TREAT LOU HARRISON
Built myself a paper world.
Exquisite corpses with Cage & Cunningham.
Read Harry Partch’s book (gift of Virgil Thomson).
Contact made more intimately within sound sources.
Made love with drones in serial music.
Said Cage, “Math of the straight and narrow path”.
Building a cathedral and shipping it to outer space.
Kinetically filled.
Please enter. No dog inside.
Large and rambunctious expansion--
mountains here and hear,
“See what you can make of . . .” [Navaho chants instead]:
Here holiness with innumerable crystalline cells /
airplant Spanish moss asway . . .
Barry Alpert / Silver Spring MD US / 3-16-11 (9:46 AM)
I initially approached the major "American Maverick" composer Lou Harrison by snapping a sequence of 10 Kodak instant photos of him, John Cage, and their patron Betty Freeman relaxing on the grounds of a music festival. Thirty four years passed before I was lucky enough to be within geographical range of the tripartite SUBLIME CONFLUENCE: THE MUSIC OF LOU HARRISON.
http://post-classicalensemble.org/lou-harrison/
After witnessing the useful documentary film, I decided to await additional language which might surface during the two subsequent programs. Overall, a difficult and elongated writing process. I expect a more fluid experience when I work with an audio interview which I’ve just now discovered.
Let me recommend a very strong work by Lou Harrison, his Piano Concerto (1985) in a version featuring Keith Jarrett, for whom it was originally composed on commission:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d85BW_ZUs0
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