Lou Harrison

Unconventional composer whose music fused East and West

Lou Silver Harrison, composer: born Portland, Oregon 14 May 1917; died Lafayette, Indiana 2 February 2003.

Lou Harrison was one of the brightest – and most unpredictable – stars in the firmament of American music. He was also one of the least readily categorised of all composers.

He followed in the "democratic" tradition of American music initiated by Charles Ives, incorporating into his music elements from any other culture that interested him. And he was many other things besides a composer: poet, philosopher, animal nurse, florist, dance accompanist, critic, teacher, instrument-maker, ethnomusicologist, calligrapher, typographer, painter, editor, forest firefighter and activist for peace, gay rights, Esperanto and countless other, often marginal causes – a man with an endless energy and sense of fun that infected anyone who came into contact with him.

Harrison was born in 1917 in Portland, Oregon, and spent his first nine years there. When his family moved to the Bay Area of San Francisco, he was exposed to the cultural diversity that was soon to become such a prominent feature of his own work: Chinese opera, Spanish and Mexican music, Gregorian chant. He wrote his first piece at 10, was a boy soprano, and played the horn, harpsichord, recorder and clarinet – catholic from the start.

As a student at San Francisco State College Harrison took composition lessons with Henry Cowell – himself a leading eclectic and flattener of barriers. After a period at Mills College in Oakland, in 1942 Harrison went on to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he studied composition with no lesser a figure than Arnold Schoenberg. Both of these teachers were radicals, though in very different ways; Harrison took what he needed from each, discipline from Schoenberg, freedom from Cowell. Another important influence was John Cage, with whom he presented percussion concerts – and a liberated approach to writing for percussion was another hallmark of Harrison's own music.

After a year teaching music to Los Angeles dancers, he moved to New York in 1943, joining the circle around the waspish critic-composer Virgil Thomson, writing over 300 reviews for The New York Herald Tribune between 1944 and 1947. He had contacted the Great Outsider, Charles Ives, as early as 1936 and was sent a huge crate of photocopied scores which he consulted almost daily. Harrison edited the Third Symphony and then conducted its first performance in April 1946. It won the Pulitzer Prize, which the grateful composer insisted on sharing with its midwife. Harrison championed the music of Carl Ruggles and Edgard Varèse – both steely individualists – too, and they likewise became important influences on his own compositions.

Eventually, life in the Apple proved too much for him to handle: in 1947 he had a nervous collapse and spent the best part of the next year attending a mental hospital. The effect on his music was cathartic, and growing dissonance was replaced by a vernal, open-hearted melodic impulse. Two years' teaching at Black Mountain College, an experimental establishment in North Carolina, took him out of the city, and in 1953 he returned to California, settling in a hilltop house in Aptos. Here he lived for the rest of his life.

But it was no more conventional now than it had been before. Determined to shun the musical rat-race, for three years he worked by day in an animal hospital, where his duties included the clipping of poodles, and by night at a ranger station where, propped up by stimulants, he composed, inexhaustibly. Grants and commissions would occasionally relieve the pressure. It was a tough existence, gradually lightened as teaching jobs came his way.

And he became a distinguished teacher. He was a senior scholar at the University of Hawaii in 1963, taught music at San Jose State College from 1967 to 1980, was visiting professor at Stanford University in 1974, held other positions at the Universities of California and Southern California, and was the Darius Milhaud Professor of Music at Mills College from 1980 to 1985; in 1983 he went to New Zealand as a senior Fulbright Fellow.

Harrison's instrumental eclecticism, and its deployment in a marriage of eastern and western musics, had already begun, in parallel with the work of an earlier maverick, Harry Partch. In Harrison's Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra, for example, the composition of which stretched over the 1940s and 1950s, he augmented the traditional percussion section with instruments fashioned from coffee tins, brake drums, lengths of pipe – everything that could make a useful noise was grist to his mill. His first trip to Asia came in 1961, with a visit to Tokyo; further travels deepened his fascination, and a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation allowed him to study Korean music in situ in 1961-62.

Another of Harrison's many concerns was "just" tuning, the division of the octave into pure intervals, as opposed to the "equal temperament" on which the Western musical tradition is built and which, Harrison asserted, "deprives us of real beauty – it deprives us of things we are genetically wired for". His Suite for Symphonic Strings, composed between 1936 and 1960, uses "just" intonation for four of its movements, and many of the others provide a template for further preoccupations: the first is based on a medieval dance (he had studied early music during his time in New York), the second is a chromatic chorale, and the ninth a nocturne written in the Locrian mode, rare even in the Renaissance heyday of modal music.

In 1967 Harrison – openly homosexual in an age when that took some courage – met and set up home with William Colvig, an electrician and amateur musician (he died in 2000). Together, in pursuit of an instrument that could play with just tuning, they built one of the earliest gamelans (an Indonesian percussion ensemble) in the United States. It set a trend: there are now more than 200 active gamelan groups in North America. Colvig's and Harrison's gamelan, though, was resolutely American: in place of the "authentic" gongs of Bali, this one featured tin cans and steel tubes, played with baseball bats.

Harrison's huge output didn't neglect the conventional forms and styles of the Western canon either, though he turned them to his own purpose. He composed four symphonies, the Symphony in G of 1948-52 written using Schoenbergian precepts but tonally centred; its scoring requires a piano armed with drawing pins in the hammers, and the Scherzo is a suite of dances, one of them a polka. He gave the piano concerto a tweak in 1985, tuning the black keys to precise fourths and fifths and the white ones to just intonation, thus generating an exultant harmonic complexity.

Active until the end – he had a heart attack on the way to attend a festival of his music at Ohio State University – Harrison had recently expanded his 1971 puppet opera Young Caesar into a full-scale work. Writing in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera in 1980, his fellow composer Ned Rorem described it as "the only opera with an overtly presented gay subject from history". Harrison returned the attention, convincing the octogenarian Rorem, who hates travelling, to visit the West Coast for the first time in many decades, by arranging for the local premiere of Rorem's large-scale song-cycle Evidence of Things Unseen, on 5 May at the Other Minds Festival. It will now serve as a memorial tribute to Harrison himself. An earlier homage was paid him in 1998 with the publication by OUP of Leta Miller's and Fredric Lieberman's Lou Harrison: composing a world.

Long an icon in American musical life, Harrison rose to wider prominence from 1995, when the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas began the regular programming of his music with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Parade for MTT (1995) was an early celebration of that collaboration. But collaboration had always been part of Harrison's working methods, beginning with the percussion concerts he put on with John Cage. Double Music for four percussionists (1941) was written jointly with Cage, as was a Suite for violin and American gamelan (1974) with Richard Dee. A partnership with the choreographer Mark Morris began in 1985 and led to a number of commissions, among them Rhymes with Silver for solo cello and ensemble, premiered in 1996 by Yo-Yo Ma.

The composer-conductor José Serebrier, for whom Harrison was "a great colleague", observed

his devotion to the Javanese gamelan orchestra, through which [he] obtained a sound mixture all his own, a fusion of East and West without parallels in our musical culture. When writing poetry or prose, or designing and physically constructing his new house in the desert (at age 84!), or composing new music, it was his feeling for sensual beauty that unified all his artistic talents.

Martin Anderson