Synopsis

British poet Rudyard Kipling wrote: “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”

But on today’s date in 1963, East did meet West at the premiere performance of a musical work by the American composer Lou Harrison, Pacifika Rondo Written for an Orchestra of Western and Oriental Instruments, at the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii.

For Lou Harrison, it was just one more stop on a journey he had begun decades earlier.

In the spring of 1935, when he was a teenager, Lou Harrison enrolled in a course called “Music of the Peoples of the World” at the University of California extension in San Francisco. The course was taught by American composer Henry Cowell, who became Harrison’s composition teacher. Cowell urged his pupils to explore non-Western musical traditions and forms. Javanese gamelan music became a big influence in Harrison’s music, and, in 1961-62, a Rockefeller Foundation grant made it possible for him to study Asian music in Korea.

The movements of Harrison’s “Pacifika Rondo” refer to various sections of the Pacific Basin.

“In composing Pacifika Rondo,” wrote Harrison, “I have thought, with love, around the circle of the Pacific.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Lou Harrison (1917-2003): Pacifica Rondo; Oakland Youth Orchestra; Robert Hughes, conductor; Phoenix 118