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Harrison (Lou) Papers: Music Manuscripts
MS.132.Ser. 1
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Contributing Institution:
University of California, Santa Cruz
Title: Lou Harrison Papers: Music manuscripts
Creator:
Harrison, Lou, 1917-2003
Identifier/Call Number: MS.132.Ser. 1
Physical Description:
30 Linear Feet
35 flat boxes
Date (inclusive): 1927-2003
Abstract: Series 1: Music Manuscripts contains
complete autograph music scores, sketches, revisions and fragments produced by Harrison
during his seventy five years of writing music.
Language of Material: Languages represented in the
collection: English, Latin, Esperanto.
The collection is open for research.
Copyright for the items in this collection is owned by the Lou Harrison Estate.
Reproduction or distribution of any work protected by copyright beyond that allowed by fair
use requires permission from the copyright owner. It is the responsibility of the user to
determine whether a use is fair use, and to obtain any necessary permissions. For more
information see UCSC Special Collections and Archives policy on Reproduction and Use.
Lou Harrison Music manuscripts. MS 132, ser.1. Special Collections and Archives, University
Library, University of California, Santa Cruz.
Gift from Lou Harrison 1991-2003.
Lou Harrison (1917-2003) is recognized especially for his percussion music, his work with
just intonation tuning systems, and his syntheses of Asian and Western musics. His
compositions have combined instruments from various cultures and utilized many of his own
construction. His style is marked by a notable melodicism: even his percussion and 12-note
works have a decidedly lyrical flavor.
Harrison spent his formative years in northern California, where his family settled in
1926. In 1935 he entered San Francisco State College (now University), and in his three
semesters there studied the horn and clarinet, took up the harpsichord and recorder, sang in
vocal ensembles and composed works for early instruments. In Spring 1935 he enrolled in
Henry Cowell's course "Music of the Peoples of the World" and began composition lessons with
Cowell, who proved one of the strongest influences in Harrison's life.
Harrison also collaborated with West Coast choreographers and in 1937 was engaged by Mills
College in Oakland, California as a dance accompanist. At Mills in 1939 and 1940, and in San
Francisco, Harrison and John Cage staged high-profile percussion concerts, for one of which
they jointly composed
Double Music for Four Percussionists.
In August 1942 Harrison moved to Los Angeles, where he taught music to dancers at
University of California, Los Angeles and enrolled in Arnold Schoenberg's weekly composition
seminar. The following year he moved to New York. There he wrote over 300 reviews for the
New York Herald Tribune, premiered (as conductor) Ives's
Third Symphony, and
composed works in a dissonant contrapuntal style. But New York life proved difficult and in
1947 Harrison suffered a nervous breakdown that ultimately served as a catalyst for a change
in his compositional language. Following this traumatic event, Harrison turned more
deliberately to melodicism and pentatonicism, and embarked on studies of tuning systems.
After a two-year residency at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, he returned to the
West Coast. In 1954 he settled in Aptos, California where he remained for the rest of his
life.
Studies in Korea and Taiwan in 1961-62 and an intensive exploration of Indonesian gamelan
beginning in 1975 inspired Harrison to bring Asian influences into his musical style and to
write works combining Eastern and Western instruments. In 1967 Harrison met William Colvig
(1917-2000), an electrician and amateur musician who became his partner and collaborator in
instrument-building and tuning experiments. Together they built three instrument sets
evoking the gamelan. In his last years, Harrison returned more avidly to composing for
Western instruments. He wrote four symphonies, various concerti, and numerous chamber works.
Throughout his life, Harrison articulated political views of multiculturalism, ecological
responsibility and pacifism in both writings and musical compositions. He and Colvig were
also active politically in the gay rights movement. In addition to his musical compositions
and prose writings, Harrison, a published poet and a painter, was renowned for his
calligraphic script, and even designed his own computer fonts.
Leta Miller
Scope and Content of Collection
The Lou Harrison Music Manuscripts series consists of autograph music scores, sketches, and
revisions. Organized in categories by genre according to the Grove's Music Dictionary, the
entries include instrumentation, dates of composition, movement titles and premiere dates as
well as cross references and notes. These details are provided by the Harrison works
catalogue created by Leta Miller and Charles Hanson for the Miller/Lieberman book
Lou
Harrison: Composing a World
(Oxford, 1998). In addition to his performed works,
the collection includes numerous unfinished works, works in process, small "gift" pieces,
and experimental sketches. There are transcriptions of traditional Asian pieces, musical
examples from workshops, and experimental works using specified tones and tunings. These
pieces, unpublished and not authorized for performance, are inventoried by description, such
as, 7-tone equal temperament sketch, unfinished 3-tone song, Just Intonation sketches, but
not by specific date or genre.
Pieces within each genre are listed chronologically by date of completion unless otherwise
stated. Complete works later used as movements of larger works are listed separately because
(1) they were complete compositions at the earlier date and remain as separate viable
compositions on their own; and (2) new material was added when they were incorporated into
the later composition.
