Prajnaparamita, or the “Perfection of Wisdom,” inspired composer Lou Harrison’s La Koro Sutro (The Heart Sutra), featuring a score that showcases the American gamelan.
The rare musical instrument will soon head back to the East Coast after a short stay in New Mexico, but not before farewell concerts featuring a magnificent work that showcases its capabilities.
The music is La Koro Sutro by Lou Harrison, a true American maverick who renounced the mid-century modernism of atonality and 12-tone classical music in favor of a highly personal style based on Asian musical aesthetics, using unfamiliar instruments, unusual tuning systems, and discernible melodies. “I’m a song-and-dance man in the abstract,” was one of his favorite quotes.
Old Granddad No. 4 was constructed by the California-based Harrison and his instrument-builder life partner William Colvig, the fourth and final instrument in a series they dubbed American gamelans. While they were inspired by the Indonesian gamelan — a mostly-percussion ensemble in which as many as a dozen performers play 70 to 80 different instruments — they weren’t trying to replicate it precisely.
Instead, the Old Granddads consisted primarily of locally found objects, another of Harrison’s musical passions. In this case it meant junkyard scrap such as discarded oxygen tanks, old metal bars, conduit tubing, and aluminum trash cans that they modified to emit specific pitches and then played with a variety of sticks, mallets, hammers, and baseball bats.
Despite what the description may imply, the sounds of an American gamelan aren’t necessarily cacophonous. In Harrison’s writing, they usually have an incantatory quality instead, with pure tones that can last nearly 30 seconds before dying out and incredibly low bass notes that are felt as much as heard.
Chatter, our indispensable chamber music collective, welcomed Old Granddad No. 4 from Massachusetts last June with a concert featuring Harrison’s Suite for Violin and American Gamelan. (Read more in “Get a taste of Old Granddad No. 4,” June 2023.) Now it’s playing farewell this weekend with La Koro Sutro, which many commentators believe to be the composer’s greatest achievement.
“I was knocked out by the music’s sheer inventiveness,” wrote The New York Times’ Anthony Tommasini in reviewing a 2017 performance, “the allure of its component parts, the instrumental colorings, the intricate choral writing that shifts from stretches of elegiac melodic lines sung in unison to intense passages where choristers alternate phrases antiphonally.”
A Gramophone review of a recent CD release said, “Harrison’s eclectic synthesis comes across as the most natural thing in the world. His orientation is melodic, and by accompanying his melodies with fresh-sounding percussion he achieves miracles of simplicity denied to more sophisticated Western composers.”
La Koro Sutro (The Heart Sutra) is a 30-minute work scored for four-part chorus, a six-player gamelan, organ, and harp. It’s also a nearly complete encapsulation of Harrison’s personal and social beliefs, in addition to his artistic sensibilities.
Harrison was a practicing Buddhist, and one of the texts he was most strongly attracted to was a 14-verse summary of the practice’s much longer Perfection of Wisdom, one version of which runs to about 100,000 lines. “It’s called [The Heart Sutra] because it’s the heart of the matter,” Harrison said. “It concentrates all of the paradoxical beauty of this whole area of philosophy into a very brief, sharp space.”
Prajnaparamita, or the “Perfection of Wisdom,” inspired composer Lou Harrison’s La Koro Sutro (The Heart Sutra), featuring a score that showcases the American gamelan.
The text describes how one can attain nirvana, which requires the realization that the physical world is an illusion, in sections the composer designated as paragraphs. The text for one of the shortest, the sixth paragraph, reads:
All the Buddhas of the three world-ages,
having placed their faith in
Transcendental Wisdom,
full awake are they to Perfect Great Illumination.
That’s actually a translation of the text, which is sung entirely in Esperanto. Harrison was an enthusiastic proponent of it, and he wrote La Koro Sutro to be premiered at an Esperanto conference in the summer of 1972 at San Francisco State College. (See “Esperantonia or bust!” for more information about the unique language.)
Percussionist Alan Zimmerman, who was instrumental in bringing Old Granddad No. 4 to New Mexico, says there’s some danger involved with playing the instrument. “It’s really quite absorbing because the sounds are so beautiful,” he says. “I’m always tempted to stop playing and just bathe in the sound.”
Percussionist Alan Zimmerman demonstrates a set of Old Granddad’s soprano and tenor bells.
The original thinking was that Old Granddad No. 4 would be in New Mexico for three or four years, then return to the East Coast, in the care of Brady Spitz, a young scholar whose doctoral dissertation was on the instrument. Spitz just got a teaching position at Appalachian State University, where the dean is supportive of having the massive instrument housed on campus, so the timeline has been accelerated.
“These are young men’s instruments,” Zimmerman says with a laugh; the 70 year old has been schlepping them around New Mexico for gigs since they arrived last year. “Brady will have a lot of student help to move them around. Plus, this instrument was always intended to be ‘the East Coast gamelan,’ which would be available for concerts on that side of the country.”
Of the four American gamelans, one is at the University of California Santa Cruz and is available for concerts, one is privately owned, and another — the first one — is in a museum and isn’t playable.
The Chatter program also includes the world premiere of Luke Gullickson’s “Wolf Moon.” He’s a composer-pianist who does double duty as Chatter’s company manager, and his new 10-minute work features the gamelan plus solo violin, to be performed by Chatter Artistic Director David Felberg.
Wolf Moon is a traditional English name for January’s full moon, a time when wolf packs were hunting for food in the depths of winter. (A wolf pack can be heard from up to six miles away over a frozen winter landscape.)
“I like thinking of the six percussionists here as a sort of pack,” says Gullickson. “They have individual parts, but really Old Granddad is one big instrument.”
As Gullickson points out, the instruments comprising Old Granddad No. 4 span a huge register of pitches, from very low to very high, but they’re all part of the D major and B minor scales. (The only difference between the two is the starting and ending point; otherwise the notes are the same.)
“As the activity in the bass gradually shifts, similar melodic materials are heard differently, as though viewed through different colors of glasses,” he says. “The music is perceived first in B minor, then in D major, then in G Lydian.” Lydian is one of the seven modes in which music was composed before our current key system was adopted; if you’ve ever heard the theme song from The Simpsons, you’ve heard music in the Lydian mode.
Chatter’s Santa Fe performance of La Koro Sutro and “Wolf Moon” is on Saturday morning, June 15. It’s being repeated at the same time the next morning in the group’s Albuquerque home, where the coffee options are more robust.
