Lou Harrison Quotations

We get more dangerous as we accumulate knowledge, and that's both a sadness and something to control, try to learn to live with, make terms with.

I don't want to wear my compositional tools on my sleeve.

Three days in a city now and I'm quite flipped. There's too much noise. I just can't do with it.

I'm a terrible pessimist... I really don't think we're going to make it. But every so often, there's some little ray of hope.

Cowell gave me an enormous amount of 'how to' knowledge, including how to write a serial piece before I went to Schoenberg. Also an immense stimulation about world music. He was an absolutely fascinating man, because of his knowledge not only of world music but also of how to do different things.