The radio show 1A on National Public Radio released a wonderful documentary on Lou Harrison, in which Bill Alves is interviewed extensively. The show was scripted by Joe Horowitz and features performances by the PostClassical Ensemble and the Leipzig Radio Symphony among others. You can listen to the show here: https://the1a.org/segments/more-than-music-lou-harrison/. Joe Horowitz, has also produced a PostClassical Ensemble documentary film, “Lou Harrison and Cultural Fusion,” distributed by Naxos ..read more

Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick is a new biography of one of America's most original and beloved composers, by Bill Alves and Brett Campbell, now available from Indiana University Press in time for Harrison's centennial this year. In this blog, we will be keeping track of some of the events in honor of Harrison's hundredth birthday and sharing some fascinating tidbits that didn't necessarily make it into the published biography. American composer Lou Harrison (1917–2003) is perhaps best known for challenging the traditional musical establishment along with his contemporaries and clos ..read more

Although we created this blog primarily to discuss the music and life of Lou Harrison, his close friendship with composer John Cage prompted some of our most interesting explorations of the directions of American experimental music in the twentieth century. I had met Cage in the 1980s and knew of him, like most people, as the brilliant explorer of radical art, indeterminacy and Zen Buddhism. But through our research in Harrison’s life, especially of his early life, we came to know a very different Cage. Therefore, I was delighted to contribute some research and this essay about a pivotal point ..read more

We remember Lou Harrison today as one of the most original composers of the twentieth century, distinctively American yet best known for his advocacy of influences from across the planet, particularly Asia. He loved the timbral richness and “radiance of overtones” of many Asian instruments such as the erhu (the Chinese fiddle), the piri (the Korean double reed), and the zheng(the Chinese zither). “There is however one exception,” he said, “and that is the harp which, if you think about it, does have a hollow tone. That however, to me, is remedied by the fact that it is plucked, and a series ..read more

first the quaLity              Of            yoUr music             tHen        its quAntity        and vaRiety      make it Resemble           a rIver in delta             liStening to it        we becOme     ..read more

On Tuesday, June 13, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella seriespresents a new, “hybrid” version of Lou Harrison’s 1971 opera Young Caesar. Harrison originally created it as a puppet opera, which premiered at Cal Tech in Pasadena, but later refashioned it for more conventional, equal-tempered instruments and live performers. This version premiered in 1987, but Harrison worked on more substantial changes in response to a commission from Lincoln Center. This last version was not performed until 2007, after Harrison's death, at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The product ..read more

“I am plucking my way through the year!” — Lou Harrison, 1997. On Friday, Ballet West’s National Choreographic Festival in Salt Lake City presented  a world premiere by world renowned choreographer Val Caniparoli inspired by Lou Harrison’s Concerto For Pipa and String Orchestra. Wu Man The 1997 piece contrasts with Harrison’s early pieces for Chinese and Korean instruments from the 1960s, where he more explicitly retained the traditional character of the instruments—the expressive pitch bends of the zheng, the slow slides of the piri, the simultaneous variations of the Confucia ..read more

Linda Burman-Hall accompanies Larry Reed's shadow puppet production of Lou Harrison's Cinna on tack piano On May 18 in San Francisco, in celebration of Lou Harrison’s centennial, two of his good friends will realize one of his most distinctive artistic ambitions,  a work that, though never completed in his lifetime,  includes some of his most unusual but enchanting music. In the 1950s, Lou Harrison had retreated from the maelstrom of New York City and the pressures of the professional musical mainstream to a cabin in rural Aptos, California. There he befriended proprietors ..read more

While our mothers were playing mah-jongg, my friends and I listened to the radio. Everywhere you dialed, you heard this wonderful Hawaiian slack guitar music. I am attempting to recapture that sound I’ve been carrying around all these years in my head. —Lou Harrison Two central inspirations shaped the three-movement Scenes from Nek Chand. First, like Charles Ives’s many nostalgic works, it represented memories from Harrison’s own childhood, when the sound of the Hawaiian guitar dominated popular music he had heard on the family’s crystal set radio at the Silver Court in Portland. The swoopin ..read more

Lou Harrison Lou Harrison spent most of his life living near Santa Cruz, California, and one of his great friends and supporters there, Phil Collins, is curating of the many tribute concerts to Lou Harrison on this centennial weekend. (Events are also taking place this weekend in Seattle, San Francisco, Berkeley, Joshua Tree and more.) The two-concert tribute features one of Harrison’s greatest and most enchanting ballet scores, and some of his seldom-performed choral music. Solstice   “I was interested in the ways that the abstract language of dance could reveal realms of experi ..read more