Lou Harrison

By John Rockwell, from the New York Times  

Lou Harrison, a distinguished composer in all genres of classical music, founder of the American gamelan movement and a leading exemplar of the marriage of Asian and Western music, died on Sunday evening  in Lafayette, Ind. Mr. Harrison was en route to a festival of his music at Ohio State University.  He was 85 and lived in Aptos, Calif.  

Mr. Harrison's primary contribution to Western music, aside from the sheer beauty of his works, was his wide-ranging, deeply felt connection to the musics of non-Western cultures, Asian especially. He studied in Taiwan and South Korea and was deeply immersed in Javanese music.  
He built several gamelans, or Indonesian percussion orchestras, spawning a movement that spread through North America (there are some 200 ensembles built in direct emulation of Mr. Harrison's). They play both traditional pieces and newly composed music.  

His own music ranged with a giddy indifference to musical polemics, from Serialism to folkish tonality in the manner of Aaron Copland to Ivesian collage to percussion, along with the many pieces for non-Western instruments. He prized just intonation, meaning pure intervals uncompromised by the Western tempered scale. He sought universal peace and brotherhood, writing or titling several of his works in Esperanto. Above all, he reveled in melodic sensuality and timbral extravagance, born from the pitch-purity of his tunings and the enormous variety of instruments and combinations that he employed.