MAVERICKS.(composer Lou Harrison; 'The Trojans')(Obituary)

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 ...