The Music of Lou Harrison Program Notes

1. Collection/Song Title: Double Music

   (composed by Lou Harrison and John Cage)

   Performers:

   1. Pacific Rims Percussion Quartet

   Double Music for percussion quartet was collaboratively written by John Cage (parts for players one and three) and Lou Harrison (parts for players two and four) in 1941, with the score dated “San Francisco 4/41.” The collaboration was suggested by Cage for the conclusion of their May 1941 concert in San Francisco. Harrison suggested using all metal instruments, which he was becoming more and more drawn to. They agreed on the length and a few other parameters but worked independently, with Cage using his square root formula and Harrison using equal phrase lengths. Knowing each other’s music quite well, they were able to put the parts together without having to change a note. The parts are more or less arranged as soprano, alto, tenor, and bass, a practice which Harrison continued to use in other percussion works.

   The instrumentation of this festive piece is representative of the work of the period. It uses “found instruments,” brake drums and thunder sheets, and other easily obtainable (at that time) and exotic instruments, including cowbells, water buffalo bells, sleigh bells, sistrums, gongs, and tam-tams. (Lou recalled John Cage and he buying a matched pair of “enormous” tam-tams at a shop in San Francisco’s Chinatown: one sounded at the A at the bottom of the piano and the other sounded at the C a third above. Lou kept his throughout his life and told stories of it having to have surgery at Stanford (“the poor thing”) after an overzealous player caused a crack, older tam-tams’ bronze being more delicate than the brass of modern ones.) Double Music also includes a water gong—a small gong raised and lowered into a tub of water while played, bending its tone. John Cage had discovered the water gong while providing music for the UCLA swimming team. When the swimmers could not hear the music, Cage accommodated by bringing the music to the water, and thus the water gong was born. —Matthew Kocmieroski

2. Collection/Song Title: May Rain

   Performers:

   1. John Duykers
   2. Stephen Drury
   3. Matthew Kocmieroski

   May Rain (1941) is scored for baritone, prepared piano, and percussion. Harrison wrote about the piece: “Rain was written for my friend William Weaver to sing. The beautiful poem is one from a sequence titled From Alba Hill by the wonderful Elsa Gidlow. It first appeared in the very early thirties and currently is printed in her Sapphic Songs: Seventeen to Seventy (Diana Press, 1976). The music was printed in the first issue of Peter Garland’s Soundings.”

3. Collection/Song Title: The Perilous Chapel

   Performers:

   • Collection of Songs:

     1. Prelude — Andante
     2. Poco maestoso
     3. Barbaro
     4. Brilliante
     5. Energico
     6. Alleluia — Poco adagio

   • Performers:

     1. Paul Taub
     2. David Sabee
     3. Valerie Muzzolini Gordon
     4. Rob Tucker

   The Perilous Chapel was composed by Lou Harrison in 1948 as a ballet for Jean Erdman. Exploring the struggles of the subconscious, the work pits the forces of anarchy against the power—and ultimate triumph—of the divine. Although the ballet comprises six movements, the concert version sounds as three large sections, since Movements I and II and Movements III to V are to be played without break. Movement VI, in itself a third the length of the composition, stands alone, exemplifying, in Harrison’s words, “a dance on the floor of Heaven.” The entire work may be viewed as an emotional arch, beginning and ending in tranquil serenity. The forces of evil, portrayed in the barbaric dance of Movement III, reach the height of their power in the middle of Movement V, a musical representation of chaos. The dramatic close of this section is then abruptly countermanded by the heavenly transfiguration of the final Alleluia.

   According to Harrison, the instrumentation of The Perilous Chapel was inspired by Persian miniatures; the title draws from the works of William Blake. A tetrachordal motive pervades the composition, found in the accompanimental figures of Movements I and V, in the repeated ground bass motive of Movement VI, as part of the melodic figuration of Movement I, and, with octave displacement, in the flute line in Movement III. —Dr. Leta Miller

4. Collection/Song Title: Suite for Percussion

   Performers:

   1. Pacific Rims Percussion Quartet
   2. Bonnie Whiting Smith

   Suite for Percussion, completed in June of 1942 in San Francisco, is the last work Harrison wrote before moving to Los Angeles. It shows a growing interest in writing for metal instruments, influenced by Cage’s First Construction (in Metal) and Harrison’s first hearing a live gamelan at the 1939 Golden Gate Exposition.

