Lou Harrison music manuscripts, sketches, poetry, and drawings, 1945-1991.

American composer Lou Harrison (1917-2003) is particularly noted for his percussion music, his exploration of cross-cultural compositional techniques, his fascination with and employment of just intonation tuning systems, and his synthesis of Asian and Western musics. Several of his compositions call for mixed ensembles of Asian and Western instruments. He was particularly interested in the gamelan and, in addition to writing for that ensemble, constructed his own ‘American gamelan.’

Lou Harrison was born in Portland OR in 1917 but spent his formative years in northern CA after his family settled there in 1926. He studied music at San Francisco State College beginning in 1935; while there he enrolled in Henry Cowell’s course “Music of the Peoples of the World.” He also studied composition with Cowell, who became a lifelong friend and influential mentor. Harrison later studied with Arnold Schoenberg at UCLA. During the 1940s, while in New York, he wrote reviews for the New York Herald Tribune and also wrote for Modern Music. He taught at various institutions, including Mills College in Oakland, CA (1937-40; 1980-85), UCLA (1942), Black Mountain College in NC (1951-53), and various other institutions. In 1953 he settled in Aptos, CA. Travels to Asia in 1961-62, as well as intensive study of the Korean double-reed p’iri, the Chinese psaltery, and the Indonesian gamelan inspired him to incorporate Asian influences into his musical style and to write works combining Eastern and Western instruments.

In addition to being a composer he was a published poet, an accomplished painter and was renowned for his calligraphic script.