In one of his poems entitled The Ballad of East and West, the British poet Rudyard Kipling penned a line of verse which was destined to enter the English language as an often-quote cliché: ‘Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.’

On today’s date in 1963, East DID meet West at the premiere performance of a musical work by the American composer Lou Harrison, entitled “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 still a teenager, Lou Harrison had enrolled in a course entitled “Music of the Peoples of the World” at the University of California extension in San Francisco. The course was taught by the 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 Rockerfeller 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. This music is from the section titled “In Sequoia’s Shade,” and Harrison’s home state of California.

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