   Harrison was, of course, making instruments of metal even then; one of the instruments in the Suite for Percussion was Harrison’s clock-coil chimes, which he made of the little wire coils used in grandfather and other older clocks, fixed to a wooden resonator. Also included are three sets of three muted brake drums used entirely in unison in the first movement and canonically in the third. Other metal instruments include triangles, small bells, a thunder sheet, two gongs, and a tam-tam, plus a prominently featured large washtub. The only nonmetal instruments are a set of five dragon’s mouths used as the soloist in the second movement, and a bass drum, given the opening solo in the third movement. This concluding work from Harrison’s San Francisco/Oakland period has become a staple of the literature in spite of the difficulties in finding the proper instruments.

   Soon after completing Suite for Percussion, Harrison moved to Los Angeles for a year, where besides continuing his accompanying activities for dance, he studied for a time with Arnold Schoenberg. Harrison, and John Cage, had already studied with Henry Cowell (and Cage had already studied with Schoenberg, before moving to Seattle and San Francisco). Harrison later moved to New York where Cage and Cowell had already settled, and their friendships continued on to new horizons. —Matthew Kocmieroski

   Personal Note: Lou once told me of a conversation with fellow American maverick composer Harry Partch in which he had tried to interest Partch in the possibilities of making instruments with metal, since metal instruments held their pitch much better than wood. Partch’s response to Lou was, “I don’t like metal. I like wood. Why don’t you do metal?” Lou then said to me, “and here I am all these years later doing metal!” —Matthew Kocmieroski

5. INTERMISSION

6. Collection/Song Title: Simfony #13

   Performers:

   1. Pacific Rims Percussion Quartet

   Simfony #13 was written in the spring of 1941 in San Francisco and first presented at a concert there in May of that year at the California Club. The concert, produced by Harrison and Cage, who had recently moved to San Francisco from Seattle, also included the premieres of other new percussion works by both composers including their collaboratively written Double Music. The means for recording one of the pieces was available, and it was decided to let the audience vote on which work it was to be. The recording of Simfony #13 was released that fall, but the score was mislaid. This tale is told in Leta Miller and Fredric Lieberman’s wonderful book on Harrison, Composing a World: Lou Harrison, Musical Wayfarer. And, it was during the preparation for that book that the score was rediscovered. (I wonder if it was in the big old trunk Lou mentioned on several occasions, where he thought a number of set-aside pieces from his San Francisco days might reside. Interestingly, Alan Hovhaness, composer and good friend of both Harrison and John Cage, had a similar trunk in the basement of his house in Seattle.) Simfony #13 shows an approach and orchestration similar to much of Harrison’s other percussion work up until that time. Harrison would plot out the possibilities of rhythmic patterns and durations, and use them in composing the little rhythmicles (Harrison’s term for the small phrases in his percussion work) and the longer formal elements used to construct his works. This facilitated the always lyrical feature of Harrison’s writing, even for percussion. He also heavily used the staff bar notation of phrasing he had inherited from Henry Cowell, where instead of indicating phrasing with lines above the notes, he simply connected the beams, often crossing beats and bar lines. Such notation shows musical and theoretical intentions clearly, but can be a bit cumbersome for performers. Yet even today there is an appeal to this visualization of the composer’s intentions.

   The orchestration is a mix of instruments in typical Harrison fashion. Players one and two have three sets each of five or six wood and metal instruments: woodblocks, water buffalo bells, and cowbells for one; suspended temple blocks (dragon’s mouths) and muted brake drums for the other. The third player has an elephant bell, a triangle, a suspended cymbal, a gong, and a tam-tam, and the fourth, seven tom-toms and a bass drum. This performance marks the Seattle premiere of this work. —Matthew Kocmieroski

7. Collection/Song Title: Incidental Music to Corneille’s ‘Cinna’

   Performers:

