Items From Lou Harrison's Music Primer

Lou Harrison's Music Primer is a pamphlet, printed from hand lettered pages with small, blank squares preceding the "Items" of musical information and advice.  Harrison meant that the owner of the pamphlet color or decoupage or otherwise personalize their copy by filling the squares.  Mine is incomplete in that those squares are blank.  As I recall, I bought it after reading Ned Rorem recommending it as bound to inspire compositional creativity.  I can't say that much of itwas of use to me, that way, though several of the items were inspirational.  I was, for example, inspired to learn Esperanto after reading this:

TO AVOID 
THE MONSTROSITIES
that might be done to your vocal works in translations, make one version yourself directly in the international language endorsed by UNESCO ~ Esperanto.  This language is particularly musical anyway, more so, I think, than the majority of the ethnic tongues, which, like Topsy, "just growed".

Good advice, I'd say, having heard what can happen to as august and disaster proof a masterpiece as Bach's Magnificat sung in English

 "My-y so-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-oul -   Doeth magni-FY The Lord! Doeth magni-FY The Lord!... And it wasn't just that the obscenely huge Mormon Tabernacle Choir was accompanied by an enormous, romantic era sized orchestra.

There is stuff in the book which is obvious nonsense, the attempt to force Indonesian, especially Balinese intonation, based on quite different principles, into Harrison's notions about just intonation.  I don't know about chronology but it might have something to do with Leonard Bernstein's embarassing related balderdash given in his Norton Lectures.  Better to consult Colin McPhee's great study on that topic.

But most of what Harrison said is quite useful and thought provoking.

There is this statement to live by:

SUCH AS I 
AM I WOULD GENER-
ally rather chance a choice than choose a chance.

Which is responsible for me giving up one of the most ill chosen topics for a paper in my grad-school years.  Christian Wolff, an indeterminacy disciple of John Cage had been frustrating me for months.  Reading that in the Spring of 1972 made me realize that there wasn't anything to be said about indeterminacy and that anything interesting in the sound patterns generated by it was purely accidental. I told my adviser I was abandoning that topic and I've never bothered with it since.

It might also be the thing I read during my education that has had the most profound and general effect on my life.  Musically, I always, to every one of my students tell them that they should always make their own choices because if they're following other peoples requirements, they are writing music for those people instead of themselves, that they should let those people write their own music.

More generally there is this observation made c. 1970, back when young people of my generation were at the height of self-congratulation on their originality

ORIGINALITY, PERSONALITY, OR 
style can neither be encouraged nor prevented.  Forget the matter.

If you ignore the stuff about just intonation or, more sensibly, see it as a suggestion for experiment, most of Harrison's Primer is full of advice to try things, to do things, to listen and think for yourself and to not be afraid to go your own way.  It's also an encouragement to look beyond the limits you find yourself in now.   He notes somewhere in it that young people aren't allowed to make many choices, again, during the period when young people of my generation were most full of themselves on just that point.  If we'd only taken more of his advice we might have defied the expected and things might have changed for the better.

I think I'll give my copy to a student and say they should color the squares as they see fit.