"Individuality can't be helped; you can neither encourage nor prevent it", Lou Harrison has said. "When I hear a music new to me, and if I like it,—Korean, Chinese, Indonesian gamelan—my response is 'ME TOO!', i.e., I want to learn it. I learn to play it, learn its history and its repertory."

Lou Harrison was born in Portland, Oregon in 1917. His musical style was shaped by the San Francisco of the 1930s.

There he studied composition with Henry Cowell, and staged high profile percussion concerts with John Cage. He spent the year of 1942-43 in Los Angeles where he studied with Arnold Schoenberg. In 1946, Harrison conducted the premiere of Ives's Third Symphony which he had edited from the manuscript score. The following year Ives was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for this work which he shared with Harrison.

During trips to Japan, Korea and Taiwan in 1961-62, he studied native instruments including the cheng and the p'iri. Back in California he enthusiastically presented concerts and lectures on Korean and Chinese music and experimented in his own works with hybrid instrumental ensembles.

In 1975, Harrison began an intensive study of traditional Javanese gamelan techniques. He soon began to explore ideas of cross fertilization, adapting the concerto principle to the Indonesian orchestra by composing works for Western soloists accompanied by gamelan. Harrison died in Lafayette, Indiana, 2003, from a heart attack while on his way to a festival of his music at Ohio State University.

This 4 CD set brings together all the works recorded in the USA for the MusicMasters label during the early 1990s.

‘Harrison's compositions demonstrate a wild and willful variety of means and techniques … But in general Harrison is a melodist. Rhythm has a significant place in his work, though it is likely to be four-square. Counterpoint and harmony are unimportant’ - Ned Rorem