an eclectic and somewhat experimental book, fitting for the composer. Occasionally some of the chapters fall short of being comprehensive, particularly the one dealing with Harrison's sexuality. But in general this book is a refreshing read, with much new information and analysis.

A CD with several unreleased recordings and demonstrations is included.

The authors explain in the introduction that but for commercial constraints they could have made a much larger book, in fact a book of each chapter. This is precisely the wrong way to think about any kind of creative work. Creation is SELECTION. Anyone can gather facts and factoids (or as Lou Harrison might say, facticles) and make a great pile of them. It is quite another thing to forge them into a clear, compelling narrative line, and this other thing is just what the authors fail to accomplish. It's safe to assume, I think, that a Lou Harrison autobiography would be much, much, much better than this.

This is a fairly drab and banal account of a marginal self-consciously eccentric American composer. In the chapter devoted to tuning I should have thought the authors would have either critiqued or defended their various extravagant claims, which to a reasonable person who knows something about this will seem so much numerological fetishism. They did neither.

Heartening to see how the authors's cronies have rallied to the defense of this tiresome and mindless random heaping up of information. Nevertheless:

If it were truly a "scholarly" work, I think the author's would have something reasonably intelligent to say about Harrison's acoustical "theories", which were, in fact, to cut to the chase, wack.

If more of the information heaped up were firsthand, this might at least be of some service to real Harrison scholars (if Harrison scholars we must endure). Instead we have, for example, a passage about Harrison's long-term stay at a mental institution lifted directly from John Cage's "Silence". Better to skip this and read the Cage.