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A Life Tuned to the Sound of California
February 9, 2003
By JOHN ROCKWELL
LOU HARRISON was born in Oregon, lived for a decade in New York and died at
85 last Sunday in Indiana. But he was always a California composer.
As such, he had to combat a persistent New York prejudice against California
music in general and his own music in particular. (Not that he ever really
combatted; he was a pacifist through and through.) In New York, the "uptown"
avatars of dissonant hyper-complexity, in their heyday a generation ago,
scorned not just what they heard as simplistic, popsy, maybe even
drug-addled downtown music but especially what they saw as its dopey pre-New
Age source in California.
Even more generous souls sometimes grew testy with Harrison's relentless
devotion to sweetness and beauty, born of his California spirit and his
lifelong interest in the music of the Pacific Rim, especially Asia. Bernard
Holland of The New York Times, in a 1997 review of a
Harrison concert, referred to the "cult of pleasantness" and "the lowered
level of psychic energy" in his music.
"Every piece on this program seemed to have a nice day and wish us one,
too," Mr. Holland added.
Before World War II, New York music was more wide-ranging stylistically.
Aaron Copland flourished alongside Roger Sessions. Harrison's allies Henry
Cowell and John Cage, the dual fathers of downtown music, both came from
California but managed to work here happily.
Of course, the tensions don't reflect just East Coast versus West Coast or
Europe versus Asia. One wonders if there is also a straight-gay tension here
expressed in stereotypes: tough-guy straights versus soft and pliant gays.
Charles Ives used to rail against "sissy" ears unable
to accept dissonance.
But here the conceptual waters become murky. There have been dissonant
composers on the West Coast, and efforts to pin down gay musical
characteristics have always foundered.
It was Harrison, unashamedly gay, who prepared and conducted the first
performance of an Ives symphony - the Third, in New York in 1947 - and it
was he who, with Ives's blessing, edited performing editions of many other
Ives scores.
In recent years Harrison had his fervent New York allies, too, and they
weren't all downtown composers. Mark Morris, above all, choreographed dances
to several Harrison scores and commissioned one - although he may count as a
West Coast fifth columnist, coming as he does from Seattle.
Raised in California and a longtime admirer of Harrison's music, I have
always resented seemingly prejudiced judgments against the state and its
music, and I have been pleased to see the rise of softer, more welcoming
compositional alternatives to the fiercest dissonance.
Minimalism, for one. Harrison was no Minimalist in the normally understood
sense of that musical style. But Terry Riley and John Adams are
Californians, and Steve Reich honed his style there. Philip Glass went the
other way around the world, to India, to help shape his East Coast variant
of Minimalism.
One needn't be defensive about California music; one can be proud. For the
last three-quarters of a century, the San Francisco area alone has been a
source of some of the most influential artistic, social and technological
movements: Beats, hippies, campus protests, regional cuisine, gay culture,
Silicon Valley and more. It's hard not to link the spirit of sometimes
self-indulgent innovation to the optimism and sensual contentedness of the
state.
Musically, California has long looked West at least as much as it has looked
East. Harrison and I once shared memories of attending opera performances in
San Francisco's Chinatown as youngsters. Like Cowell, Harrison was grounded
in the European tradition but fascinated by the world: by the variety of its
aesthetics, its instruments, its tuning systems, its compositional
practices, its sheer manifold beauties.
But unlike, say, Colin McPhee, Harrison was less interested in replicating
or evoking Asian music than in learning to compose using Asian techniques.
"I actually study that music and learn to play it and comprehend it as
closely as possible," he told me in 1990. "It's the procedure that interests
me. I don't try to imitate."
IT would too easy to make sweeping geopolitical generalizations about the
California mind-set. The longstanding presence of Asian communities on the
West Coast has clearly influenced composers living there. So has the gentle
climate. And perhaps Caucasian New York
composers look back fretfully and enviously at a European continent they or
their forebears fled, rather than looking outward to a seductive new world
on the other side of the Pacific. Fearful refugees versus optimistic
pioneers.
Despite his success here, Harrison never felt comfortable in New York,
professionally or personally - particularly as he compared the gay scenes of
the 1940's in New York and
San Francisco.
"I had what they call a nervous breakdown in New York, and it took 10 years
to recover from it," he told me. That recovery took place in the 50's, when
he had moved back to California, more particularly to Aptos, on the idyllic
coast south of Santa Cruz, at the north end of the Monterey Bay.
Once "home," and once he had formed a relationship with the craftsman
William Colvig in 1967, Harrison seemed sunnily content with the music he
wrote and the attitude toward life he espoused. He had composed serial
scores in his time, good ones, but moved beyond all that. For him, life was
heightened play, a constant lively curiosity about the world and its
manifestations.
"I don't think increasing complexity is the answer to anything," he said.
"In California and in the West generally, we're not afraid if a thing sounds
pretty, and we're not out to terrorize everybody. I don't think significance
is opposed to beauty."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/09/arts/music/09ROCK.html?ex=1045780155&ei=1&
en=837556625d829fec
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
Paul Moor
<Texas-Paule@Sigmund-Freud.Org>
D-10715 Berlin
Telefon (4930) 8639-5784
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