The Music Man
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A major influence on Harrison’s career was the music of gay composer Henry Cowell. In 1935, the teenage Harrison was introduced to Cowell when he took the older man’s course, “Music of the Peoples of the World,” at the University of California extension school in San Francisco. Cowell challenged conventional musical practices, maintaining that the music of the world was just “melody accompanied by some form of rhythmic behavior.” As a fan of non-Western music, Cowell was able to instill an appreciation for this music into his young apprentice.

A man of many talents, Harrison also built his own musical instruments. As a young man living in New York, he constructed two collapsible clavichords with muted sound abilities so he would not disturb his neighbors. He was especially aware of the “noise” in the big city, which is what eventually drove him out to the west coast, an area he believed was the future cultural center of the world. His battle against noise pollution included walking out of a concert “when the amplitude exceeded his comfort.” As Harrison himself wrote about the “noise” during one New York concert: “The anxiety aroused by that amount of sound was such that I could no longer have the kinetic response. I could see that there were humans on the stage, and they were doing things, but my body did not respond. The ear was cut in two. Such loud-tech nonsense represents the contemporary way of impressing one with the establishment. All the corporate power is there. I don’t need it.”

Cowell’s influence extended into the personal realm as well. As a young gay man, Harrison was looking for a role model or mentor to help him chart his personal development. When Cowell was arrested in May 1936 on a morals charge—he had violated the California penal code of the time by engaging in oral copulation with a seventeen-year-old boy—and sent to San Quentin for four long years, Harrison was devastated. He visited the older man regularly in prison and later told authors Miller and Lieberman that he knew that the historical background of Cowell’s troubles were “the troubles of Oscar Wilde, Hart Crane, Walt Whitman.”

Harrison studied the work of Charles Ives and became an expert on the composer’s œuvre, later observing: “I’m probably the only living composer who had a ten-year access to the complete works of Ives, in effect … and I absorbed them like a sponge.” (Eventually, he met John Cage, who would liken Harrison’s music to “a river opening into its delta—listening to it, we become ocean.”) When Ives insisted that Harrison become “his eyes” and prepare an edition of his complete works, the young composer was still having doubts about himself. Harrison wrote to a friend: “Sometimes I wish I didn’t write music; life would be so much simpler. And besides, I am always so tortured and distressed during a performance of my own music that I don’t really hear a note of it anyway.”

Stress led to a nervous breakdown. Harrison was in his twenties and had already developed an ulcer. The manic pressure and hectic pace of New York was a contributing factor, but more than that the authors claim that it was also his inability to establish an enduring romantic relationship. In New York he was writing music journalism for very little pay, not to mention being assaulted by noise. He was hospitalized and later transferred to the Psychoanalytic Clinic at Presbyterian Hospital. Ives came to the rescue and sent his friend half of his Pulitzer Prize money. Recovery was slow; it took Harrison nearly a decade to recover fully.

Even after his recovery, friends like actress Judith Malina and her husband Julian Beck of the experimental Living Theater encouraged him to delve into the “far out” at any cost. Malina said: “We wanted excess. We wanted to see how far one could dare go. … But the courage in an artist to go far out, to break the rules, to overcome the tradition (which is somehow the ground we stand on) and then to find oneself without this ground, without the metaphor and the vocabulary that is socially acceptable—to create art out of the courage of taking those leaps and then to find that one has left the world behind—leaves us in a vulnerable, dangerous state.”

Harrison came out as gay during the McCarthy era and immediately began attending the early meetings of SIR, the Society for Individual Rights, in San Francisco. He took poetry workshops from the poet Robert Duncan and, at SIR meetings, taught Ned Rorem how to do the Charleston. Duncan’s 1944 essay “The Homosexual in Society” touched on feelings of self-deprecation and alienation. Harrison subscribed to Duncan’s belief in the value of “shared human experience over the needs of the special interest group” (in Miller and Lieberman’s words). Wrote Duncan: “Minority associations and identifications [including those of gay rights groups]were an evil wherever they supersede allegiance to … a human community good.” Coming out freed Harrison and his partner Bill Colvig to be photographed for a 1978 bus poster opposing the anti-gay Briggs Initiative in California, which would have prohibited the hiring of openly gay public school teachers.

Musicians will delight in this book. As a primer text and musical analysis of Harrison’s work, this book is indispensable. As biography, it suffers because of the juxtaposition of this material with technical musical analysis. The authors themselves announce that “this book is not a biography in the traditional sense,” and “Our tone throughout the book is deliberately informal, as befits our subject.” This is ample warning, perhaps. However, this isn’t to say that the writing is bad or the analysis sloppy, just that the academic musical analysis comes across as dry when compared to the raw data of Harrison’s personal life. In short, they make for odd bedfellows.

For the non-musician who nevertheless has a sincere appreciation of Harrison’s work, the close musical analysis may get in the way of the quest to understand who Harrison was—what he felt, how he anguished and loved, and what he thought. Still, this book stands as a noble testament to a unique figure in American music, and it belongs in every music aficionado’s library.

Thom Nickels has two books forthcoming, Out in History and Philadelphia Architecture, both scheduled for publication in 2005.