Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick

LOU HARRISON

LOU

HARRISON

American Musical Maverick

BILL ALVES and BRETT CAMPBELL

Indiana University Press

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

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Herman B Wells Library 350

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iupress.indiana.edu

© 2017 by Bill Alves and Brett Campbell

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No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Alves, Bill, author. | Campbell, Brett, [date] author.

Title: Lou Harrison : American musical maverick / Bill Alves and Brett Campbell.

Description: Bloomington ; Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016056931| ISBN 9780253025616 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253026156 (pb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253026439 (eb)

Subjects: LCSH: Harrison, Lou, 1917-2003. | Composers—United States—Biography.

Classification: LCC ML410.H2066 A7 2017 | DDC 780.92 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016056931

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This whole round living world of music—the Human Music—rouses and delights me, it stirs me to a transethnic, a planetary music.

—Lou Harrison

CONTENTS

Foreword: Hail, Lou! / Mark Morris

Preface: Lou’s World

Acknowledgments

Part 1: Oregon Trails

1.  The Silver Court (1917–1934)

Part 2: The Vast Acreage

2.  A Wonderful Whirligig (1935–1936)

3.  The Ultramodernist (1935–1936)

4.  The Grand Manner (1936–1937)

5.  Changing World (1937–1938)

6.  Double Music (1938–1939)

7.  Drums Along the Pacific (1939–1941)

8.  Into the Labyrinth (1941–1942)

9.  Western Dance (1942–1943)

Part 3: A Hell of a Town

10.  The Lonesome Isle (1943–1945)

11.  New York Waltzes (1945–1946)

12.  Praises for the Archangel (1946)

13.  Day of Ascension (1946–1947)

14.  Tears of the Angel (1947–1948)

15.  The Perilous Chapel (1948–1949)

16.  Pastorales (1949–1950)

17.  The White Goddess (1951)

18.  A Great Playground (1951–1952)

19.  Lake Eden (1952–1953)

Part 4: Full Circle

20.  A Paradise Garden of Delights (1953–1955)

21.  Free Style (1955–1957)

22.  Wild Rights (1957–1961)

Part 5: Pacifica

23.  The Human Music (1961)

24.  Pacific Rounds (1962–1963)

25.  The Family of the Court (1963–1966)

26.  Stars Upon His Face (1967–1969)

27.  Young Caesar and Old Granddad (1969–1974)

28.  Elegies (1973–1975)

Part 6: The Great Melody

29.  Golden Rain (1975–1977)

30.  Playing Together (1977–1979)

31.  Showers of Beauty (1978–1982)

32.  Paradisal Music (1982–1984)

33.  Stampede (1984–1987)

34.  New Moon (1986–1990)

35.  Book Music (1991–1995)

36.  An Eden of Music and Mountains (1995–1997)

37.  Asian Artistry (1997–2002)

38.  White Ashes (2003)

Appendix A: Glossary of Musical Terms

Appendix B: List of Harrison’s Compositions

Notes

Bibliography

Index

FOREWORD: HAIL, LOU!

Mark Morris

This book is a marvel. From knowing Mr. Harrison, from reading and through conversation with many others who knew him better than I did, I thought I’d heard it all. I’m happy to say that I was way off. His story and the story of his music are very satisfyingly presented here. So many fascinating details are revealed that I felt renewed respect, awe, and love for the subject: the Divine Lou Harrison. Harrison’s music—or musics, considering the many diverse styles and modes and methods he employed in his compositions—promoted pleasure and peace. His devotion to beauty and consonance resulted in a deep trust relationship with his audience: hearing an engaging tune makes you feel better, and everyone wants to feel better. He was unafraid of the emotional resonance of a ravishing melody and, like his beloved Henry Cowell, was long denied respect by the Music Police. The deep, theoretical, personal immersion in music of the Rest of the World paid off by allowing him to produce an astounding variety of sonorities and compositional practices and structures, resulting in the amazing, huge embrace that his aesthetic presents to a willing listener.

You either love Lou’s music or you haven’t heard it yet. It sings and it dances. I first heard his call in the early 1980s from an out-of-print LP of Four Strict Songs. That recording led me to hunt for more and then more. I can’t imagine how I’d been ignorant of the music for so long. Since my early teenhood I’d been drawn to the work of Satie, Cowell, Thomson, Nancarrow, Hovhaness, Cage, Ives, and particularly Harry Partch. My first good dance was set to Partch’s Barstow. I’d been to Indonesia and was smitten with all things gamelan. I’d been to Korea and Japan and Thailand. I already loved the music of Asia and Polynesia. I adored Peking Opera. I’d sung madrigals and Croatian music and Appalachian and shape-note hymns and the Carter Family. I sang (enthusiastically if not beautifully) baroque music and rounds and catches and lute songs with similarly interested friends. I loved American Sign Language and hula and Esperanto and popular songs of the 20s and 30s. I was a flamenco dancer, a folk dancer, a modern dancer, a ballet dancer. I was already an active, confident choreographer at fifteen. I’d even read most of Partch’s Genesis of a Music, at least the parts I could comprehend.

Lou’s music hit me in the same way that my first trip to India hit me: it felt like Home. It was strange and satisfying and just right. In the way that Lou claimed he wished he’d written Take Me Out to the Ball Game, I felt that I myself could somehow have come up with what I heard in his music. What I heard was magic, trust, power, Eros, kindness, fear, an overwhelming mystery, and vast inclusion. I try to perpetuate those qualities in my own work as a choreographer. I’ve learned through conversation with friends who knew Lou (Merce Cunningham, Dennis Russell Davies, Willie Winant, Eva Soltes, John Luther Adams, Michael Tilson Thomas, Jody Diamond, Remy Charlip …) that we all knew him best and loved him most. He was impossibly kind. He was generous and bossy. He was grand and shy. Super-strong and super-gay. I found his music irresistible and inescapable. Over the years, I’ve choreographed many of his pieces and presented many more in my curation of concerts, and I plan to set even more dances to his music as time goes on.

