Lou Silver Harrison was born on 14 May 1917 in Portland, Oregon, where he lived until the age of nine. His father’s difficulty finding work forced the family to move frequently around the San Francisco Bay area in Northern California. As a child, Harrison’s school education was spotty, but he received a rich and varied artistic education, including piano and dance lessons. He graduated from Burlingame High School in December 1934, and moved to San Francisco the following year. For seven years, until the summer of 1942, he explored the Western musical canon in depth, while at the same time developing a strong interest in Asian music traditions. In 1935, he enrolled in San Francisco State College for three semesters, during which he studied horn, clarinet, harpsichord, and recorder, and sang in several choral ensembles. He composed Six sonatas for harpsichord (1934-1943) and Mass to St. Anthony (1939-1952) during this time. He then transferred to the University of California at San Francisco, where he took Henry Cowell‘s “Music of the Peoples of the World.” Soon after, he became Cowell’s asssistant, composition student, and friend. Through Cowell, Harrison came into contact with Charles Ives and Carl Ruggles, with whom he would maintain friendships and artistic ties. From 1937 to 1942, Harrison worked as a piano accompanist for the Department of Dance at Mills College in Oakland and taught composition for dance during its summer sessions. Harrison would return to Mills College in 1980 as a professor of composition in its Department of Music. In 1938, Harrison met John Cage. From 1939 to 1941, the two organized a series of percussion concerts on the Mills College campus and in San Francisco’s Bay Area, in which several of his compositions were performed, including Double Music (1941) for percussion quartet, which he wrote collaboratively with Cage. In August 1942, Harrison moved to Los Angeles, where he took courses with Arnold Schoenberg at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and composed Suite pour piano (1943), which was influenced by Schoenberg’s serialism.

In summber 1943, Harrison moved to New York City, where he worked for the journal New Music and as an assistant music critic to Virgil Thomson for the New York Herald Tribune. On 5 April 1946, he conducted the world premiere of Charles Ives’ Symphony n° 3. New York’s noisy, chaotic atmosphere did not suit Harrison: he suffered from severe depression and had to be hospitalized for nine months. Nevertheless, he continued to compose during this time, notably The Perilous Chapel (1949) and Solstice (1950). During the summers of 1949 and 1950, he directed the Reed College Festival of Music and Theater in Portland, Oregon, and composed scores for Marriage at the Eiffel Tower (Jean Cocteau) and The Only Jealousy of Emer (William Butler Yeats). From 1951 to 1953, he was a resident at Black Mountain College, where he taught harmony, counterpoint, and intonation theory. In 1952, he was awarded a first Guggenheim Fellowship and composed the opera Rapunzel.

Harrison returned to California in the summer of 1953, settling the following year in Aptos, a small rural community south of Santa Cruz. At first, he supported himself playing piano as an accompanist, and in various jobs, including forest fire fighter and veterinary nurse. A second Guggenheim fellowship in 1954 offered him some financial stability, along with a commission from the Louisville Orchestra in 1955, for which he wrote Strict Songs (1955) for eight baritones and orchestra. In 1959, he traveled to Buffalo for a residency, where he completed his Concerto for violin with percussion orchestra.

In April 1961, Harrison traveled to Tokyo on a Rockefeller Grant to attend the East-West Music Encounter. Immediately thereafter, he spent two months in South Korea. The following year, he returned to Seoul for nearly four months, spending an additional three weeks in Taiwan. These travels allowed him to study local instruments and music, which inspired compositions that used Eastern and Western instruments, such as Nova Odo (1961-1968), Pacifika Rondo (1963), and Concerto for pipa (1997). In 1966, Harrison spent six months in Oaxaca, Mexico. The following year, he met William Colvig, an electrical engineer and music lover, who would become Harrison’s collaborator and companion until Colvig’s death in 2000. During their thirty-three years together, they lived in Aptos in a straw-bale house. They built instruments together, including an instrumental ensemble they called the American Gamelan, nicknamed Old Granddad, which Harrison notably used in his second opera, Young Caesar (1971-2000).

During the 1960s and 1970s, Harrison staged hundreds of concerts of traditional Chinese and Korean music throughout California. He continued to pursue his studies of different intonation systems, which he taught during the Berkeley World Music Festival in 1975. In 1976, he began studying music for gamelan, and the following year he began composing music for Javanese gamelans often played with Western solo instruments in works such as Double Concerto for violin, cello, and gamelan (1981-1982) and Concerto for piano with Javanese gamelan (1987). He traveled to Indonesia for the first time in 1983, taking advantage of a trip to New Zealand to make a detour to Java. Harrison died of a heart attack on 2 February 2003 on his way to Columbus, Ohio to attend a festival devoted to his music.