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An Unlikely Synergy: Lou Harrison and Arnold Schoenberg

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2009

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Abstract

This essay addresses the unlikely but profound synergy between Arnold Schoenberg and Lou Harrison. Despite their personal rapport and mutual interests in visual art, they held antithetical beliefs about the nature of musical composition. Schoenberg maintained that a composition was the presentation of a metaphysical “Idea.” Harrison saw composition as the process of systematically gathering and assembling resources and techniques.

After studying with Henry Cowell and Schoenberg, Harrison displayed a fascination with musical resources that led him to compose twelve-tone works using disparate compositional tools. A 1937 piano piece combines Schoenberg's methods of variation with Cowell's and Seeger's techniques of “dissonation.” The “Conductus” from the 1942 Suite for Piano, a work inspired by Schoenberg's Suite für Klavier, op. 25, explores all twelve prime forms of the row in light of Cage's square-root form. A nontonal 1944 string quartet ends on a triad like Schoenberg's Ode to Napoleon, op. 41.

In the 1950s Harrison rejected the aims of the total-serialist movement and found his own voice in just intonation instead. By the 1980s all vestiges of twelve-tone technique disappeared from his pieces; however, analogous serial techniques resurfaced in his paintings. Thus Harrison retained deep respect for Schoenberg as a composer, teacher, and friend.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , May 2009 , pp. 155 - 193
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Music 2009

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Discography

Boriskin, Michael. “The Equal-Tempered Lou Harrison.” Newport Classics NPD 85520, 1995.Google Scholar
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