I visited Lou and Bill Colvig numerous times at their home in Aptos. They were wonderful, fascinating old friends. Yes, there was the perpetual soup pot on the stove, the Tchaikovsky and Ives rooms, the carpets, the garden with its plants from antiquity. They attended my dance company’s performances in Berkeley and in New York, even if the program didn’t include music that Lou had written. Lou came to my mother’s birthday party in Seattle wearing galoshes instead of shoes. The two of them, so fond and funny with each other, were mildly lascivious with me and my male friends. Bill would dart past, naked, out of Lou’s view. They smelled of the Forest and the Temple. In our very satisfying collaboration on the piece that became Rhymes With Silver, I was lucky to be caught up in the thrilling compositional process of a fully realized choreomusical presentation. Lou consulted Yo-Yo Ma on bowing and fingering, adjusted phrasings and lengths to suit dancing’s needs, revised and improved the already gorgeous music both new and repurposed; he through-composed most of the sections but also generously dumped several kits in my lap to cope with in my own way. He always served me and paid for lunch at the Mexican café near his house.

In 2003 I was at work choreographing a solo for myself to Serenade for Guitar. In the dance, I played finger cymbals during one part (the Usul) and thought I should also play castanets for the last part (which sounded to me like Scarlatti). I was getting ready to call Lou for official permission to add that little bit of percussion to his music. Before I got around to making that call (don’t put it off!), I learned that Lou, darling Lou, had died. I guess it was time. I took his silence as tacit approval. I strapped on my castanets and danced to his memory and to his unequaled influence on the Great Big World of Music. Hail Lou!

PREFACE: LOU’S WORLD

The bus dropped me off at a stop on the side of the road, just off a major highway near Santa Cruz, California. I looked around. This appeared to be the right place, but there was no building nearby, just forested hillsides on both sides of the road. It was June 1995, and I was supposed to be meeting composer Lou Harrison at his house for the first time in half an hour, for our first formal interview in the biography I had just begun with Bill Alves. I had assumed I would take a taxi to his front door, but in our phone conversation, Harrison pointed out that it would be a lot cheaper and more fun to ride the bus from the home I was house-sitting in Walnut Creek and then hike up the hill from the back. You’ll see the trail that Harrison’s life partner, Bill Colvig, had blazed himself many years before, Harrison assured me.

I looked around and finally spotted what might—or might not—have been the path. Toting my tape recorder and laptop, I plunged into the forest and followed the path uphill.

Bill Alves and I decided to write the book when I was looking for a final project in my literary nonfiction master’s program at the University of Oregon. In the mid-1980s, when Bill was a music composition graduate student at the University of California, his interests in just intonation and gamelan had led him to Lou’s music, at a time when recordings of Lou’s gamelan music had recently become available. After having helped arrange for a residency for Lou at USC, Bill was surprised when two white-bearded, flannel-shirted men pulled up in a ramshackle old camper. Lou and Bill hit it off right away, with Lou even conceding his admiration for Bill’s computer music, a medium that Lou normally disdained, and they corresponded thereafter.

Meanwhile, I had been entranced by a public radio broadcast of Lou’s Pacifika Rondo and asked Bill to introduce us. We met up with Lou and Bill Colvig after a talk Lou was giving at a local college, in which he used the history of the Western piano to demonstrate that there is no such thing as a pure musical tradition. At dinner afterward, we proposed our biography project, and they agreed to participate. What composer doesn’t like to talk about himself? chuckled Lou.

Thus I trudged my way up that coastal hillside, at the fringe of the Forest of Nisene Marks State Park, marveling at how after only a couple of minutes of walking through the quiet shade of pine, redwood, and eucalyptus trees—so cooling after the hourlong ride in Santa Cruz’s un-air conditioned bus—I felt worlds away from the area’s suburban sprawl and noxious highways. I spied a couple of deer darting away, tuned into a chorus of birdcalls, inhaled the arboreal fragrance.

A few minutes later, I spied a fence and a clearing. Opening the gate, I emerged into a lovely garden, with purple agapanthus and other lilies and more in full summer bloom. There at the picnic table sat Lou (wearing a batik shirt) and Bill (wearing a lumberjack-style shirt and hiking shorts), enjoying a snack. I felt as though I’d entered some kind of magic garden. They invited me inside.

To enter Harrison’s house was to immerse yourself in a realm resplendent in modern art (some by famous painters Lou had known, like Ben Shahn), artifacts (wall hangings, statues, tiles from Iran, and more), shelves upon shelves of books (with even more scattered about everywhere), strange percussion instruments, even food from all over the planet. And of course music—LPs and cassettes of traditional music and Lou’s own recordings and scores. After a couple of hours of interviewing, Lou walked me to the back fence, and I plunged into the forest and descended back to the real world.

I repeated that journey (an hour each way by bus) a few times a week for the next month or so, trying hard not to overburden Lou, who was nearly seventy, and already starting to feel the pressures—increasingly incessant phone calls and faxes, mail, invitations, and other importunings that chipped away at his composing time. But he was almost always voluble, funny, brilliant (he had inherited Henry Cowell’s habit of prefacing some relatively arcane knowledge of history, science, or art with As you know …), and, as many older people are, amazingly detailed in his memories of his childhood, teenage years, and twenties. I’d learned interview techniques to elicit just such memories, but I also learned that Lou was at the time engaged in similar reminiscences with his therapist, which probably helped. By the end of that summer, I knew I had one of the great stories of twentieth-century art.

For the next eight years, Bill Alves and I would return several times a year to Aptos whenever Lou’s increasingly hectic schedule, and ours, permitted. He encouraged Bill to root around in his piles of manuscripts, then just being put into order by Lou’s doughty archivist, Charles Hanson, and to use his home copier and stacks of kenaf paper. In formal sit-down interviews, over lunches at Manuel’s, and during other encounters in Eugene, Portland, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, Lou would share his memories and ideas, musical and otherwise.

Then one February day in 2003, we received the devastating news that Lou had died, en route to an extensive four-day music festival in his honor at the Ohio State University. I was due to meet him there the next day, to cover the festival for the Wall Street Journal, and when I arrived in Columbus, I found everyone stunned, still reeling from the sudden departure of the artist whose music, whose world, had so long enchanted us.

After Lou’s death, boxes of scores, recordings, notebooks, and memorabilia passed into storage at UC Santa Cruz, which hired Charles Hanson to catalog it. Thanks to his work and that of others at UCSC, these archives became an invaluable resource for us. While interviewing Lou’s friends (such as Terry Riley, John Luther Adams, Mark Morris, Burt Bacharach, David Harrington, and David Lang) for unrelated stories, I would ask them about Lou, and their faces would light up, eager, like so many others, to share their memories.

Everyone smiles when they talk about Lou. His contagious sense of wonder and discovery—about history, science, art, music, politics, and more—rekindles that same spark in all of us. As we excavated further his full life, we discovered more about his troubled past and terrible temper, and one of the only regrets Lou ever expressed to us was about the terrible way he had sometimes treated people. Yet those who knew him during his youth—Remy Charlip, John Dobson, Judith Malina, Ned Rorem—remembered first his charm, his laughter, his infectious excitement. Remembering Lou made you feel, as he did, that the world was a bounteous trove of wonder.

