Celeste Hutchins<\/p>\n
Proseminar<\/p>\n
17 September 2003<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Harrison writes in his Music Primer<\/i>, <\/p>\n \nTo Avoid the Monstrosities that might be done to your vocal works in Harrison \nMorris, The E-o “movado” was equally taken by Harrison, \nI do remember attending that concert and it was About Despite She Lou During Cook His Lou Miller’s Grumpy paper Celeste Hutchins Proseminar 17 September 2003 Harrison writes in his Music Primer, 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 … Continue reading <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[203,76,11,170],"class_list":["post-1717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-academic","tag-celesteh","tag-music","tag-wesleyan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1717"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1717\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3969,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1717\/revisions\/3969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\ntranslations, make one version yourself directly in the international language
\nendorsed by UNESCO – Esperanto. This language is particularly musical anyway,
\nmore so, I think, than the majority of ethnic tongues, which, like Topsy, “just
\ngrowed.” (p 22)\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nis clearly very serious about Esperanto, even going as far as to teach it
\nthrough a gay organization in San Francisco and to write several E-o (E-o is
\nthe “official” Esperanto abbreviation for “Esperanto”) manifestos. Amy Cook,
\nLou\u201a’s sign language instructor, describes him as “passionate” about E-o. So
\nmuch so that in his primer, he goes so far as to list Dr. Zamenhof, inventor of
\nEsperanto in his list of the most influential figures of the nineteenth
\ncentury.<\/p>\n
\nBlake, Zamenhof, Whitman & maybe Dolmetsch – Darwin too & Thoreau;
\nthose are the great geniuses of the west in the 19th century, the
\nones still disturbing, awakening, arousing, fertilizing & revealing us. (p
\n41)\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nsending a delegation out to meet him in Tokyo, when he arrived for the 1961
\nEast-West Music Encounter in Tokyo. (Miller p. 57) Similarly, the E-o community
\nat San Francisco State provided him with a premiere of his work, La Koro
\nSutro<\/i>. Charles Amirkhanian, former
\nmusic director of KPFA (and current director of Other Minds), recalled the
\nconcert in an email, <\/p>\n
\npacked. I think it was in Knuth Hall in the Music Dept. and they used Lou’s
\nfirst gamelan, the American gamelan built w\/ Bill Colvig. We did find a tape in
\nthe archives of Lou speaking about that time about that gamelan, made with
\nmetal pipes used normally to route electrical lines. The conduit was ground
\ndown by Bill using an oscilloscope to get exact tunings. Lou was wild with
\nenthusiasm about the sound and tuning and that Bill could pull off this
\nmiracle.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nthe lectures, Amirkhanian said, “We do have a recording, I think, of the 1972
\nperformance of La Koro Sutro. We don’t have the lectures. I guess there wasn’t
\nmuch hope of broadcasting an entire lecture in Esperanto.” Despite KPFA’s fears
\nof an insufficient audience, Miller reports that “329 participants from
\ntwenty-eight countries” attended the lectures. (p 64) ELNA, the Esperanto
\nLeague for North America sells a CD of La Koro Sutro<\/i>, via their E-o book catalog. They describe it saying,
\n“[T]his collection by the world famous Lou Harrison is . . . a masterpiece in
\nany language. An innovator of musical composition and performance who
\ntranscends cultural boundaries, Harrison’s highly acclaimed work juxtaposes and
\nsynthesizes musical dialects from virtually every corner of the world.” (
\nHe was awarded a lifetime honorary membership to ELNA and is well known
\nthroughout “Esperantio.<\/i>” Someone
\non an E-o email list concerning music asked, “Cxu ekster Lou Harrison neniam
\nekzistis emo, ‘serioze’ verki pri iaj esperantaj poemoj?” Do there exist,
\noutside of Lou Harrison, serious works with Esperanto poems? (
\nhow seriously Lou took E-o and how seriously the movado<\/i> takes him, Miller clearly does not take this
\nseriously. For instance, she describes the premiere of La Koro Sutro<\/i> as taking place, “during a week-long seminar at San
\nFrancisco state University.” (p 64) It is extremely likely that the “seminar”
\nwas actually NASK, La Nord-Amerkio Sumera Kursaro,<\/i> an annual E-o language summer school, which, “[p]rior
\nto 2002, . . . was hosted for 31 years at San Francisco State University.” (
\nOn the same page, she says that “this postconfrence” followed “the 1972 World
\nEsperanto Convention in Portland.” There does indeed exist an annual
\ninternational convention of E-o speakers. The correct name for this is the Universala
\nKongreso<\/i>.<\/p>\n
\nsimilarly fails to accurately report names of E-o organizations when talking
\nabout the 1961 Conference in Tokyo, saying, “Harrison wrote to the fine arts representative
\nof the International Esperanto Association in Tokyo.” (p 57) I would very much
\nlike to read a copy of this letter, but I can find no mention of such an
\norganization via Google searches in English or E-o. There does exist a Universal<\/i> Esperanto Association. There also exists a “passport
\nservice,” which provides the kind of lodging and translation services that Lou
\nreceived from the representative of this mysterious organization. There also
\nexists a Japana Esperanto-Instituto<\/i>,
\nwhich has existed continuously (except for 1944) since 1906. Many organizations
\nin Japan that want to reach an international audience use E-o, including some
\nscholarly journals. I have an impression of Japan as an extremely wired
\ncountry, so it seems like the “International Esperanto Association in Tokyo”
\nwould be mentioned somewhere on-line.<\/p>\n
\ntook sign language as seriously as he took E-o, yet it merits hardly a mention.
