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Percussionists Celebrate Lou's Legacy By DANIEL DRUCKMAN
When Lou Harrison died in February 2003, the percussion world lost perhaps its most eloquent and singular voice. No one has done more than Harrison to elevate the status of our instruments and enrich our repertoire, and to open our musical eyes and ears to other cultures and possibilities. So, although Juilliard paid tribute to Harrison at last season's Focus! Festival, I knew that the School's percussionists had to acknowledge the passing of this great master by dedicating a concert to his work and ideals. While contemplating whether to do an all-Harrison evening or a concert of music by Harrison and his peers (Cage, Cowell, Partch, etc.), I decided that a more fitting tribute might be to juxtapose Harrison's music with that of his musical "offspring" and, in so doing, to explore the living legacy he left us. On April 12 in Alice Tully Hall, the Juilliard Percussion Ensemble will present an evening of works by Lou Harrison and three composers—Dean Drummond, Akira Nishimura, and Evan Ziporyn—influenced in some fashion by his life and works.
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No one has done more than Harrison to elevate the status of percussion and enrich our repertoire, and to open our musical eyes and ears to other cultures and possibilities.
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Harrison spent his formative years in northern California, where he had moved from his native Oregon in 1926. He studied violin and piano in high school, and took up horn, clarinet, and harpsichord upon entering college. In 1935 he enrolled in Henry Cowell's "Music of the Peoples of the World" course at the University of California extension in San Francisco, which began a lifelong fascination with the music of other cultures (particularly Asian and Native American) and an enduring friendship with Cowell. Through Cowell, he met John Cage in 1938, with whom he staged a series of important percussion concerts in the early 1940s (for which many of the seminal works of Harrison and Cage were written). It was during this period that Harrison began to add to the traditional percussion battery with "found" instruments such as automobile brake drums, flower pots, lengths of plumbing pipe, and nonwestern instruments like Asian bells, clay ocarinas, and Mexican slit-drums. Two of the works on this concert—Fugue (1942) and Canticle No. 3 (1942)—stem from this period.Harrison spent one year in Los Angeles teaching dance notation and musical form and history for dancers at U.C.L.A. While there, he enrolled in Schoenberg's weekly composition seminar, which he later said taught him the "importance of simplicity and method" to complement the "license for freedom" he had learned from his study of the music of Ives. In fact, although hardly a serialist, Harrison did experiment with 12-tone composition and used certain pre-compositional processes throughout his creative output. He spent 10 years in New York—some of them as one of Virgil Thomson's "stringers" at The New York Herald Tribune—before returning for good to northern California in 1953. In 1949 Harry Partch's Genesis of a Music stimulated his interest in just intonation, another lifelong passion.In 1961 Harrison was chosen as a delegate to the East-West Music Encounter in Tokyo, and visited Asia for the first time. He spent several months in Korea and Taiwan studying traditional music, and upon his return, began to write for ensembles combining western and traditional Asian instruments. He also spent six months in Mexico studying indigenous music and instruments. In 1967 he met William Colvig, an electrician and amateur musician who became his partner as well as dedicated collaborator on instrument building and tuning experiments. In 1971 they constructed an "American gamelan," a set of metallophones tuned to a pure D-major scale and built from common materials (steel conduit, aluminum slabs, tin cans) combined with galvanized garbage cans and cut-off oxygen tanks. This instrument combined several of Harrison's obsessions: "found" or invented instruments, just intonation, and Asian influence. The Concerto for Organ with Percussion Orchestra (1973) stems from this period, and uses several of the instruments from the American gamelan. In 1975 he began to study traditional Indonesian gamelan, and in subsequent years wrote many works for this ensemble alone or in conjunction with western instruments. A true Renaissance man, Harrison was also a published poet, an often exhibited painter, and was renowned for his calligraphic script. He taught composition and world music courses at San Jose State University, Stanford University, Cabrillo College, Mills College, and the University of Southern California.
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Juilliard Percussion Ensemble
Alice Tully Hall
Monday, April 12, 8 p.m.
Free tickets available in the Juilliard Box Office.
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Dean Drummond (b. 1949) was a member of Harry Partch's ensemble, premiering many of Partch's important works and participating in both Columbia Masterworks recordings made during the late 1960s. He subsequently received degrees in music composition from the University of Southern California and California Institute of the Arts. He is currently co-director of Newband, director/curator of the Harry Partch Instrumentarium, and assistant professor of music at Montclair State University. Drummond's compositions feature new acoustic instruments, synthesizers, new techniques for winds and strings, and large ensembles of exotic percussion. His music has been largely concerned with the exploration of microtones and just intonation. He is the inventor of two percussion instruments utilizing non-conventional tuning, the zoomoozophone and the juststrokerods. Dirty Ferdie (1976) is the last of a set of chamber works inspired by the writings of Louis Ferdinand Celine that feature rich, ringing metallic sonorities, jagged polyrythms, and a complicated shared melodic line. It is scored for four performers playing a large battery of pitched and unpitched percussion.Akira Nishimura (b. 1953) studied composition and theory at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. His many composition prizes include the Queen Elizabeth International Music Composition, the Luigi Dallapiccola Composition Award, the I.S.C.M. World Music Days, and the Otaka Prize. Kala for solo marimba and six percussionists (1989) is the second of his works for marimba solo and percussion ensemble. Kala means "time" in Sanskrit; in traditional Indian music, it also means "tempo."The rhythmic texture of the percussion ensemble consists of various periodic accentuations like tala (repeating rhythmic cycles in traditional Indian music), and different periodic rhythms used at the same time. Therefore the point of stress shifts gradually, revealing "pointillistic" associations, much like Indonesian gamelan. Above this rhythmic texture, the marimba plays both notated and improvised solo passages.Evan Ziporyn (b. 1959) is a composer/clarinetist whose work draws equally from world and classical music, the avant-garde, and jazz. As a member of the Bang On A Can All-Stars, he has collaborated with Don Byron, Meredith Monk, Henry Threadgill, and Cecil Taylor. He has also recorded and toured with Paul Simon, Steve Reich, Arnold Dreyblatt, Matthew Shipp, and Tan Dun. Ziporyn is Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor at M.I.T., where he is also head of Music and Theater Arts. He is the founder and director of Gamelan Galak Tika, a Balinese music and dance troupe in Boston. Melody Competition (1999, revised 2000) is inspired by the west Balinese mebarung, a true "battle of the bands," in which two giant bamboo gamelans are put onstage together and compete, trying to throw each other off. In this piece, the term refers not just to the mebarung itself, but also to various other competitions: pitched instruments vs. non-pitched, wood vs. metal vs. skin, and one melody vs. another. The conductorless ensemble is asked to use all its skill to move between states of togetherness and separation; as it turns out, the latter can require more virtuosity than the former.Please join us for this unusual evening celebrating Lou Harrison's music and musical legacy.Daniel Druckman has been a member of the faculty since 1991.
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