1. Overture

Lou Harrison

John Luther Adams sits down, in Alaska, to visit by telephone with Lou Harrison, in California.

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: In a mesostic written in your honor, John Cage compared your music to a river opening into its delta. He wrote: "Listening to it, we become ocean." I think John was right, your music is absolutely extraordinary for its breadth, its diversity, its sheer quantity, and its constantly exquisite quality. You're an american master with a remarkable body of work. Last year, your 80th birthday was celebrated with performances all over the world. Some major new pieces, including the Pi'pa Concerto, were premiered. Moving into your ninth decade, you're still going strong!

LOU HARRISON: Yes, and we just had two more performances of the concerto. One in Seattle, and one with the California Symphony, in the Bay region. There were 2 different virtuosi, and they both went very well. You know I'm a slowpoke -- I have a difficult time with things like bowing, metronome marks, and all sorts of decisions. Fortunately, most musicians are kind to me and help, which is a good thing.

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: Well, the collaborative relationship with performers is part of the fun, isn't it?

LOU HARRISON: I'm dependent on it. . . I absolutely need my musicians to help me, and thank heavens they do.

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: What are you working on right now?

LOU HARRISON: Well, right now, I'm attempting a revision of my second opera for a possible performance at a SummerFest in New York in '99 or 2000. It's a major revision, because the last time, it jumped from being a puppet opera to a full-stage one, and having done that, I discovered it needed arias! So I'm singing arias to myself at this point. We also have to perk up the orchestra a little bit. . . It needs a little bit stronger bass. So we're changing a lot, and there are a couple of scenes that need to be revised. It's really a major project. I've started on it, and will continue, because I want to leave that opera in pretty good shape.

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: So this is Young Caesar

LOU HARRISON: Yes. There has been the shocking proposal that both (puppet and full-stage) versions be done in this new revision. That's going pretty far.

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: What a delightful proposition!

LOU HARRISON: Yes, it's something, and we hope it works. So that's what I'm working on. In the meantime, we're building a getaway house in Joshua Tree, so I can take a project such as this and very much concentrate on it. What are you working on?

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: I just recently completed a wonderful collaboration with Percussion Group -- Cincinnati on a concert-length work called Strange and Sacred Noise. It's been a real peak experience for me, working with musicians who perform at such a high level. (I know you've worked with them before, so you know what I'm talking about.) They've now given two performances of the entire work, and have just recorded it for New World Records. At Oberlin, Tim Weiss recently conducted the premiere of In The White Silence -- a 75-minute landscape for harp, celesta, two vibraphones, string quartet and string orchestra. JoAnn Falletta will give the second performance, next year. And we're trying to pull together a recording of that work, too.

LOU HARRISON: I think we ought to write into all of our contracts that as composers, we are entitled to at least archival tape. It seems to be a normal thing that should be written in, because it's sometimes hard to get them. And it shouldn't be, it should be a natural thing.

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: Yes, it's so important to all of us (especially younger composers), but also to those of us who are not as young.

LOU HARRISON: Especially to me who is aged! And in fact, it may be more important to me because I get absent-minded as I get older, and a tape reminds me of what directions I should put in.

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: It's absolutely true. After all, we're involved in an oral and an aural tradition. Yes, it has a literature, we do have notation, and some of us work in that way. But I think recordings are an increasingly vital part of what we do -- and not only as a documentation.

LOU HARRISON: It's oral evidence of what we've done.

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: Absolutely, it helps us establish a performance practice.

LOU HARRISON: That's what Carlos Chavez said. You know a long time ago, I had a tizzy before one of my premieres. And Carlos looked at me and said, "Lou, for heavens sake, this is only the first performance. AFTER that, you can get tizzy, if you want to." And I haven't had a tizzy since.

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: You know, I often remember the story you told me once about your Fugue for Percussion.

LOU HARRISON: Well, having read Henry Cowell's New Musical Resources and the advertisement for the Overtone Series, and knowing that a traditional fugue has tonal levels, I wanted to write a fugue in which that could be expressed rhythmically. So I wrote a theme, but I didn't know how to do the "is-to's" and "as-to's". John Cage and I were working in San Francisco at that time. We had gone to the beach where there was a wonderful pie shop. So we sat down and had a splendid apple pie, while he explained how to do the math. And that's how I was able to write it. Still, percussionists have found my slippage occasionally, when I did it incorrectly, and have helped. It's mostly a problem of crossing the bars. (Which reminds me of when John and I were rehearsing in Mills College, and there was a problem about that. We both said: "Let there be no moaning when we cross the bars.")

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: You know, one of the things that impressed me so much about that story was that initially Stokowski looked at it and said, "This is all very interesting, but it's not yet playable."

LOU HARRISON: Yes, that was the word he used: can't be done yet. And then, by the next year, Tony Cirrone was doing it at San Jose State and invited me over to hear it. Very shortly afterwards, it became a sort of contest-piece, and now, it's back into ordinary repertoire. People do develop techniques for doing things (It's quite astonishing, one can confidently write for the oboe above E now. And instrument builders extend things frequently). So things do change, and it sometimes surprises one -- happily.

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: And very quickly too, in terms of performance practice, and even our own ability as listeners and composers to hear things-our perceptions, you might say.

LOU HARRISON: Oh yes, we have them in spades in our ears. We are as virtual users: audio-visceral.