I can still recall the moment—every biographer has one—when we found a document that, combined with evidence from interviews, for the first time really illuminated a searing turning point in his life. And whenever I encountered fellow citizens of Planet Lou, in the course of research or other journalistic assignments or visits, we would share more memories of the musician who touched so many through both his music and his ebullient attitude toward life.

Throughout his eventful career, Harrison would pursue the magic he first experienced amid the Asian art treasures gracing his childhood home in Portland’s Silver Court apartments. He’d find it in mysterious shops in San Francisco’s Chinatown, in Korean temples and Indonesian percussion orchestras, Medieval musical modes, ancient Greek tunings, in new instruments contrived from junkyard detritus. From those unlikely ingredients, he would fashion beguiling new sounds far removed from the conventional music of his time and place. Like his mother, he would embrace beautiful strangeness—and make it feel like home.

Just as Lou re-created, in his home and his music, the exotic world of the Silver Court of his childhood, or the colorful Chinatown and the rest of San Francisco of his adolescence, we have tried to conjure up Lou’s world, the one I and so many others glimpsed when we entered that rambling house bordering the woods, or when they heard his increasingly popular and influential music.

After Lou died, new owners demolished the house I’d climbed up to that summer, the property now having become too pricy to harbor the quirky compound of music and memories we and his other visitors knew. I never could bring myself to go back to that spot on the hill. Eva Soltes preserved some of the contents, and she manages Harrison House, the desert retreat Lou designed at the end of his life, probably the best place to encounter a tangible environment that preserves his spirit. In a way, more and more of us, especially on the West Coast, are living in the world Lou helped create, a world in which music and art and culture from all over the world converge as part of our everyday lives.

And of course this spirit lives in Harrison’s wondrous music, so much of which embraces, in an organic rather than a contrived fashion, the sounds of so many other cultures. It’s there that he really re-created the sense of worldly wonder he felt as a boy at the Silver Court. We hope that this book also captures the feeling of that world, the one Lou glimpsed as a child in Portland and re-created in the house and garden at the edge of the woods—and the continent—in Aptos. As I emerged from the woods into a magical garden, I found myself in a portal to the vast and rich world of history, art, nature, music, and delight that Lou Harrison created during his eighty-five years on this planet, and that resounds in the music he made.

—Brett Campbell

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are indebted to a great many people for the creation of this book, most especially many of Lou’s close friends, who generously and gleefully shared detailed memories of their time with Lou, always, always with a wistful smile and a chuckle, including Remy Charlip, Bill Colvig, Richard Dee, Jody Diamond, Charles Hanson, Robert Hughes, Daniel Schmidt, and Eva Soltes. Now good friends of ours as well, they helped in many ways, from providing key documents and photographs to tracking down acquaintances and other valuable information. We’re grateful to Eva Soltes for allowing us access to her research for her 2012 documentary Lou Harrison: A World of Music. Lou’s friend Charles Shere, who began an insightful Lou Harrison biography of his own but went on to other projects, graciously allowed us access to his manuscript. The memories of Judith Malina and Ned Rorem helped open up a crucial but underappreciated part of Lou’s story in New York, in part because his own memories, damaged by his breakdown there, were so sketchy.

Like all researchers, we are also grateful to the librarians and archivists who helped us search through the monumental collection of scores, recordings, documents, and other artifacts of Lou’s life: those at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Special Collections—including Rita Bottoms, Christine Bunting, Luisa Haddad, and Charles Hanson—and Janice Braun at Mills College. We’re sure there is much more information in these archives, and there are more stories worth telling. We hope future researchers will find these collections as fascinating.

We are also very grateful to Jeff Abell, John Luther Adams, Susan Alexander, Anahid Ajemian, Debbie Alves, Charles Amirkhanian, Burt Bacharach, Erik Bauersfeld, Jack Body, Robert Brown, Mark Bulwinkle, Todd Burlingame, Linda Burman-Hall, the Cabrillo Music Festival, Bonnie Callantine, Hal Callantine, Peter Cavagnaro, John Chalmers, Duncan Charters, John Dobson, David Doty, Frank Eng, Margaret Fisher, Frank Foreman, Holly Gardinier, Peter Garland, Don Gillespie, Kraig Grady, David Harrington, David Harsany, Susan Heinlein, Mark Hoffman, Joseph Horowitz, James Irwin, Daniel Kelley, Lorle Kennedy, David Lang, Kerry Lewis, Frederic Lieberman, Larry London, Eric Marin, Vincent McDermott, Donald McKayle, Jim McKee, Midiyanto, Leta Miller, Danlee Mitchell, Mark Morris, Trish Neilsen, Matthew Paris, Peter Poole, Jarrad Powell, Terry Riley, John Rockwell, Joel Sachs, John Schneider, Chloe Scott, Jon Siddall, William Slye, Jennifer Shennan Thomas, Andrew Timar, Larry Warren, Jeffrey Wash, Raymond Weisling, I Nyoman Wenten, William Winant, Daniel Wolf, Randall Wong, Wu Man, George Zelenz, and Michael Zwiebach.

Our thanks go to the editorial staff and others at Indiana University Press, who were so helpful and supportive of this large and challenging project, including Raina Polivka, Janice Frisch, and Gary Dunham. We also gratefully acknowledge support from Harvey Mudd College. We are especially thankful to our teachers, other supportive friends and colleagues, and, of course, our beloved family members—parents, partners, children, and felines.

PART 1

Oregon Trails

By the time he turned eighty in May 1997, Lou Harrison had reached a pinnacle few American musicians ever attain. San Francisco mayor Willie Brown declared June 14, 1996, Lou Harrison Day.¹ Across the street from City Hall, at a concert at Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco Symphony music director Michael Tilson Thomas read Brown’s proclamation to the audience at the orchestra’s American Mavericks Festival, which honored Harrison and his friends and fellow music pioneers Henry Cowell and John Cage. There, just steps from the War Memorial Opera House where, fifty-seven years before, Harrison had received his first orchestral performance, Thomas conducted several Harrison compositions, including Canticle #3, a now classic composition for percussion ensemble that San Franciscans had first heard a mile and a half away at the Fairmont Hotel’s auditorium in 1941, played by Harrison, Cage, and a group of amateur percussionist friends.

