[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 27 (Thursday, February 13, 2003)]
[Senate]
[Page S2453]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       IN MEMORIAM: LOU HARRISON

   Mrs. BOXER. Madam President, one of our great American 
composers, Lou Harrison, died recently at the age of 85. Mr. Harrison 
lived most of his life, including the last 50 years, in California. He 
taught at a number of universities and had been honored in many ways in 
recent years, including by a festival of his music at the San Francisco 
Conservatory of Music. He was en route to another festival of his 
music, sponsored by Ohio State University and the Columbus Symphony 
Orchestra, when he died. The San Francisco Chronicle recently published 
a thoughtful obituary written by its chief classical music critic, 
Joshua Kosman. I would like to print it in the Record in honor of this 
great man and his rich legacy.
  The obituary follows:
       Composer Lou Harrison, who delighted Bay Area audiences for 
     decades with his tuneful, spangly music as well as his 
     exuberantly generous personality, died of a heart attack 
     Sunday night in Lafayette, Ind. He was 85.
       Mr. Harrison, a resident of Aptos (Santa Cruz County) since 
     1953, was on his way to Columbus, Ohio, for a weeklong 
     festival of his music sponsored by the Columbus Symphony 
     Orchestra and Ohio State University. According to Professor 
     Donald Harris, Mr. Harrison, who disliked flying, was being 
     transported in a university van from the Chicago train 
     station to Columbus on Sunday night. The van had stopped at a 
     roadside diner when he was stricken. He died at a local 
     hospital shortly afterward.
       ``He was just such a great friend to music, to our planet 
     and to everybody,'' said San Francisco Symphony music 
     director Michael Tilson Thomas, an advocate who commissioned 
     an orchestral piece from Mr. Harrison to inaugurate his first 
     concert season in 1995. ``We're going to miss him greatly.''
       ``This was an irreplaceable guy,'' said composer Charles 
     Amirkhanian, executive director of the Other Minds Festival, 
     which honored Mr. Harrison in 2000. ``The East Coast had 
     (Aaron) Copland, and we had Lou.''


                      unabashedly beautiful music

       Spirited, rhythmically vibrant and unabashedly beautiful, 
     Mr. Harrison's music incorporated elements of Asian and 
     Western styles in a highly personal synthesis. He had a 
     fondness for the jangly, percussive sounds of Asian music, 
     and in addition to traditional instruments, his scores often 
     included such devices as flowerpots, porcelain rice bowls, 
     garbage cans and oxygen tanks.
       Many of these instruments were built in collaboration with 
     his life partner William Colvig, who died in 2000. Together, 
     the two men created a large orchestra of idiosyncratic metal 
     percussion instruments for which Mr. Harrison wrote dozens of 
     pieces.
       He wrote copiously in traditional Western forms as well, 
     including symphonies, operas, chamber and choral music.
       What united all his music, though, was its essentially 
     melodic nature. Whether shaped by medieval French dance 
     rhythms, Javanese modes or Korean harmonies, melody always 
     was Mr. Harrison's primary building block.
       ``These are melodies that stick with you and are useful for 
     everyday life,'' Thomas said. ``There are tunes by Lou 
     Harrison that are ideal for walking up a steep ridge, and 
     some that are good for falling asleep in a hammock. He had 
     the gift for finding the tune that had the essence of a 
     particular experience.''
       And in the face of orthodoxies favoring structural 
     integrity and fearless dissonance, Mr. Harrison was never 
     afraid to write music that celebrated beauty for its own 
     sake.
       ``He was one of the very first composers to bring back the 
     pleasure principle,'' said composer John Adams. ``For those 
     of us who came of age during the bad old days when rigor and 
     theory and the atomization of musical elements was so in 
     vogue, Lou provided a model of expressivity and sheer 
     beauty.''
       Mr. Harrison also was the last living link to a tradition 
     of American experimental music that reached back to Charles 
     Ives--whose Third Symphony had its premiere in 1946 with Mr. 
     Harrison conducting--and included such influential figures as 
     Henry Cowell, Harry Partch and John Cage.
       Lou Silver Harrison was born on May 14, 1917, in Portland, 
     Ore., and moved frequently as a child throughout the Pacific 
     Northwest and the Bay Area. By the time he graduated from 
     Burlingame High School in 1934, he said, he had attended 18 
     different schools, ``so I never really put down roots or had 
     a peer group.''
       He studied music briefly at San Francisco State University, 
     then began private lessons with Cowell, who encouraged his 
     interest in world music and nontraditional instrumental 
     techniques. Cowell also introduced him to Cage, who would be 
     a lifelong friend and artistic collaborator.
       After a brief stint at UCLA, where he enrolled in Arnold 
     Schoenberg's composition seminar, Mr. Harrison moved to New 
     York in 1943. There he wrote music criticism for the New York 
     Herald Tribune under the aegis of Virgil Thomson and edited 
     and premiered Ives' Third Symphony, which won the composer a 
     Pulitzer Prize.
       But Mr. Harrison found New York life too stressful, and 
     after a two-year teaching engagement at Black Mountain 
     College in North Carolina, he settled in Aptos for good in 
     1953. In subsequent years, he taught at Stanford University, 
     San Jose State University, Cabrillo College and Mills 
     College. In 1963, he was one of the founders of the Cabrillo 
     Music Festival, which continues as an annual celebration of 
     new music.
       His nearest survivors are his sister-in-law, Dorothy 
     Harrison, and two nephews. His body was cremated, but other 
     arrangements are incomplete.
       In recent years, Mr. Harrison's music was a frequent 
     feature of San Francisco Symphony programs, with the composer 
     himself, in his trademark red flannel shirt and snow-white 
     beard, beaming from a loge box. In addition to ``A Parade for 
     M.T.T.,'' premiered in 1995, the Symphony has performed the 
     Third Symphony, the Canticle No. 3 and the Organ Concerto.
       His music is amply represented on the San Francisco record 
     label New Albion.
       In 1998, Barry Jekowsky and the California Symphony 
     released a disc of his music, including the Fourth Symphony 
     with jazz vocalist Al Jarreau as narrator.
       Mr. Harrison's interests extended far beyond music. He was 
     a published poet and a painter, and as a young man had been a 
     dancer as well--a fact he enjoyed relating to audiences in 
     his later years, when his girth made the idea seem 
     incongruous.


                        committed to gay rights

       He was committed to gay rights long before the subject was 
     common; his 1971 puppet opera ``Young Caesar'' focused on a 
     gay love affair of Julius Caesar's. He was an ardent pacifist 
     and political activist.
       And he had more exotic passions as well--Esperanto, bio-
     diesel, kenaf (a fiber related to the hibiscus that he touted 
     as an ecologically sound alternative to paper), calligraphy, 
     American Sign Language and especially straw-bale 
     construction. His straw-bale house in the Mojave Desert near 
     Joshua Tree National Park, completed last year, was a joyful 
     retreat in his final months.
       That spirit of all-embracing receptivity and openness to 
     experience was evident everywhere in his music. As he once 
     told an interviewer, ``There are so many musics that I'm 
     attracted to. I'm fortunate that I laid out my toys on a very 
     large acreage when I was very young.''

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