Lou Harrison
A Portrait

Rhythm and melody are, for Lou Harrison, the most important characteristics in music: thus the style of an American composer for whom it was easier to look East than to the abstractions of old Europe is defined.

"A Portrait," an anthological CD published by Argo, indeed offers us a portrait of this musician, a pleasant and engaging author who disproves many clichés about contemporary music, particularly its abstrusity and unpleasantness for the listener.

So much so that in the longest piece on this CD, the Symphony No. 4 "Last Symphony", Harrison uses the voice of Al Jarreau, the famous vocalist at the crossroads of jazz, pop, and r'n'b, who in this case lends his services in the fourth and final section of the symphony, singing or rhythmically reciting three Coyote Stories from the Navajo tradition. This vast symphony (42 minutes long) was completed in 1990 but later revised multiple times, and in the first three parts effectively describes expansive soundscapes.

In contrast, just a few notes of "Solstice" or the "Concerto in slendro" can instantly project you into exotic atmospheres reminiscent of Javanese or Balinese gamelan, which are the small ensembles of musicians characteristic of those cultures, where tuned percussion predominates. Of "Solstice" for eight instruments (1949-50), this CD offers some excerpts (17 minutes of a total half-hour) for space reasons, while the "Concerto in slendro" for four instruments and percussion (1961) is recorded in full: 10 minutes divided into three fast-slow-fast episodes, in which the debt to Indonesian music is evident from the title, as slendro is a pentatonic scale without semitones and one of the two main tuning systems on which a Javanese gamelan is based.

It's worth noting that the CD concludes with a genuine gem, the irresistible "Double Music" from 1941, so titled because it was co-written with John Cage. It is a brief piece (4'20") for percussion that possesses a devilish rhythmic vitality and an evocative alchemy of sound derived from the exclusively metallic percussion used. This piece also demolishes one of the dogmas of Western music, namely the individual authorship of a work: here Harrison and Cage divided the compositional work after agreeing on general principles, wrote each on their own, combined the results, and in the end, didn’t change a single note.

For anyone interested in discovering or delving deeper into the unusual and intriguing figure of Lou Harrison (1917-2003), listening to this portrait is an opportunity not to be missed.