   1. Stephen Drury

   Lou Harrison returned to California in 1953, after a stint at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and established a home in Aptos, where he would live for the rest of his life. His well-known interest in and advocacy for Just intonation, historical temperaments, and experimental tunings took shape at this point in his career. Before long he had retuned a piano into a 7-limit Just intonation and added tacks to the hammers to create what is usually referred to as a “tack piano.” He immediately composed a suite of pieces for the tack piano that was intended to provide the incidental music for the production of a play by Corneille, which Harrison hoped to produce as puppet theater. The production did not materialize, but the music lives on, not only as a testament to Harrison’s early interest in Just intonation, but as a reflection of his interest in the music of the French Baroque. The tuning provides a variety of interval types not represented in equal temperament, most notably ones that involve the prime number 7, such as the wide whole step (8/7), the narrow minor third (7/6) and the narrow flat seventh (7/4) that is the alluring seventh partial of the harmonic series. The score also requests that the keyboard be lowered about a half step from normal so that the reference pitch of A is around 415 Hz., a tuning practice associated with the Baroque era. The pieces are composed in a free, nonmetrical style, reminiscent of the prélude non mesuré developed by composers who were contemporaries of Corneille. Harrison uses frequent pedal tones to allow us to perceive the modal character of the music and to appreciate the distinctive character of the intervals. —Jarrad Powell

8. Collection/Song Title: In Memory of Victor Jowers

   Performers:

   1. Laura DeLuca
   2. Valerie Muzzolini Gordon

   In Memory of Victor Jowers, composed in 1967, is scored for clarinet or English horn and piano or harp. Its beautiful, arching melodic line, accompanied by a spare and simple line primarily in octaves, is an elegy to a friend who died of cancer. Harrison wrote: “My good and jovial friend, Victor Jowers, died pathetically and slowly of blood cancer. He had been made to watch atom bomb tests in Nevada. Gradually we learn little bits of information about U.S. use of citizens as subjects of lethal experiments. We will never know all of such done in the past, nor, indeed, of what is presently being committed. It is heartrending to know this.” —Paul Taub

9. Collection/Song Title: Music for Remy

   Performers:

   1. Laura DeLuca
   2. Matthew Kocmieroski

   Music for Remy was written in 1998 for oboe and percussion; tonight’s program presents an adaptation for clarinet. Remy Charlip, a lifelong friend of Lou Harrison, is an artist, writer, and choreographer who has worked with Merce Cunningham, the Living Theater, and other artistic endeavors associated with the composer. The music, reminiscent of Harrison’s early Concerto for Flute and Percussion, features the combination of counterpoint and beautiful melody typical of the composer’s late works. Harrison’s preface to the edition says that the work “was stimulated by the section of Remy Charlip’s book Arm in Arm, which begins ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, old snake is going to dance.’” —Paul Taub

10. Collection/Song Title: Concerto in Slendro

    Performers:

    • Collection of Songs:

      1. Allegro vivo
      2. Molto adagio
      3. Allegro, molto vigoroso

    • Performers:

      1. Mikhail Shmidt
      2. Stephen Drury
      3. Gunnar Folsom
      4. Matthew Kocmieroski
      5. Roger Nelson
      6. Rob Tucker

    Concerto in Slendro, written in 1961, is a wonderful example of Lou Harrison’s sumptuous melodic gifts and exquisite orchestrating skills. The title is explained in his notes to the score: “The term slendro is Indonesian, and is a generic term which refers to any five-tone tuning in which seconds are wide and thirds small (as pelog indicates the reverse).” This is akin to playing on the black keys of the piano, but with subtle pitch differences more in tune with the physics of sound found in nature than in our modern “stretched” equal temperament.

    Tuning was a growing interest and concern in Harrison’s work from the late 1940s on. The violin, lacking the fixed frets found on the guitar, is easily able to accommodate these pitch differences. The accompanying ensemble includes two tack pianos—which also are easily tuned for the piece—percussion and celesta. The real trick to performing the piece according to Harrison’s intonational wishes is the celesta, a fixed-pitch keyboard instrument with metal tone bars. Harrison happened to own such an instrument, which he had retuned for an earlier work that included the two slendro modes used in this concerto, and he was always generous in loaning his instrument for performances. Although he allowed that the piece might be played in equal temperament, the original tuning is much preferred. (Thanks to the help of Jarrad Powell, piano technician and Gamelan Pacifica member Stephen Fandrich has fashioned a special set of celesta bars tuned in slendro intonation, which allows us to present this piece as the composer desired.)

    The two percussionists use all metal instruments, three each of triangles and ranch triangles, six gongs, and, in place of drums, two washtubs and two garbage cans. Two of the keyboard players use claves, one of traditional wood and one from plumber’s pipe, in the second movement. The form of the work is a Baroque concerto grosso with fast, slow, and again fast movements, the second movement also being an infinite canon. —Matthew Kocmieroski