Lou Harrison: A World of Music

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03/08/2012 This documentary just may deserve an Oscar nomination. The film maker Eva Soltes took standing ovations from a full house at the Castro theatre after it's debut. Fitting for a documentary about a composer, the background music is, of course, by the composer. And fitting, sophisticated music it is. The music is intrinsically interlinked with the long, sophisticated, and human story illuminated by this sophisticated, and humane documentary. Lou Harrison had a brief but meteoric rise in his career while living in New York, followed by a complete psychiatric collapse, followed by a long recovery. As part of his recovery regimen he ended up living, isolated, in a small, rough home in rural California. He lived there for 60+ years, for what turned out to be the rest of his life. As he slowly re-merged from this refuge, he became one the most important formal American composers of his era. Like many of his younger contemporaries, Harrison became fascinated with many types of traditional Asian music. Unlike most of those contemporaries, he had the drive and technical tools to understand the underlying foundations of these very old Asian forms. Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Indonesian, he was able to first understand, then create, fuse, and create new music again and again. In an interview in the movie, a longtime Chinese teacher, of Chinese music in San Francisco revealed that her background in traditional Chinese music came almost exclusively from her classes with Professor Lou Harrison in San Francisco. The list of Harrison's collaborators over the years is a who's, who's of American non-pop music. The documentary contains numerous interviews with Harrison's contemporaries and provides a historical context for for Harrison's work as well as several of his contemporaries. The movie should be used as an element of a music history class. Harrison's career spanned World War II, the red scare in the US, and the cold war. The list of his collaborators includes Schoenberg, Virgil Thomson, Cage, Ruggles, Tilson Thomas, Varèse, and Alan Hovhaness. He is credited with "making Charles Ives music performable" leading to Ive's winning the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1947, and he was a close friend of Henry Cowell when Cowell spent 4 years in San Quentin for "homosexual activities". Harrison and his partner, Bill Colvig, also created the first "American Gamelans" in his home in California. A Gamelan is an array of traditional percussive instruments usually associated Indonesia. Mostly bells, a Gamelan is a set of instruments that traditionally, are permanently, tuned only to other members of the set and thus are permanently bound to that set. Each Gamelan is unique. Creating a Gamelan is akin to creating every instrument in an orchestra before sitting down to play. Highly recommended. See more Read all reviews

Lou Harrison: A World of Music

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