The Music Manuscript collection contains over 113 complete representations of the variety
and styles that the composer achieved in his 75 years of writing music. Included are the
earliest juvenilia from age ten that Harrison himself said "are perfectly dreadful" as well
as the percussion and dance compositions from the 1930's and 40's that are still considered
signature pieces and as Lou also said " still hold the boards". Harrison continued composing
until his last day of February 2, 2003. He was on his way to a festival of his music which
included yet another revision of his Third Symphony. His final work,
Scenes from Nek
Chand, for American Steel Guitar
, shows his faltering hand after decades of a
beautiful calligraphic script and notation. In various stages of his life, Harrison's script
changed dramatically and was to become one of the factors in helping to identify, and date,
fragments and scores.
The Music Manuscript materials are filed in order of movements with entries indicating
pages or folios, scores and sketches. Pages are numbered at the top right in parenthesis.
Harrison is known for his continual revision process and his "mining" of earlier materials
to incorporate in to new works. To that effect, the manuscripts in this collection were
carefully studied, versions compared, and sketches identified so that the most complete
picture of his compositional process could emerge. In extreme cases of cross-referenced
manuscripts (such as the
Political Primer where material ended up in the
Elegiac and
Third symphonies), all folios and sketches are
retained in the original work with pencil indications where fragments and themes were
extracted and to which work they were taken. In other instances of multiple revisions, such
as the
Fourth Symphony, bound published scores are included because they
contain autograph revision sketches. In cases where entire movements are taken out and
replaced (such as
First Suite for Strings/New First Suite for Strings 1937,
1948, 1995), all materials extant can be directly identified in the cross-reference section
of the notes. In the few instances where one of the "revisions" is simply an exchange of
movement order, manuscript materials are listed in the original order so as to avoid
confusion where numbering occurs. Where possible, program and performance notes, written by
the composer, are included.
Harrison often used his preferred spellings of certain words as in
Simfony in
Freestyle
,
Labrynth,
Short Set from Lazarus Laughed
(or
Set for 4 Haisho which was eventually reverted to Suite to avoid cultural
confusion). He was an early proponent of the universal language Esperanto. Several of his
works are titled in Esperanto and several vocal pieces are written to be sung or recited in
this language. His
Kon-certo por la violono kun perkuta orkestro (
Suite for Violin with Percussion Orchestra),
Nova Odo (
New Ode), and
La Koro Sutro (the Buddhist
Heart
Sutra
, translated to Esperanto and sung to the accompaniment of an American
gamelan) are examples of what the visitor to this collection might encounter.
Special Collections, with appreciation, has received funding to acquire and process the Lou
Harrison Archive. The Rex Foundation and the Unbroken
Chain, two foundations established by members of the Grateful
Dead, generously contributed to the acquisition of Lou Harrison material for
the Archive. Members of the Grateful Dead had a long association with Harrison, having
performed together on several occasions at San Francisco Symphony programs, and they
recognized the importance of Harrison's musical contributions. Without their support some of
Harrison's essential manuscripts and recordings would not have been part of the Archive.
Special Collections also acknowledges Richard Faggioli for his contributions towards the
archiving and preservation of music at UCSC and for his continued interest shown to Special
Collections' holdings. We are particularly grateful to the
Title: Gladys Krieble Delmas
Foundation
of New York for awarding a grant to Special Collections to support
preparing the inventory and preserving Lou Harrison's music manuscripts. Delmas
Foundation support has allowed for the construction of this detailed electronic
finding aid of the music manuscript collection available through the Online Archive of
California. We thank the Delmas Foundation for assisting us in making
this special resource accessible to the public and for their continued efforts to support
scholarly resource sharing beyond institutional boundaries.
We are particularly grateful to Charles Hanson, longtime personal archivist to Lou
Harrison, who patiently identified the music manuscripts within the Archive and prepared the
inventory provided in this Finding Aid.
Initial processing by Charles Hanson; Final processing by M. Carey, completed 2005. EAD
encoded findng aid by UCSC OAC Unit, Final encoding by M. Carey. Note that many of the
subseries descriptions are in Harrison's words.
This finding aid was revised in the Reparative Archival Redescription Project. Previous
versions of this finding aid are available upon request.
- George Barati Papers
- Ernest T. Kretschmer Archive
Additional information may be found in these related collections held by other
repositories
- Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library, Harvard College Library, Harvard University
- San Jose State University School of Music & Dance
- Lou Harrison Archive at Mills College
- The John Cage Music Manuscript Collection, Henry Cowell Collection, New Music Society Archives, at the Music Division of the New York Public Library
- Northwestern University Music Library, Special Collections - John Cage Collection
- Lou Harrison Notebooks
- Lou Harrison Papers: Correspondence
Subjects and Indexing Terms
Composers -- United States
Dramatic music
Dance music
Motion picture music
Orchestral music
Vocal music
Ensembles (Musical compositions)
Percussion music
Gamelan music
Keyboard instrument music
Harrison, Lou, 1917-2003