\nAmy Cook (who was my housemate for a few years) taught Lou sign language twice
\na week, in 1.5 hour sessions from 1991 until 1996 or 1997. I talked to her by
\nphone after finishing Miller’s book. Amy was unhappy to learn that she was not
\nmentioned in the book, since she was very close to Harrison. During the time
\nshe was my housemate, Lou called her and said that he and Bill Colvig wanted to
\nadopt her and told her she should find and fill out the appropriate paperwork. She
\nconsidered this offer, since her own parents are gone, but in the end, decided
\nagainst it. I remember this happening, star struck as I was, that Lou
\nHarrison<\/b> was calling her up on the
\nphone! <\/p>\n
\nall the time that she taught Harrison sign language, Cook reports that he never
\nonce mentioned his deaf former roommate, who is mentioned twice in the
\nbiography. Cook explained that Lou’s neighbor George, which whom Lou was very
\nclose, had gone mostly deaf. Her classes initially included Bill, but her
\ndropped out very quickly. After that it was Lou, George and Marian, George’s
\ngirlfriend. Harrison was the organizer of the class. He was enthusiastic and “unafraid”of trying new signs. He “would go to any deaf event he could go to.” Cook
\nrecalled a flying with Harrison to Seattle to see a sign language play and was
\nstruck by his generosity in paying her way. He combined some of his interests
\nin constructed languages by reading about gestuno, an international sign
\nlanguage, similar in motivation to E-o.<\/p>\n
\npainted a less saintly image of Harrison than Miller. She said, “He had a lot
\nof things going on . . . internally\u201a” and said that, “he seemed complicated”
\nand to be \u201a”going through complicated stuff.” She went so far as to call him “high
\nmaintenance.” She attributed some of this to health problems, such as pain in a
\nnerve in his face, and some to his “brutal” schedule. He was booked a year in
\nadvance and always seemed to be writing something. He worked hard and continuously,
\nwriting, traveling and teaching gamelan at Cabrillo Community College. He was continuously
\ndoing something, if not working, then partying and was generally very
\npassionate about everything. Cook hypothesized that he welcomed the relief of
\nthe sign language classes and so created unintensive lesson plans. He would stop
\neverything else that he was doing during the lesson time and objected strenuously
\nif he was disturbed during that time.<\/p>\n
\nsign language lessons started in 1991, which would have been during the
\ncreative crisis that Miller reports him suffering around the first Gulf War. When
\nI asked Amy about this, she thought and said that eventually, he was always
\nwriting, but said that she recalled him working on something even when they first
\nmet. I asked her if this might have been Homage to Pacifica<\/i> and she explained that although she was a music major
\nat the time and a percussionist, he gave “social cues that [music was] not an
\navenue of conversation.” She could and did ask him questions about music and he
\nwould answer them, but he looked bored when he did. She recalls him having a
\nbust of Ives in his house. When he found out that she didn’t know who Ives was,
\nhe became exasperated.<\/p>\n
\nwas \u201a”thunderous.” He was “used to having his way” and would “storm around”
\nuntil he got it. However, his thunder was all sound and fury signifying
\nnothing. He yelled at Bill, but Bill’s hearing was poor and Bill didn’t take it
\npersonally. Amy never saw tension between them. They were clearly in love, she
\nreported.<\/p>\n
\nbiography of Harrison is similar to Cowell’s biography of Ives in that they
\nboth were written during their subject’s lifetime and were both written by
\npeople who were fans of their subject. Unsurprisingly, they both have a tendency
\nto fawn. Miller however, unlike Cowell, is sloppy with her subject matter and
\nshould strongly consider collaborating with an Esperantist before another
\nedition of this book is released.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"