American Gamelans 1981

Lou Harrison and his graduate students performed their own works on the Mills College and CSUSJ gamelans as the closing event of New Music America '81.

Lou Harrison was one of the most interesting innovators to come out of the United States. His work bears some affinity to that of Harry Partch in the experimentation with unusual scales, although Harrison favored Indonesian gamelans in traditional sléndro and pélog tunings. He and his partner, William Colvig, built gamelans for the schools where Harrison taught (the gamelan Si Betty for California State University, San Jose, and the gamelan Si Darius at Mills College) and he and his students performed seven of their own works on these instruments for the New Music America Festival 1981 in San Francisco. One of those students, Larry London, took Harrison's experimentation a step further by constructing a harp in a thirteenth-century Greek scale to play against the gamelan's Indonesian scale. All in all, a very interesting hour of music.

Lou Harrison's American Gamelans 1981
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