In New York, where Harrison lived for a decade, Lincoln Center presented an eightieth birthday exhibition of Harrison memorabilia, a solo recital by pianist Michael Boriskin, and the premiere of Harrison’s Concerto for Pipa and String Orchestra. A concert at the 92nd Street Y presented Harrison’s music for the American Gamelan, a set of percussion instruments Harrison had designed and built with his life partner, Bill Colvig. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the country’s most innovative dance group, led by Mark Morris, performed three evenings’ worth of dances set to Harrison’s music, including Rhymes with Silver, featuring superstar cellist Yo-Yo Ma, which had debuted earlier that year in Berkeley.

In between the start of his artistic life, living on the edge of poverty, and his celebration as one of America’s leading composers, Harrison helped bring American music from the generation of fearsome modernist iconoclasts to the generation of world music and minimalism. In 1930s San Francisco, he helped to pioneer music for percussion ensemble as well as a DIY mentality that extended to forming his own band and even making his own instruments long before classical composers did such things. His early explorations in noise, global music cultures, early music, and unusual musical tunings also anticipated the larger world by decades, as did his countercultural convictions of pacifism and open homosexuality. An unrepentant eclectic in a time that celebrated singular artistic visions, he composed propulsive dance scores and unabashedly modal melodies alongside his experiments in atonality. Also unlike many modernists, Harrison never thought of his many innovations as revolutionary musical statements, just the next potentially rewarding creative avenue to explore, often inspired by mentors and books that opened his imagination to new possibilities.

Like other ambitious radical artists, he headed for the headwaters of American new music, New York City, but despite his formative connections and experiences there, he found a musical and personal dead end. He returned to California, leaving the musical mainstream both geographically and musically for the quiet solace of nature and a perspective looking out over the Pacific. His trajectory between these extremes was unlike that of any of his contemporaries—to outsiders, he seemed to have suddenly abandoned a seemingly promising career to pursue, in near isolation, eccentric interests in Asian music and tuning. At a time when the musical avant-garde exploded with futurist electronics, wild experimentation, and inscrutable complexity, Lou Harrison vacated the overcrowded city space of modern music, said New Yorker critic Alex Ross, to camp out in a desert landscape of long drones and mesmeric patterns.² A troubled life and a long wait for acceptance never shook Harrison from his stalwart faith in transcendent melody, a resolutely westward view (away from Europe and toward Asia), and an ideal of harmonic purity in music as well as society.

Through his isolation, he came to value the joys of making music with friends over a career in search of conventional markers of success. By the gentle gravitational attraction of his ebullient personality, Harrison drew a steadily widening circle of sympathetic fellow travelers to his side in his journey, often creating a supportive community to perform and listen to the new sounds he was conceiving. His contagious enthusiasm for ideas, artistic and beyond, inspired devotion and support from key figures who helped him throughout his life, because he made so many of those around him imagine that they could do what he did: continuously embrace the joy of exploring new horizons, and continuously reinvent himself throughout his long and fruitful life.

By the 1980s, Harrison’s recordings were winning legions of listeners beyond the hermetic Western avant-garde aficionados, and his multiculturalism was moving beyond the esoteric to the mainstream. At the San Francisco Symphony’s 1996 American Mavericks Festival, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas placed Harrison’s music squarely in the lineage of American music, alongside his mentors and musicians he influenced, from Charles Ives to John Cage, and even with Bay Area rock legends the Grateful Dead.

Throughout his long and meandering creative journey, Harrison never stopped learning and exploring, and the acclaim of the Davies Symphony Hall audience, Deadheads and all, showed that this path had found a surprisingly wide range of listeners. And that path’s direction was set nearly eighty years before, several hundred miles up the Pacific Coast, where his mother surrounded him with the elegance of Asian art and his father read James Joyce out loud to the family.

1

THE SILVER COURT (1917–1934)

Whenever Lou Harrison came home, it was like stepping into another world. From as early in childhood as he could remember, wherever he looked in his family’s apartment in Portland, Oregon’s Silver Court Apartments, young Lou saw colorful paintings from various Asian cultures mounted on walls covered by Japanese grass wallpaper. Chinese carved teak furniture perched on Persian rugs, colorful Japanese lanterns dangled from the ceiling, cloisonné objects filled the mantel, and the rooms boasted other artifacts from Asia and the Middle East. Compared to the prosaic furnishings and fixtures of the rest of the young Harrison’s post-World War I Pacific Northwest life, his home was an almost magical place.

The exotic decor sprang from the ambitions of his mother. Born in Seattle in 1890, Calline Silver grew up in the Alaskan frontier with her sister, Lounette. Despite these rough circumstances, their father saw to it that both girls had music lessons, at a time when music was an important marker of good breeding and refinement for young women. After her father died and Cal raised herself from this rustic beginning to a middle-class ideal, she became a woman of strong will and determination, qualities that her son would inherit. She married affable, fair-skinned Clarence Harrison, a first-generation American born in 1882, whose Norwegian father had, like many immigrants, changed his surname from exotic (de Nësja) to blend-in conventional: Harrison.

Like many upwardly mobile West Coasters, Cal Harrison was attracted to the allure of Asia and regarded exotic artifacts as exemplars of refined taste. Such decorations were common in Portland homes since the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial and American Pacific Exposition and Oriental Fair. Japan alone spent a million dollars on its exhibit, which featured exotic (to American eyes) arts and crafts, sparking a local infatuation with Asian art and culture. Many middle- and upper-class houses boasted Oriental Rooms festooned with Asian and Middle Eastern furniture and art, Turkish corners, and other symbols of what many Americans still regarded as the mysterious East. That Pacific exoticism also manifested in music. When Lou was born on May 14, 1917, Hawaiian music was the most popular genre in America. Radio broadcasts of Hawaiian slide guitars and the clacks of his mother’s mah-jongg tiles supplied the soundtrack to some of his earliest memories—and inspired his final great composition eight decades later.¹

The Silver Court’s surrounding Irvington neighborhood in northeast Portland had been developed as an exclusive enclave only twenty years before Lou was born. Connected to downtown Portland’s cultural riches by trolley, the streetcar park originally catered to the toffs (including lumber barons). During Lou’s childhood, however, the changing neighborhood’s new Queen Anne revival, Craftsman, and Prairie School-style homes welcomed more middle-class people like the Harrisons. They had built the handsome Silver Court Apartments (which still stands at 22nd and Hancock streets) shortly after Lou’s birth, when Calline received a substantial inheritance from her family in Ohio, who owned a manufacturing business; her grandfather’s widow’s death in 1910 led to a partition of the estate, and the Harrisons used their share to build the three-story, thirty-unit apartment building. The money allowed them to hire a family to take care of the apartments, including their own.

