Playing Apart as "Playing Together": Lou Harrison’s Threnody for Carlos Chávez for Gamelan and Viola

Abstract

on 22 February 2003, twenty days after the sudden death of lou Harrison, the first memorial tribute for this musical maverick took place at the university of California, Santa Cruz recital Hall. organized by musicologist/flutist leta e. miller and Harrison archivist Charles Hanson, the memorial honored Harrison’s rich, artfilled life by intertwining many of his wideranging creative interests. Spoken reminiscences were joined with a display of several of Harrison’s paintings, readings of his poetry, video presentations of dance performances for which Harrison had written the music, and performances of a handful of his compositions.1 music selections included an early work for flute and cello, a recently discovered piece for tubular bells (constructed by Harrison and his partner, william Colvig), a work for guitar, and a composition for piano. but it was the memorial’s final performance—Harrison’s Threnody for Carlos Chavez, played by Geraldine walther on viola and by Gamelan Sekar Kembar, directed by trish Neilsen—that best captured the complexity of Harrison’s artistic vision. whether by happenstance or by design, Harrison’s memorial service concluded with a piece that showed him at his least sentimental, yet most sophisticated, in dealing with “cultural fusion”—a piece in which he entertains the possibility that playing apart is also a way of playing together. Credited by mark levine with “fashioning . . . America’s first important body of ‘multicultural’ music,” Harrison took particular delight in writing for central Javanese and Sundanese gamelan, ensembles primarily comprised of bronze gongs and metallophones.2 Harrison’s initial