The Mills College Music Department and the Center for Contemporary Music present
LOU HARRISON CENTENARY CONCERT
Presented by the Mills Performing Group and Thingamajig
Saturday, April 15, 2017 8:00 pm
Littlefield Concert Hall
For detailed information, please visit the Music Now webpage:
http://musicnow.mills.edu
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1798997643682908/
Free to Mills students, faculty, and staff
$15 general/$10 seniors, non-Mills students, and Mills alums
Tickets may be purchased at the door, or online at:
https://www.boxofficetickets.com/bot/wa/event?id=318223
Mills Alums may purchase the student tickets at Box Office Tickets.
Wheelchair accessible
Free parking on campus
Mills College
Music Department
5000 MacArthur Blvd
Oakland, CA 94613
Program includes:
2 Video Shorts by MAFISHCO:
Jahla 1 of 2
Music by Lou Harrison (Jahla from Pedal Sonata)
Directed by Margaret Fisher
Performers: Margaret Fisher, Stassa Morgan-Shank
Jahla 2 of 2
Music by Lou Harrison (Jahla in the form of a Ductia to please Leopold Stokowski
on his 90th Birthday)
Directed by Margaret Fisher
Performers: Elvyn Blair, Margaret Fisher, Robert Hughes, Claudia Naganuma, Bob Saito, Brenda Stine, Toyoji Tomita
Lou Harrison:
From the Varied Trio:
Elegy
Rondeau in Honor of Fragonard
From the Grand Duo:
Polka
David Abel: violin, Julie Steinberg: piano
Edward Schocker:
Hymn for Lou & Bill
Dylan Bolles: Bamboo flute
Soo Yeon Jyuh: Haegeum
Stephen Parris:
New Work for Pipa and Javanese Gamelan
Sophia Shen: pipa
Gamelan Encinal directed by Stephen Parris
(Commissioned by Thingamajigs as part of "Harrison 100 / Thingamajigs 20 project” -a project that celebrates Lou Harrison’s centennial and Thingamajigs 20th anniversary.)
Henry Cowell:
Persian Set for Chamber Orchestra
Lou Harrison:
Suite for Violin, Piano, and Small Orchestra
Mills Performing Group
Steed Cowart: conductor, Hrabba Atladottir: solo violin, Kate Campbell: solo piano, Stacey Pelinka: flute, Bethanne Walker: flute, Jesse Barrett: oboe, Sophie Huet: clarinet, Travis John Andrews: tar, Meredith Clark: harp,
William Winant: percussion, George Hayes: violin, Mia Bella D’Augelli: violin, Hannah Addario-Berry: cello,
Crystal Pascucci: cello, Kristin Zoernig: contra bass, Regina Schaffer: celesta,
Brett Carson: tack piano
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Lou Harrison (1917–2003) studied composition with Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg. He had a long personal and artistic association with John Cage dating back as far as the 1930s and 1940s when the two composers performed and taught at various times at Mills College. Harrison collaborated with many choreographers, including Bonnie Bird, Carol Beals, Tina Flade, Marian van Tuyl, and Lester Horton. In 1937 he was engaged by Mills College as a dance accompanist and also taught courses in composition for the dance at its summer sessions. In 1943 Harrison moved to New York where he and Virgil Thomson worked as music critics for the Herald Tribune for which he wrote more than three hundred reviews. Harrison was editor for New Music Editions, a seminal collection of scores documenting early twentieth-century American experimentalist music. In 1946 he conducted the first complete performance of Charles Ives’ Third Symphony, thirty-eight years after it was composed. He was offered a teaching position at Black Mountain College in 1951. Harrison returned to California in 1953, where he began to focus on non-Western musical traditions; many of his works from that point on mixed traditional Western instruments with instruments from around the world. His compositions employed Chinese, Korean and Indonesian instruments as well as Western instruments and those of his own construction. He also has had a life-long interest in tuning systems, especially just intonation. Harrison met his partner Bill Colvig (1917–2000) in 1967. Colvig was an amateur musician, who was a skilled electrician and worked with Harrison on his instrument-building projects and tuning experiments. In 1980 Harrison returned to teach once again at Mills where he held the Darius Milhaud Chair in Composition (1980) and the Mary Woods Bennett Chair (1981–83). At Mills, with the help of percussionist
William Winant and Bill Colvig, he built the gamelan Si Darius and Si Madeleine in honor of the French composer Darius Milhaud and his wife Madeleine Milhaud, both of whom served on the Mills College faculty. Mills presented Harrison with an honorary doctorate in 1988 and in 1990 he was Mills’ first Jean MacDuff Vaux composer in residence.
From his earliest years in San Francisco, Harrison was an outspoken advocate of multiculturalism, ecological responsibility and pacifism in both his writings and musical compositions and was also politically active in the gay rights movement. His musical output is both rich and varied. During the Second World War, he composed percussion music and helped organize performances of similar works by Cage, Russell, Roldán, and many others. He wrote symphonies, chamber works, and music using both Eastern and Western instrumentation. Harrison was a polymath—he was an instrument builder, worked as a dancer and a dance critic, painted, wrote poetry, studied calligraphy, signing, and Esperanto. Harrison composed in a wide variety of musical styles throughout his career, but a common factor was his melodic gift—an expression of the profound humanism at the core of his aesthetic and social philosophy.
The musical community at Mills College was blessed with a special relationship with Lou on both artistic and personal levels. His work has inspired generations of Mills faculty and students. He was also our very dear friend and we can not imagine a more appropriate expression of our gratitude and love than tonight’s concert of Lou’s wonderful music in honor of what would have been his 100th birthday.
Cost: $15 general, $10 seniors/students