The Lou Harrison Legacy

A festival celebrates the ultimate outside. “Harrison’s music does not stand apart from so much as, like a giant sponge, absorb all around it. A feisty individualist, he was an outsider artist who happened to be the ultimate musical insider. He was an expert geneticist-composer who made musical hybrids no one had ever heard before, particularly in his pioneering grafting of Asian musical instruments and genres onto Western ones. And he wrote melodies — gorgeous, unpredictable, brain-sticking melodies — with the best of them.”