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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The composer Lou Harrison, who died on February 2nd, at the age of eighty-five, described himself not long ago as "an old man who's had a lot of fun." He was a great deal more than that, though what posterity will make of him is difficult to say. A roly-poly guy who reminded everyone of a sun-kissed Santa Claus, Harrison seemed for a long time to be the only happy composer in America; unlike so many of his congenitally embittered ivory-tower colleagues, he not only accepted his marginal status in the nation's culture but revelled in it. Yet he was, in many ways, an imposing figure--at once the prophet of the minimalist movement and the last vital representative of the mighty populist generation led by Aaron Copland. His music was so spare in design as to seem naive, but it was not simple, and he was not a simple man.
Harrison--I have an urge to call him Lou, though I never met him--tends to be categorized as the quintessential West Coast composer, an accurate enough description. He was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1917, and moved to the Bay Area as a boy. After a troubled stint in New York, during which he befriended Charles Ives, he returned to Northern California in 1953. He spent the last forty years of his life outside Santa Cruz, in a house overlooking the Pacific. He had many of the characteristics that you would expect to find in a man who lived in the...
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