They also bought the tire business where Lou’s father worked, inculcating a lasting family tension: Cal never let Clarence forget that it was her money that put him in business. It was mother’s belief that the man should wear the skirts, Lou wrote in his journal many years later.² After all, the apartment building they lived in and managed was called Silver Court, not Harrison House—and it later seemed to Lou that his father was always on trial.

Clarence and Calline did share a love of cars—she was reputedly the first woman to drive across Portland’s Steel Bridge—and the family enjoyed then-common Sunday drives and picnics in the country. They appreciated the scenic beauty—waterfalls, the spectacular Columbia River Gorge, Mt. Hood (which dominated the eastern skyline), and nearby Mt. Tabor—and gave Harrison and his brother, Bill (born three years later), a lasting love of the outdoors.

Calline had intended to name the baby for her sister Lounette, but when they discovered I was a male, they cut off the ‘nette.’ I became Lou, so I’m not Lou-vig, or Louis, or any of that, just plain Lou.³ Like their apartment building, Lou was also named for his mother’s maiden name, giving his name a uniqueness that was later commemorated in the title of his ballet Rhymes with Silver. In childhood, though, Lou Silver Harrison was mostly called by his nickname, Buster. Harrison never met his grandparents and had little contact with extended family during childhood, so his parents exerted the greatest family influence on their eldest son. Their two most persistent legacies were his lifelong loves: arts and reading. Aunt Lounette played violin, often accompanied by Calline on the piano, and little Buster would dance.

He took the stage early. Calline worked in a Portland beauty shop, and one of her regular customers, Verna Felton, ran a small theater company that in 1920 was producing Jean Webster’s 1912 play Daddy-Long-Legs.⁴ They needed a young boy for a silent walk-on role as a little orphan, and Calline volunteered two-year-old Buster, who, encouraged by candy, improvised his lines—for the irrepressible little Lou, it turned out not to be a silent role after all—and won the audience’s heart, getting his picture in the daily Oregonian newspaper and an invitation to reprise the role on a Northwest tour and in another production in Washington.⁵ The experience gave Harrison both a taste for performance and a deep set of separation anxieties that never left him.⁶

Aged three

I was on stage

& touring with the troupe—

the child’s still me in my rounds and duties

The stage

was large, the scene

was dim, the actress was,

I knew, woman my mother

much loved.

frightened

by commotion

in the hall—applause

laughter?—loud, so many grown-ups

clapping!

So large

the stage! the plot

unknown, the lines unsure,

& the scenes done as reverse glass

paintings.

So much

for all the pain—

costumes and glitter keep

our solemn frivolity

alive.⁷

LOST TREASURES

Along with the Asian art in her home and the European art in the Silver Court lobby, Calline imparted artistic culture to her children. Just two and a half miles away and over the Broadway or Steel bridges across the Willamette River that separated the Irvington neighborhood from downtown’s theaters and studios, the city’s relatively rich classical music, dance, and theater scenes provided an outlet for Calline’s ambitions for her family’s artistic enlightenment.

Oregonians liked to say that when the pioneers moved west over the Lewis and Clark Trail, the settlers who wanted gold turned left and headed for California, while those who wanted to set up a culture turned right and brought their schools, pianos, and other cultural trappings to Oregon. Portland fancied itself as more cultured than other West Coast boomtowns, and its 1920s music scene reflected that cultivated sensibility, including recitals by famous musicians like Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Béla Bartók, Jascha Heifetz, and Fritz Kreisler. Lou remembered seeing movies like the 1925 epic The Lost World at the Hollywood Theater.

As Buster grew older, he’d join the rest of the family in singing popular music, old tunes like Bicycle Built for Two, Blue Lagoon, and By the Bend of the River—the last a pentatonic melody that, he later recalled, haunted his music for years, just as Virgil Thomson was haunted by ‘Jingle Bells.’⁸ The family owned a phonograph that Lou once modified by putting a bigger horn on it.⁹ Cal signed the boys up for music and ballroom dance lessons. I remember learning the schottische when I could barely toddle, said Harrison.¹⁰ Although his brother, Bill, was not very interested in music, Lou was happy to stay home and play violin, harmonium, and the family piano on Portland’s rainy winter and spring days.

Lou also inherited what he called his mother’s tendency toward hysteria to get what she wanted. His later friend Remy Charlip said that Lou told him how, at the age of five, he would get his way: He stood in the middle of the room and screamed. Lou remained, said Charlip, a diva throughout his life.¹¹ Even his faintly formal and slightly archaic manner of speaking and writing seemed to originate in his mother’s upwardly mobile ambitions.

If Harrison associated his mercurial mother with the beautiful things in life, his father, known as Pop, symbolized industrial grease iron and masculine detachment.¹² Once, when Lou rushed up to embrace his father after an absence, Pop’s response was, Men don’t do that. Only years later would Harrison come to appreciate what a gentle and kind person Pop Harrison really was.¹³

Despite his childhood close connection with his mother, Lou received one crucial legacy from his father: a love of reading. When Pop came home each night from his job at a Portland tire company, he enjoyed a cocktail and hours of reading books and magazines, even reading James Joyce’s Ulysses aloud to the family.¹⁴ Little Buster often read from an encyclopedia set for young readers called Our Wonder World with a section titled Queer Peoples of the World.¹⁵ Lou inherited his dad’s bibliomania (and his taste for alcohol) and was immersed in at least one book practically every day of his life.

