A poet, environmentalist, instrument builder, musicologist, calligrapher and political activist. Lou Harrison, born 100 years ago in Portland, Ore., was all these things.
Above all, though, he was a composer. And his centenary is celebrated this week with a festival staged by Zeitgeist, the contemporary music group based in St. Paul's Lowertown.
Thursday evening's opening concert was a lovingly crafted taster menu of Harrison's fabulously varied chamber music. It began, fittingly, with the ululating sounds of a solitary oboe — like a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer — in "Music for Remy."
The evocative, Middle Eastern ambience of the piece is no accident. Harrison had a passion for what we now call world music, and was a pioneer of incorporating non-Western music into his own compositions.
Harrison's particular fascination with the Indonesian gamelan — an orchestra of tuned percussion instruments made of bamboo, wood and metal — was well represented, especially in "Varied Trio" for piano, violin and percussion.
The "percussion" in question is anything but the standard classical complement of drums, timpani and cymbals. Rather, eight rice bowls were tuned by partial fills of water and played with chopsticks. They twinkled busily in the trio's second movement to a snappy accompaniment of violin pizzicati.
And then, for the same piece, six baking pans of varying sizes were beaten with a drumstick while the piano's strings were plucked manually and the instrument's outer casing was hit with a small mallet.
Perhaps it all sounds gimmicky, but it isn't. Harrison was a master of inventing new sonorities and using them for the betterment of his material, not for superficial decoration.
