Lou Harrison (1917-2003) was a prominent 20th century voice in American music, as well as gay art. He explored homosexual themes in his work, which was strongly modernist to the point of being avant-garde at times. He was heavily influenced by Asian music and Asian sounds, and he incorporated those sounds and tonalities into much of his own work. Harrison was one of the most important gay musicians of the last century, and he was open during his life about the influence his own homosexuality had on his art and how it informed much of what he had to say through his art. How difficult that must have been, even as he watched acceptance of homosexuality slowly, ever so painfully slowly, grow in America. And that struggle has by no means ended.
Today’s work, Pacifika Rondo, features that fascination with Asian sound. Here are some notes I found about it (via):
British poet Rudyard Kipling wrote: “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”
But on today’s date in 1963, East did meet West at the premiere performance of a musical work by the American composer Lou Harrison, Pacifika Rondo Written for an Orchestra of Western and Oriental Instruments, at the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii.
For Lou Harrison, it was just one more stop on a journey he had begun decades earlier.
In the spring of 1935, when he was a teenager, Lou Harrison enrolled in a course called “Music of the Peoples of the World” at the University of California extension in San Francisco. The course was taught by American composer Henry Cowell, who became Harrison’s composition teacher. Cowell urged his pupils to explore non-Western musical traditions and forms. Javanese gamelan music became a big influence in Harrison’s music, and, in 1961-62, a Rockefeller Foundation grant made it possible for him to study Asian music in Korea.
The movements of Harrison’s “Pacifika Rondo” refer to various sections of the Pacific Basin.
Like many modernist works, it is a fascinating listen, a study in pure musical color and mood.
