LOU HARRISON
Gamelan Music
-VOLUME 1-
[1] PHILEMON AND BAUKIS
[2] CORNISH LANCARAN
[3] GENDING ALEXANDER
HOMAGE TO PACIFICA
[4] Prelude
[5] In Honor of the Divine Mr. Handel
[6] In Honor of Mr. Mark Twain
[7] Interlude
[8] Ode
[9] Interlude
[10] Litany
[11] In Honor of Chief Seattle
[12] BUBARAN ROBERT
In 1959, Mantle Hood brought to the United States the first full Javanese gamelan for use in his Institute of Ethnomusicology at the University of California Los Angeles. At about the same time, Dennis Murphy began to build gamelan instruments in Wisconsin. The American Gamelan Institute keeps a running record of gamelan in the United States and estimates that, as of this writing, there are about 150 of them, both Indonesian and American made.England and Japan have a half dozen or more each, and Holland has eleven or so. Long ago the Dutch brought Indonesians to work plantations in their South American Guyana. These workers brought gamelan with them, and over the course of time established a special kind of gamelan music which survives in present day Surinam.
The great beauty of sound that all of these orchestras produce from their tuned metal keys and wide range of gongs is like no other, and excited Debussy, Ravel, Britten, Eichheim, and McPhee among other western composers.
I myself was invited to compose for gamelan by K. R. T. Wasitodiningrat, the greatest living Javanese composer, who has been mentor to almost all North American players (who is known by his familiar name Pak Cokro) and whose own works written in the United States are numerous and beautiful. His invitation was enormously stimulating to me and in the many years since then I've labored to prove worthy
of it. My occasional experiments have not fazed him and, indeed, some of his own have been "beyond the pavement," so to speak. He chose the Pelog tuning which is still heard in the Mills Gamelan. From that tuning William Colvig and I have raised the second pitch a little in the Pelog of Gamelan Si Betty. Although Pak Cokro would prefer a lower "pitch one" in our Slendro section, nevertheless he wrote for it, under a collective gamelan grant funded by NEA, what many feel to be his American masterpiece -- "Purnomo Siddi" (The Joy of the Full Moon), which will be heard in the second of these discs. There is a charming and heartwarming phrase in Indonesian -- "main bersama sama" -- which means "playing together", and it carries the full sense of transcultural warmth and understanding. One of my own pieces actually carries this Indonesian title as such, and most of the pieces on this disc carry the idea further in works for violin, saxophone, trumpet, and harp playing as soloists with the gamelan. I have also integrated the harp directly into the gamelan texture, in these instances not as soloist, as indeed I have also done with LatinAmerican percussion instruments, a virginal, and a western-style chorus.
The extraordinary new metallophone (named "Ptolemy Duple") heard in the interludes of "Homage to Pacifica" was built by William Colvig, who also built the Gamelan Si Betty (Gamelan Honorable Betty) with precision-
(Gamelan Honorable Betty) with precisiontuned aluminum and iron. Betty Freeman helped to fund it, and it belongs to William Colvig and Lou Harrison. Gamelan Si Betty has lived for a number of years at San Jose State University where this recording was made in the Concert Hall kindly provided by the music department.
-Lou Harrison
[1] Philemon and Baukis: Slendro, a twosection piece for Violin and Gamelan, to my friend Daniel Kobialka.
[2] A Cornish Lancaran: Pelog, named for the Cornish College of Seattle; the solo played by William Trimble.
[3] Gending Alexander: Pelog, a "classic" gamelan-only piece in what the British call the "austere style".
[4]-[11] Homage to Pacifica: Commissioned by the Gerbode Foundation for the opening of the new Pacifica Foundation headquarters in Berkeley—
I. Prelude
II. In Honor of the Divine Mr. Handel
III. Mark Twain on the Philippine War
IV. Interlude, and Ode on Bravo Twenty
V. Interlude, and Litany
VI. From the Testimony of Chief Seattle.
[12] Bubaran Robert: Slendro. The Javanese use a special musical form for leaving the hall with the sound of the gamelan ringing in your ears. For several years this piece became the Commencement marching piece for Mills College. The solo is played by Randy Masters on a piccolo trumpet.
TEXTS
(from Homage to Pacifica)
III. MARK TWAIN ON THE PHILIPPINE WAR:
We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them, destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots: subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves of our business partner, the Sultan of Sulu, and hoisted our protecting flag over that swag. And so, by these Providences of God -- and the phrase is the government's, not mine-we are a World Power.
IV. HORATION ODE ON BRAVO 20:
The "untied snakes of America" drive down With stinking speed-and-gleam to pierce sweet ancient things, To pain earth's elders' bones, to leave red poison pools-
[School buses shattered.
The "untied snakes of America" drive down With speeding strike to pox earth's flesh, to bomb out birds, To corrupt a mountain, and to gut these sands, for Mad and evil men.
L.H.-15, 111, 1991
Aptos
V. A LITANY:
Acoma, Zuni, Lummi, Ohlone, Mohawk, Maidu, Wintu, Onandaga, Taos, Hopi, 'Acota, Kwakiutl, Tlingit, Yurok, Arawak, Seminole, Choctaw, Athabascan, Iroquois, Cherokee, Seneca, Chickasaw, Hoopa, Osceola, ALL THE FINE PEOPLE.
