source file: m1541.txt Date: Thu, 1 Oct 1998 15:46:19 -0400 Subject: Lou Harrison: Composing a World From: Daniel Wolf I've just read through a copy of _Lou Harrison: Composing a World_ by Let= a Miller and Frederic Lieberman (Oxford University Press, 1998) and recomme= nd it -- and the accompanying audio cd -- without reservations. The authors have made an elegant and entertaining read through the life a= nd works of this unique figure in the world's musical lanscape. They have fearless tackled the most complex subjects central Mr. Harrison's: whethe= r dealing with musical intonation, politics, the tangled mess of his score catalog, Harrison's relationship to traditional musics, or to the sometim= es devisive history of gamelan in North America, Miller and Lieberman manage= to be clear, thoughtful, and often provocative. (Okay - I do have a reservation: once again the primacy of Surinamese gamelan in the new worl= d is left out, an error that Mr. H. would surely not have made!). The chapter 'Assembling the Pieces' appears to me to be the center of the= book, a study of a composer at work. Such a key to how Harrison applies h= is wide musical resources will be especially useful in further studies of Harrison's work, particularly in sorting out Harrison's relationship to Javanese gamelan music, where he both revels in ahistoricity and experiments within a framework of contraints that is, on its own terms, conservative. In fact, such attributes have long been part of his work, a= nd the extension to a gamelan or gamelan-like instrumentarium is a developme= nt of his own technical and aesthetic concerns and not a wholesale appropriation of resources. Harrison's music is too often mistaken for a naive species of orientalism; such a confusion reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of 'where the action is' in the music and this book is a= first corrective in what I hope will be continued further study. May I add that it's a special delight to see this book come from two UCSC= faculty members. During my undergraduate days there, too long ago, an interest in Mr. H.'s music was decidedly NOT part of the accepted academi= c discourse. Harrison's few visits to the UCSC campus were hit and run events, avoided by the music faculty as one would avoid a hurricane, and were in themselves a powerful corrective to the different brand of musica= l conservatism then prevailing. Daniel Wolf Frankfurt =