A lyrical insinuation into life

When the underappreciated Lou Harrison died last year of a heart attack at age 85, it seemed inevitable that his time would come. There was the example of Morton Feldman, whose death in 1987 caused his reputation to change overnight from that of a cultish figure in the new music community who composed exquisitely delicate time-bending pieces to that of one of the most important American composers of the 20th century. Surely, the same thing was bound to happen to Harrison, given his gift for irresistible lyricism and his pioneering fusion of Eastern and Western musical traditions.

And surely it will, but a Harrison craze lies yet on the horizon. The first anniversary of his death, Feb. 2, went unacknowledged locally or anywhere else.

Still, the sunny sensuality of the California composer who spent most of his life near Santa Cruz is slowly insinuating its way into our musical life. John Adams paid tribute to Harrison in “Dharma at Big Sur,” the violin concerto he wrote for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s gala Walt Disney Concert Hall opening in October, and the once Harrison-shy Philharmonic will use his Organ Concerto to help inaugurate the Disney organ in October.

This week, moreover, works by Harrison were central to the Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella concert at Disney Hall on Monday night and to the Xtet program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Wednesday. They were agreeably performed and a pleasure to hear. But it was their context that was most significant. The Green Umbrella concert covered music from the Pacific Rim. Xtet grouped Harrison with other major 20th century figures: Luciano Berio (who also died last year), Feldman and Olivier Messiaen.

One interesting aspect of the Green Umbrella program, which featured the USC Thornton Contemporary Music Ensemble, was its demonstration of just how meaningless it has become to pigeonhole the Pacific Rim. The concert began with Maria Grenfell’s “Ceol na Fidhle,” a violin and percussion investigation of Celtic music written for Tasmanian musicians by a young Malaysian composer who grew up in New Zealand and studied at USC. The evening ended with a lively abstract piece, “AC/DC” by P.Q. Phan, a Vietnamese composer who teaches at Indiana University Bloomington and who acknowledged in a preconcert talk that his score for chamber ensemble, which concluded with an exciting crescendo and quasi-minimalist repetition, had nothing to do with the traditions of his native music.

In between came Harrison’s “The Perilous Chapel.” It was preceded by Lisa Lim’s “The Heart’s Ear,” whose exotic sliding tones reflect the young Australian composer’s interest in Arabic and Turkish Islamic music, and followed by Earl Kim’s “Now and Then,” a profound and subtle setting of death-obsessed texts from Chekhov, Beckett and Yeats by the late California composer of Korean heritage, who spent his career at Harvard.

“The Perilous Chapel,” for its part, has nothing to do with Asia. A quartet for flute, cello, harp and percussion, it was written for a 1948 dance by Jean Erdman and based on an idea from her husband, the mythologist Joseph Campbell, about a young woman finding a soul. The experience transforms her, and she dances to an ecstatic tune that seems to make her feet float a couple of inches above the floor. Musically, though, the score predates Harrison’s involvement with Asian music.

Xtet gave us Harrison the full-blown composer of hybrids with his 1981 Double Concerto for Violin and Cello With Javanese Gamelan. In the outer movements, violinist Susan Jensen and cellist Roger Lebow adapted to Javanese tunings, playing unbroken melodies that threaded above the chiming gongs of the Harvey Mudd American Gamelan. The central movement, however, is a dance form that was popular in Britain during the Renaissance, and here the soloists were accompanied by ancient drums.

This time, the context was entirely Western, but that means as little these days as Pacific Rim.

Creating sounds out of the syllables of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s name, Berio’s “O King” is both timeless and stateless. Feldman’s ethereal, sweet, sexy “The Viola in My Life II” is languorous music hardly in step with the fast pace of the West. Messiaen’s Piece for Piano and String Quartet, written in 1991 just before his death, is a fleeting meditation that reveals for the last time the French composer’s obsessions with Indian rhythm and the peal of Indonesian bells (along with the songs of birds from everywhere).

Both programs were well prepared, and much credit for that goes to Donald Crockett, who heads the USC student ensemble and is the conductor for Xtet. Neither Harrison piece was conducted, though, and in each it felt as though there was a bit of air leaking out of the tires at the end.

Harrison, even in his plump old age, was an enormously physical man, always graceful in movement, and there is in his music an ever-present element of dance. Yet if that element wasn’t as strong as it might have been in these performances, it was made up for by the enthusiastic participation of the USC and Harvey Mudd student players.