However, Harrison’s Portland idyll—as he remembered it—of arts and books and nature ended when he was eight. In the mid-1920s, boosters in what was then Oregon’s second-largest city, Astoria, were advocating for the construction of a new bridge across the Columbia River. Anticipating an impending North Coast economic boom that ultimately never arrived, the Harrisons swapped the Silver Court for a resort hotel in the declining coastal city. The failure of this investment prompted them to leave the state entirely. Clarence’s rich brother Harry (known as H. O.) was an automobile distributor in San Francisco and agreed to set up Clarence in his business.¹⁶

Harrison’s Oregon upbringing left lasting impressions on the budding young musician: an inclination toward the outdoors and nature’s beauty, an affection for high-culture art and music, and a performer’s sense of the stage and the audience. But leaving the only home he’d ever known is tough on any child, and now, as the family drove south along Highway 101, following the conquistadors’ old Road of Kings, El Camino Real, the alluring, Asian-tinged world that had nurtured nine-year-old Buster Harrison was receding. The loss of that world would be compounded by the economic upheavals roiling not just his family’s prospects but also the nation’s. Much later, toward the end of one of the richest lives ever lived in American arts, the then-octogenarian Harrison came to realize that in pursuing, studying, and ultimately creating original music deeply informed by the traditional sounds of Asia, he was trying to recapture the lost treasures of my youth.¹⁷

I was surrounded by a household of very fine Asian art, he said, and as I grew up, I wanted to reproduce that. My problem and my drama has been, could I recover the lost treasures of childhood? Well, I discovered that if I couldn’t make enough money to buy them, at least I could make some.¹⁸

Yet mere imitation of music of other times or cultures, however elegant and graceful, would not fulfill Harrison’s quest. He would soon discover a thrilling world of modern American composition blazing paths into previously unheard worlds of sounds. This creative tension between recapturing ancient beauty and finding new excitement in revolutionary sounds would fuel Harrison’s lifelong musical journey.

CALIFORNIA MISSIONS

the great valley’s heat & birds & blooms,

my beautiful brother bicycling with me

on the banks of rivers,

the melons that my father loved

& that in summer crawl laden

out upon the roads,

reedy rivers, blackbirds, & the perilous canals.

—Lou Harrison¹⁹

When Dad announced that we were going to move to California, Harrison recalled, I had this image of a sombreroed rider on a burro, and cactus. It turned out not to be true—we moved to Woodland. And there were the missions.²⁰

A brown, rural landscape replaced the regal security of the Silver Court, little resembling Astoria’s chilly coastal seascape or Portland’s verdant neighborhoods. Flat, small (three thousand people), and broiling in summer, Woodland was a farm town outside Sacramento in California’s fertile agricultural breadbasket, where Lou and Bill would play among orchards and irrigation canals. Lou’s uncle H. O. hired his brother Clarence to set up regional car dealerships around the area. As a result, the family became itinerant, changing cities every year or two as Clarence received new assignments: in Sacramento itself after Woodland, next in marshy Stockton.

Young Buster was just beginning a peripatetic stretch in which he would live at twenty-eight different addresses by the time he graduated from high school.²¹ Although thanks to the advanced Oregon schools, Lou did fine in his studies, even jumping ahead a grade when he got to California, I learned early on that you shouldn’t form really close relationships, because you were going to move, Harrison remembered.²² He was already starting to feel different from the other boys, and every time he entered a new and unfamiliar school, he kept to himself and out of sight of bullies. A series of childhood illnesses also served to isolate both brothers. Lou retreated to his books, art, and music, and he later wondered whether his interest in music did not come from the weariness of having to relocate all the time.²³ Family life was often dominated by a tempestuous mother who lashed out at his father, whom she blamed for the family’s misfortune.

For solace, Lou kept a trunk of precious possessions—photos, scores, books, mementos—that became his portable world of imagination, an island of beauty and stability amid the shifting currents of the family’s turbulent peregrinations. The trunk’s greatest treasure—a self-created, portable replacement for the Silver Court’s lost glories—was what it embodied for Harrison: his response to the challenges of adolescence. In this period of discovery over the next few years, through junior high and high school, he would surmount those challenges by vastly expanding his knowledge of music, arts, the world, and himself. Throughout his life Harrison would continue to pursue his vision of beauty from his lost happy childhood and the Silver Court.

His music lessons continued, and when he heard of the death of a family friend whose farm they had frequently visited in rural Oregon during their Portland years, Lou wrote his first composition, an Elegie, contributing his own watercolor image and hand calligraphy to the score cover and signing it Lou Silver Harrison, 10 years old. The elegy is really a waltz, which Lou had learned in ballroom dance lessons, a charming little piece full of block major and minor chords, often misspelled in a crude but earnest hand. This juvenilium already reveals a longing for rural surroundings that would recur in his life and music; the dead friend represented the country pleasures that the citified Portlanders enjoyed on visits.²⁴

The family’s next move took them from rural to suburban California, as they relocated to Berkeley, where Lou started junior high school and even joined the football team with his brother (Lou played center). His mother found him a new piano teacher in nearby Oakland, one who could also teach him jazz. Harrison was never particularly a jazz enthusiast, but it was a broadening experience for the young musician, who had to learn to navigate harmonies through all twelve keys and quickly find various chords. However, 1929 was the heyday of the stride piano style, in which the pianist’s left hand must speedily leap from bass notes to chords, and twelve-year-old Lou simply did not have hands the size of James P. Johnson’s or Fats Waller’s. Frustrated, he abandoned this jazz experiment when they next moved, but its influence would later resurface. I was never successful as a jazz pianist because … I never could do the oompahs right. So I flunked out as a performing artist there, but I gained a lot theoretically.²⁵

The more cosmopolitan college town also offered another opportunity for diversifying Buster and Bill’s educational background. Although the family wasn’t especially religious, Cal wanted her kids to be exposed to as many religions as possible so they could make up their own minds about their spiritual direction. Lou later credited his exposure to a multitude of Protestant churches and Sunday schools for his many explorations into traditions farther afield, from mystical Christianity to Buddhism. I never regretted this run-around, he explained, because it gives you a comparative sense of things and also it just went right on into world religions too and general philosophies.²⁶

But any sense of stability was again short-lived. Uncle Harry, like so many others in Grapes of Wrath-era California, went bankrupt, and Pop started taking on extra jobs, including managing apartment houses and office work. After a brief stay in Los Gatos, the family moved to the bayside town of Redwood City, from which Pop would commute twenty-five miles north to San Francisco.

At Sequoia Union High School, Lou soon found opportunities to become much more serious about music. At thirteen, he was still featured as a boy soprano soloist and for a while could sing both soprano and bass. I did a lot of singing those days, he remembered, from madrigals to popular songs to Gilbert and Sullivan tunes. I think that my attitude towards music, that it’s basically a song and a dance, comes from both things: first I was a singer, then I was a dancer.²⁷

Lou also learned the rudiments of conducting and could passably play French horn and clarinet. The school choir director, also a composer who played organ in a downtown church, invited Harrison to dinner with his family and eventually gave Lou the key to the church organ loft so that he could play the pipe organ there whenever he could find time not already committed to his newspaper route and school.²⁸ Soon Harrison had composed a rather romantic organ sonata (marked Andante Religioso).

