Lou Harrison: New Tunings and Instruments

Lou Harrison was one of the America’s twentieth century musical pioneers.  He explored  alternate tuning systems, as well as inventing a few new instruments. Born in 1917 his youth was spent on the West Coast before moving around Northern California, eventually settling in San Francisco. There he studied with the eclectic modernist Henry Cowell (see post below). While still only in his twenties, he wrote extensively for dance and percussion insturments. With another of Cowell's students, John Cage, he established what must have been the first concert series devoted to new music for percussion.

Harrison moved to Los Angeles to study with the famous Arnold Schoenberg at UCLA in 1942. Having assimilated the atonal avant garde of Schoenberg's school (12-tone music), he settled in New York the following year, making a name for himself as composer and as music critic where he wrote for New York’s Herald Tribune. Harrison published a study of the music of American atonalist Carl Ruggles, and the influence of Ruggles, as well as former teacher Schoenberg, came through in works such as his Symphony on G and the opera ‘Rapunzel’. However, New York living led to a nervous breakdown in 1947. John Cage recommended him to Black Mountain College in rural North Carolina, where the idyllic environment proved conducive to Harrison's new interests, Asian music and tuning.

In 1961, he attended the East-West Music Encounter, a conference in Tokyo, which proved a decisice point for extensive studies of Asian music, first in Seoul, then in Taiwan. The 1960s saw some of his best known works incorporating these influences, including ‘Pacifika Rondo’ and ‘Young Caesar’. In the last, an elaborate puppet opera, he used for the first time instruments designed and built by his new life-partner, Bill Colvig.  It should be mentioned that a contemporary of Harrison’s, Harry Partch, was also a builder of his own instruments and ruthless pursuer of a new music based on alternate (but not Eastern) tuning systems.