Return of the Composer

Composer Lou Harrison returns to Ventura County this weekend as guest of honor in the “Indonesia Alive!” program. There’s a difference, though. In May 1997, Harrison turned 80 and was the recipient of the attendant hoopla when a well-known living composer--that rare breed in our culture--chalks up another decade. Toasts and tribute concerts took place around the world.

Since then, Harrison has moved up a few notches more in the ranks of acclaim and name recognition. Composers who live and work to ripe old ages with as much creativity and vitality as Harrison begin to take on a new level of respect in the general cultural atmosphere.

As he has for years, Harrison makes his stamp as an important American composer by looking outside the United States for influences and generally shirking conventional wisdom. Gamelan, or Indonesian ensemble, music is a particular point of departure. He has written for Western and gamelan instruments, adopting Indonesia’s ideas about musical structure, harmony and intonation.

Harrison is the perfect complement to “Indonesia Alive!” Sunday’s event will be the third component of a three-concert mini-festival this weekend sponsored by the New West Symphony.

Friday’s song-and-dance program, “Tango Party!,” will land at the Pierpont Inn in Ventura, and “Argentina Alive!” will feature fare of such composers as Piazzolla and Ginastera on Saturday night at Ventura City Hall.

The “Indonesia Alive!” event’s centerpiece will be Harrison’s Suite for Violin and American Gamelan, to be performed by violinist Raymond Kobler. Also on the program will be his piece for French horn and gamelan, “Main bersama-sama,” and the two-piano adaptation of “Ceremonial Balinese Music” by fellow Indonesian-influenced composer Colin McPhee.

The piece for violin and American gamelan was written in 1972 for a gamelan for which Harrison designed the tuning and that was built by his long-standing partner in music and life, Bill Colvig. How does a composer go about devising a new tuning?

“In the first place,” Harrison said, “you have to know what your intervals are and have some mental image and feeling between your ear and your brain. My connection has long since been made, so I can envision tunings, go to the harp and tune them up instantly and try them out. A harp is a good thing to have around.”

Harrison has long been interested in creating tunings outside the 12-note, equal-tempered scale that has dominated Western music. It is, he said, “only in the last century and a half, and largely due to the Steinway, that we have allowed ourselves to be imprisoned into 12 equal intervals.

“It’s important to realize that things can be returned, despite international capitalism, which is selling instruments fixed into equal temperament all over the world, to people who do not have it hard-wired in them yet, and nobody does, by the way.”

To hear him tell it, 12-tone temperament was only genuinely possible after World War II with the advent of electronic tuners and oscilloscopes, which could precisely calibrate the tuning. “And since then,” he said, “of course, it all sounded very boring. That’s the only reason we can hear 12-tone equal, because technology makes it possible to tune it that way. You can’t do it by ear. That’s why music was better in the old days.”

According to Harrison, the 80th birthday celebrations “went on for over a year and a half. Finally, we had to decline.” Physical ailments, including tendinitis of the thumb, have restricted activities, but his spirit prevails.

He hopes to get more done once he and Colvig complete a house in Joshua Tree.

“It will be a getaway studio,” Harrison said. “I have a lot of unfinished work, both writing and music and other things. That will be a wonderful thing. Or we can just simply rest.”

Harrison’s longtime home base in Aptos, near Santa Cruz, “has become a big international office, and it’s hard to do anything here, including compose.”

The idea of creating bridges between Eastern and Western music has gained in popularity in the past 25 years, as idioms and cultures have been fused, but it’s a concept Harrison has been pursuing for decades. He has written many pieces that put the idea in actual performance practice, combining soloists on Western instruments with Indonesian gamelan.

One such piece is “Main bersama-sama.” Harrison explained that “the title translates from Indonesian to “playing together.”

“It carries some of the implications of international pleasure and cooperation,” he said.

That very idea conveys much of what Harrison’s creative life has been--and continues to be--all about.

DETAILS

“Indonesia Alive!,” Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Ventura Theatre, 26 S. Chestnut St. Tickets are $20; 497-5800.