His new piano teacher also encouraged Lou and even took him to concerts in the area, and piano compositions soon followed.²⁹ Despite its reliance on Clementi models (Alberti basses and big block chords), an ambitious four-movement sonatina (dated, with a hint of pride and his later prolificacy, begun Nov. 10, 1931, completed Nov. 11, 1931) shows a clear grasp of conventional forms, including sonata form and a minuet and trio. For all of their puerile romanticism, his early piano works display an increasing confidence, facile musical handwriting, and a willingness to experiment with unusual chord progressions and key changes.

Harrison’s creativity found other outlets, including writing poetry and taking an art class in school. He did well academically, especially in science classes, beginning a lifelong interest in science. He read library books by science writer Arthur Eddington and all the science fiction he could find.³⁰ He even invented his own shorthand alphabet to facilitate note-taking in school. However, unlike his brother, Lou detested gym class, where he felt awkward (except in wrestling) and was taunted for being a sissy and thrown into the swimming pool.³¹

The bullies sensed what Harrison himself had already suspected. He had already felt unsatisfied urges directed toward older men and realized he was different. The following year, at a high school party, the action moved to the rumble seats of the parked cars, and he discovered that he had no sexual interest whatsoever in the girls there. I knew I was different—that’s when it struck me, he recalled. It made me very sad, very melancholy.³²

He found solace at the Redwood City public library, where he would eagerly devour books on art, literature, and science fiction. And he realized that he could pursue his particular interests as deeply as he wanted, by checking out the books cited in footnotes and repeating the process with those books in turn. He remembered reading a couple of books each evening—a practice he never abandoned. My afternoons after school … largely consisted of studying and reading and … long sessions at the piano trying to work out scores, he remembered. And also, being gay kept me away from parties. All the straights were having a lot of parties, whereas I didn’t have that, so I had a lot of reading time and practice time, making instruments time too.³³

But he was not entirely alone. Lou began to play music with Ivan Harris, a violinist from school, and then their duets became even closer. He was very sensuous and a very nice guy, Harrison remembered, fondly recalling writing poetry together and romantic trysts in a tent in summer. We were friends for many, many years. He was very nice, very intense, very pleasurable. He taught me a lot and shared concepts and ideas. It was romantic and soft and warm and sexy.³⁴ Harrison now knew that his attraction to men was real and serious, and that it could even be fun.

The older Ivan introduced Lou to a new musical world. One day over at Ivan’s house, Ivan played records from his collection for Harrison. Out of the tinny speaker came music of flabbergasting intensity and dissonance. It was Stravinsky’s ballet score The Rite of Spring. Next was the strangely austere counterpoint of the same composer’s Octet and Piano Concerto, pieces then less than ten years old. But for a lesson on how ancient and modern could intermingle, Harrison preferred Manuel de Falla’s El Retablo del Maese Pedro (Master Peter’s Puppet Show), a short, delightful chamber opera that would later inspire one of Harrison’s landmark compositions. Instead of following Stravinsky’s detached, almost mechanistic reinterpretation of baroque idioms, the Spanish composer’s recent (1923) setting of this episode from Don Quixote was melodically opulent and sparkled with the then-novel timbre of the harpsichord. Harrison also heard in Falla’s melodies and (more surprisingly) Stravinsky’s rhythms a Latin character that connected with his romance of colonial period California.

One day when they visited a pianist friend of Ivan’s, Lou noticed some curious sheet music with a distinctive art deco cover, called simply New Music. It contained music, written by mostly American composers, that appeared to have little in common with Stravinsky’s neoclassicism. Although Harrison wouldn’t delve into these mysterious scores until he rediscovered them in the San Francisco Library after high school, leafing through them gave him a brief glimpse of a world of contemporary music. Harrison’s own portal to that world would be the very editor of New Music, America’s ultramodernist composer Henry Cowell.

BAROQUE AND BRAHMAN

A bit of incense

Rising from a tiny pot

But now—see the fern!

—Poem in the form of a Japanese haiku by fifteen-year-old Harrison published in a local paper³⁵

Just as Harrison was settling into Redwood City, though, the family moved again, to Burlingame, just up the peninsula, where Clarence was running a car wash. And it was there that Lou’s intellectual and artistic lives really blossomed. In his high school English class and during subsequent library trips, Harrison developed intense literary obsessions, especially for the works of William Blake and William Butler Yeats (both of whom would influence subsequent work), and he recognized the homosexual overtones in works he admired by Walt Whitman, igniting what became a lifelong passion for poetry with congested and intense quality of sound and lots of tone language.³⁶ He helped edit the school poetry journal and also contributed original linoleum block print illustrations.

A friend active in the theater department, Bob Metcalf, introduced Harrison to the works of Gertrude Stein, and the boys even traveled up to Stanford for a rare opportunity to hear Stein herself read. Impressed, Harrison wrote Stein a fan letter and received a polite response from her partner, Alice Toklas. Harrison then submitted a Stein-influenced piece to the senior-year issue of his school’s poetry journal. Metcalf would continue to be a good friend after graduation, as they both became active in the Bay Area arts community.³⁷

Harrison’s intellectual explorations often transcended his school lessons. A conscientious teacher spotted something in an essay he wrote and pointed him toward the Vedanta Society, devoted to the study of the centuries-old Hindu Brahman philosophy. Harrison admired the philosophy’s emphasis on the pursuit of knowledge and the compelling talks delivered by the current temple leader, Swami Ashokananda. When I was there, I had the sensation that I was being looked right through, that I was absorbing what he absorbed in some way, Harrison recalled. I guess it was good music, intelligent preachment [that] seemed more like philosophical discussion, and appealed to me emotionally as well as [to my] intellectual interests. There was no intermediary between God and you. An adolescent hunting inside himself is apt to regard that, I suppose, as a kind of aid too.³⁸

Pop Harrison patiently indulged his older son’s interests, even if he didn’t understand them. When the boy wanted to learn about medieval music, he drove him up to San Francisco’s historic Mission Dolores for Gregorian chant choir—an hour driving, a two-hour wait during Lou’s rehearsal, and another drive home. There Lou learned about the so-called church modes, scales beyond the major and minor he knew from piano lessons, and recitation tones, the extended pitches on which many syllables of prose or irregular verse could be repetitively chanted and framed by melodic motives called initium and terminatio. He even saved up to buy a copy of the Liber Usualis, the Catholic Church’s thick standard compilation of chant, and, helped by his high school Latin classes, learned to read the thirteenth-century-based notation.

