Can you ever have too much gamelan? Not with Lou. Lou Harrison’s La Koro Sutro isn’t exactly what you expect. Known for his wonderfully imaginative blend of Asian and Baroque styles, the late/great Lou Harrison much like the more known minimalists — Steve Reich, Terry Riley, etc. — used a profound interest in “eastern” music as a gateway to explore the edges of western-based ideas by trying to forgo imitation for new creation.
La Koro Sutro, a collection of three compositions “La Koro Sutro”, “Varied Trio”, and “Suite For Violin and American Gamelan” recorded in 1987 at Herz Hall by the Chamber Chorus Of The University Of California At Berkeley, and with esteemed colleagues at the same school, brought to life that heavenly combination of the little known with the universally profound, found only through self-examination.
Surprising to me, outside of a few classical circles, Lou Harrison isn’t a name that is shared by many this days. It’s hard to understand why. Openly melodic, forgoing dissonance and harmony, Lou’s aim were for ideas that are instantly getable. Somehow, some way, Lou seemed like he missed the greater audience he was destined for. His own destiny wouldn’t seem to speak to this at first. Born in Portland, Oregon but raised in the Bay area after the first World War, Lou from a young age took in all the melange of musical styles he heard on the radio in California.
When he was old enough to do so he moved to LA where he began his career not as a composer but as a dancer and sometimes accompanist. As he discovered musical ideas from Europe — serialism, musique concrete, etc. — and began taking compositional lessons from none other than the creator such ideas, Arnold Schoenberg. As he grew on his own as a composer early vastly more studied works, gave way to other ideas.
Growing up as a young gay man, in the ‘40s and ‘50s in an increasingly hostile cis male-dominated environment had pushed him to try to out-muscle the next composer. Even as he’d count as great experimental composers like John Cage, Henry Cowell, and Aaron Copland as friends, he knew he had music that had a different outlook. After he moved to New York to become a music writer and help champion composers like Charles Ives, Edgard Varèse he turned back into his own work. A series of personal failures in New York led him to realize that going back home might just be better for him in the long run. He’d come back to teach where he could be in a better place.
Back in California, he was given a book by friend Harry Partch promoting the use of just intonation (Genesis of Music), to get away from the 12-tones that western music was known for. Still deeply in love with Javanese and Balinese music, Lou realized that in order to make music in that timbre which moved him the most, he’d had to explore musical ideas outside of it. First steps were taken trying to combine other loves he had — mostly Baroque in nature — in ways that took into account that less-mannered, microtonal world. Steps inside travels within Asia (in the realm of real life), led him to discover musicians creating gamelan music not with ornate, “classical” instruments but with justly-tuned, fashioned instruments respectful of their own locale/history.
Importing gamelan instruments from abroad would be prohibitively expensive, serving only to appeal to colonialist attitudes. If they wanted to play gamelan music they’d had to create the instruments themselves. Coming back home with longtime life-partner William Colvig, they took it upon themselves to create not Indonesian or Thai gamelan instruments but American instruments that could join the gamelan tradition.
Using scrapped metal, found objects, trash cans, and oxygen tanks, Lou and Bill would dismantle said objects and repurpose them to create something they’d dub “Old Granddad” a collection of American-made, American-sounding gamelan-style instruments inspired by the Kyai Udan Mas.
Utterly unique in sound, even if tuned to a more western-derived music, this collection could travel in the world of chamber music even if that wasn’t where other gamelan styles would normally go to. Writing for it, Lou (much like Daniel Schmidt a friend of his at Berkeley), would teach others this new course of instrumentation and create hybrid modes that allowed other Western instruments like violin, guitar, and more to come into its fold.
La Koro Sutro brings together everything that makes Lou, Lou. Here you hear his personal ties to pacifism and Buddhism, as promoted through his study of universal languages like Esperanto and just intonation. It’s here these chorale works sung in Esperanto, tied to this unique orchestra could only be heard, played on these instruments that took you out of any distinct place or sonority. Lou asked a friend of his to distill 100,000 lines of the Perfection of Wisdom/the Prajñāpāramitā into 14 verses and on one fateful night in 1972, performed his idea a concert for the “heart sutra”.
On this recording and performance of Lou Harrison’s most important works, everything from the 100-piece choir, a full orchestra to his full complement of invented instruments, takes a distinctly American gamelan idea to its full berth, pointing to directions Western music could still go — if someone would be bothered to listen to it without prejudice and take the initiative to do so.