A Joyful Playing of Lou Harrison

At long last, the music of Lou Harrison--the dean of California music and the very symbol of a culture in which musics from the Americas, Asia and Europe can joyfully, magically merge--has begun to be heard, known and embraced.

Michael Tilson Thomas, who has memorably dubbed Harrison new music’s Santa Claus, has championed him with the San Francisco Symphony and made a local celebrity of the composer who has lived in Northern California most of his life. Harrison’s 80th birthday two years ago was celebrated with festivals in the Bay Area and New York, concerts in London and throughout Europe. Oxford University Press has just published the first biography--Leta E. Miller and Fredric Lieberman’s engrossing, indispensable “Lou Harrison: Composing a World.” Mark Morris keeps the music alive in the dance.

All that, and yet in Los Angeles . . . next to nothing. An exception was a performance a week ago by the Southwest Chamber Music of Harrison’s Suite for Violin and American Gamelan. Last week Franz Welser-Most was scheduled to conduct Brahms and Shostakovich with the Los Angeles Philharmonic (but canceled because of illness), while in May the Austrian conductor includes Harrison in an appearance with the New York Philharmonic.

On Sunday afternoon, however, Harrison got further south than he has in some time when he joined the New West Symphony in its multicultural Musics Alive ’99 series to celebrate Indonesia at the Ventura Theatre in Ventura.

The program only included two brief examples of Harrison’s music. It oddly placed Harrison, who often toys with Javanese instruments, tunings and techniques, within a somewhat different Balinese context. But the performances were superb; the setting (an old movie palace turned rock venue) amusing; and the music (Harrison is the rare 20th century composer with a Schubertian gift for melting melody) irresistible.

Harrison enjoys his Santa Claus--he is a large man with a long snowy beard who favors oversized red shirts and has an infectious laugh. And though his walk was effortful Sunday (he is recovering from surgery), Santa Claus-like he was--not just in appearance but in essence--as he introduced his music. Harrison is a gift-giver, tirelessly offering one culture something it can use from another culture.

In discussing the first piece on the program, which combined saxophone with an ensemble of Indonesian flutes, spike fiddles, drums and gongs that make up a gamelan, Harrison was asked if he found it hard to mix traditions. “Not at all,” he replied. “I’m a musician; I can listen and I can learn.”

Still, “Main Bersama-Sama” was a jolt. Originally written for French horn and Harrison’s home-made, Javanese-style gamelan orchestra, it is the best introduction to Harrison I know (there is a fine CRI recording)--its tune, once heard, will not leave you. Sunday’s performance, in a later arrangement for saxophone and Indonesian flute, was performed with a traditional Balinese gamelan orchestra called Burat Wangi, made up of CalArts students and led by I Nyoman Wenten. The effect was music brighter, more shrill, more shimmering, more brash.

Not quite right, I would be tempted to say, but the playing was expert, and once one begins melting cultures, who’s to say where to stop? And just how fluid musical cultures can and should be did prove the ultimate theme. The pianists Gloria Cheng-Cochran and Vicki Ray played Colin McPhee’s “Balinese Ceremonial Music,” a 1940 evocation of gamelan orchestra. Burat Wangi offered traditional music and dance, along with a new piece in traditional style, but jazzier, by Wenten. Nothing sounded in conflict.

Then came the fascinating experience of hearing some movements from Harrison’s Suite for Violin and American Gamelan in a transcription the composer made for violin, string orchestra and piano. The performance, with violinist Raymond Kobler and Greg Fried conducting members of the New West Symphony, was stunningly beautiful; East and West merged into a single, gleaming transcendent whole.