When Lou wanted more formal training in music theory, Pop paid for lessons with Howard Couper, a graduate student of Domenico Brescia, the elderly Italian composer who headed the music theory department at Mills College in Oakland. For about a year, Harrison received a firm grounding in traditional counterpoint and theory from Couper via copious exercises in such forms as fugues and variations. Harrison welcomed the lessons in baroque counterpoint, as he loved music from this period, particularly that of George Frideric Handel. The divine Mr. Handel has been with me since I can’t remember. It’s so old, my love for Handel, he reminisced. And there was a period in my life when I would get up, go to the phonograph, and put on something by Handel as my first act of the morning.³⁹

To Harrison, the baroque aesthetic was no mere textbook abstraction. He recognized it in the architecture of the Dolores Mission and other survivals of California’s colonial past. During those years, everybody’s living room had a least one picture of the [Spanish] Alhambra [Palace], he said.⁴⁰ Harrison pursued the Spanish connection in local public libraries, where he found the monumental collections of Spanish Renaissance and baroque music edited by Spanish nationalist Felipe Pedrell, who also collected folk and popular songs. Harrison spent hours playing through volumes of seventeenth-century Spanish keyboard music, a pursuit that led directly to his first composition that he kept on his list of acknowledged works.

Harrison called this creation a sonata, not after the well-known classical form, but instead in the earlier sense of a piece to be sounded as used by the Italian-Spanish baroque composer Domenico Scarlatti. Like those models, this sonata is in binary form (two repeated halves) and written not for piano but rather the baroque harpsichord. Although Harrison lacked access to a harpsichord, he decorated the melody with appropriate ornaments. Unlike his earlier compositions, the spare, clean textures sometimes resemble the inventions of Bach. Over the next few years, Harrison gradually added more sonatas to form a collection representing what Harrison called his Mission period and reflecting, he said, the romance and geometry of impassioned Spain.⁴¹

Harrison frequently brought to Couper these voluntary pieces (that is, pieces written apart from his assignments), many of which show his preoccupation with early music, including a set of folk song variations for a whole Renaissance ensemble.⁴² Upon receiving one of these unorthodox experiments, the astonished Couper told Harrison, You’re either going to amount to a lot or you’ll collapse.⁴³ In the end, Harrison would do both.

Harrison graduated from Burlingame High in December 1934, performing with a student flutist his new composition Blue Glass at the ceremony.⁴⁴ In those critical years, he had confronted initial challenges—his dislocation from his family’s comfortable, Asian-accented Portland life; his outsider status resulting from his frequent moves and being gay—and found his identity through the study of ideas, through art and literature, and in creating art. When you’re adolescent, that’s when everything opens up—the whole world, he said later. It’s not only your pelvic girdle, it’s also your mind, and they sort of bloom at once.⁴⁵

Harrison’s blossoming would continue in San Francisco, where his family was moving and where he planned to enroll at San Francisco State College. The city was home to some of his high school friends, such as Bob Metcalf, who helped Harrison navigate an intoxicating artistic atmosphere.

PART 2

The Vast Acreage

Although Harrison’s family had lived in the environs of San Francisco since he was twelve years old, their move into the city itself in January 1935 revealed to Harrison a vibrant cultural world. The next seven years—the period that shaped his career—would also introduce him to the other major elements he would combine in fruitful fusion for the rest of his life: dance, percussion, European and American avant-garde music, early music, Asian music. Harrison often said that he laid out his toys on a vast acreage early on and spent much of the rest of his life picking them up, examining them, using and combining them as he pleased.¹ In his old age, he called San Francisco the city where I attained my maturity—I can’t say I grew up here, because I haven’t yet.²

At the time, though, Harrison didn’t know he wanted to be a composer. In fact, to the end of his life, he claimed that he never did make that decision. Then as later, Harrison’s guileless charm proved attractive to others who shared his many enthusiasms, and they, in turn, opened many of San Francisco’s doors of discovery to him.

To the voluble, energetic young Harrison, San Francisco was a lavish, very social city with friendship and pleasure above all.³ In the quarter century since it had been leveled by an earthquake and fire, the city had developed into a busy metropolis of art deco skyscrapers and cable cars, jazz clubs and Victorian row houses. Traditional musicians played along the fragrant alleyways of Chinatown, and sizable communities of immigrants from Japan, the Philippines, and India contributed their flavors to the port city’s rich cultural stew. Until the completion of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge in 1936 and the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937, ferries crisscrossed the bay, with small musical ensembles often furnishing entertainment for the passengers.

The Depression hit San Francisco’s longshoremen and others at the bottom of the economic ladder especially hard. Much of their plight was invisible to the city’s social elite, who had already established San Francisco as the leading arts center on the West Coast, founding the San Francisco Symphony in 1911 and the city opera in 1923. In 1936, the socialites who controlled the symphony board scored an artistic coup when they enticed the famous French conductor Pierre Monteux, who had conducted the notorious premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, to come to San Francisco. Monteux would establish the orchestra as one of the nation’s finest. Critic Alfred Frankenstein devoted most of his weekly column in the Chronicle to the symphony, just as the society pages faithfully chronicled the goings-on of Monteux and his family.

But rarely did newspapers touch on the other San Francisco—the teeming mix of bohemian artists, leftist radicals, and religious visionaries, of iconoclasts and misfits that the seventeen-year-old Harrison discovered shortly after his arrival. Harrison’s encounter with this other San Francisco began when he enrolled at San Francisco State College’s old downtown campus, just walking distance from his family’s new house on Buena Vista Hill.⁴ Just on the other side of the tunnel lived Jim Cleghorn, another aspiring composer who sang in the college madrigal singers and chamber choir with Harrison. Harrison and his new friend became close artistically and intellectually, and soon Cleghorn was introducing Harrison to communities of artists, dancers, and musicians, where his real education began.⁵

After an inward-looking existence necessitated by his family’s frequent moves and his failure to fit into adolescent cliques, Harrison found a welcoming artistic milieu waiting for him in the city. I just entered the network that already existed, he remembered. It was a place where you could go and attend a party and within a week know practically everybody. I’d go whenever I was invited and wasn’t working—at least once a week. We’d smoke cigarettes and drink and recite poetry, play instruments, tell jokes, and enjoy the latest in gossip.⁶

A man he met at a theater party introduced Harrison to the city’s gay underground. Homosexuality was so accepted within Harrison’s social circles that he never hid his orientation from most friends and acquaintances. The first gay bars sprung up after Prohibition was repealed, and in the 1930s and 1940s, the city’s gay and lesbian communities frequented the same bars, including the quasi-dangerous Mona’s ("where we encountered