Pima, Papago, Mohave, Chumash, Miwok, Pomo, Achumawi, Paiute, Haida, Chinook, Tillamook, Delaware, Chippewa, Shawnee, Kickapoo, Kiowa, Eskimo, Aleut, Yakima, Klamath, Umatilla, Cheyenne, Omaha, Arapaho,
ALL THE FINE PEOPLE ON THIS ORIGINAL NATURAL LAND
Kansa, Creek, Natchez, Cayuga, Oneida, Huron, Winnegabo, Patawatomi, Penobscot, Narragansett, Tolowa, Cree, Salish, Timucua, Yuchi, ALL THE FINE PEOPLE ON THIS ORIGINAL NATURAL LAND-SCREWED.
L.H.-17, 111, 1991
Aptos
VI. FROM THE TESTIMONY OF CHIEF SEATTLE:
Where is man without the beasts ?
If the beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts soon happens to man. All things are connected. This we know.
The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth
Man did not weave the web of life he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web he does to himself.
Apache, Pawnee, Mandan, Wichita, Hidatsa, Shoshoni,
SOLOISTS
Jody Diamond, soprano •
Robert Hughes, bassoon
Daniel Kobialka, violin •
Randy Masters, trumpet
Henry Spiller, harp •
William Trimble, saxophone .
Milton Williams, declamation •
William Winant, percussion
SINGERS
BERKELEY CHAMBER SINGERS –
DONALD AIRD DIRECTOR
Sopranos
Gloria Almuti
Dora Burdick
Anne Lenkert
Jean Pulis
Altos
Carol Aird
Carolyn Coolidge
Marilyn Davis
Miriam Hill
Pat Perry
Tenors
Steve Guimond
Scott Perry
Donald Tallman
Basses
David Cuthbertson
Paul Davis
Robert Pearson
MUSICIANS OF THE GAMELAN SI BETTY
Chris Bobrowski
Andrew Bouchard
William Colvig
Jody Diamond
Darren Gibbs
Lou Harrison
Peter Huboi
Daniel Kelley
Kenneth Miller
Trish Neilsen
Larry Polansky
Michelle Pollace
Gino Robair
Ann Schwartz
Henry Spiller
Joel Taylor
George Tredick
Hage van Dijk
Linda Wegner
DIRECTORS:
TRISH NEILSEN AND JODY DIAMOND
LOU HARRISON lived a few years in Portland, Oregon where he was born on May 14, 1917. Residences since then include Central California, Los Angeles, New York City (10 years), North Carolina, San Francisco Bay region, Oaxaca, New Zealand, and Monterey Bay region where he is now. He studied with Howard Cooper, Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg, and Virgil Thomson. Among grants and awards received: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, Guggenheim Fellowships, Rockefeller Fellowship, Fromm Foundation, Phoebe Ketchum Thome, and Betty Freeman. Residencies for teaching and composing include Reed College, University of Hawaii, Black Mountain College, USC, Atlantic Center for the Arts, South Florida University, University of Miami, University of New Mexico, Louisiana State University. Principal teaching schools: San Jose State University and Mills College from which he received the Doctor of Fine Arts, Honoris Causa degree. He has also taught at Greenwich House Music School and Cabrillo College. On a Fulbright scholarship he taught at the four main universities in New Zealand for six months. Mr. Harrison has received commissions from Lester Horton, Jean Erdman, Merce Cunningham, Cabrillo Music Festival, BMI for Louisville Orchestra, Mirecourt Trio, San Francisco Chamber Music Society, Louisville Orchestra, Koussevitsky Foundation in the Library of Congress, Maro and Anahid Ajemian, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn Philharmonic, and Pacifica Foundation. He is a member of the American Academy and Institute
of Arts and Letters. Major performances of his works have been held in San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, NYC, Philadelphia, Miami, Bonn, Huddersfield, York, Cincinnati, Stuttgart, Tokyo, Indonesia, Korea, and so on. American composers must often do other things to support themselves. Among these Harrison has been a record salesman, an animal nurse, a journalist, a florist, a forestry fire-fighter, and dance accompanist. He is also a poet, painter, calligrapher, and designer. Lou has helped to introduce the Indonesian gamelan to the United States and, with William Colvig, has constructed two large gamelan now in use at San Jose State University and Mills College. From Ned Rorem: "Lou Harrison's compositions demonstrate a variety of means and techniques. In general he is a melodist. Rhythm has a significant place in his work, too. Harmony is unimportant, although tonality is. He is one of the first American composers to successfully create a workable marriage between Eastern and Western forms."
Produced By Gregory K Squires •
Engineered by Gregory K. Squires
In Honor of Mr. Twain: Produced & Engineered by Jim Bennett, KPFA-FM •
Digital Editing by Richard Price
Production Assistance by Jody Diamond Ode on Bravo 20 & Litany
Courtesy of Jargon Society, Highlands, NC
All compositions published by Hermes Beard, BMI
Distributed by Frog Peak Music and American Gamelan Institute, 52 Green St., Lebanon, NH 03706
