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Lou Harrison.

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Lou Harrison. By Leta E. Miller and Fredric Lieberman. (American Composers.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. [viii, 148 p. ISBN 0-252-03120-2. $40.] Illustrations, suggested listening, index, compact disc.

Lou Harrison is the second book by Leta E. Miller and Fredric Lieberman detailing the life and work of this West Coast experimental composer and independent, the first being Lou Harrison: Composing a World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, hereafter Composing a World). After Harrison's death in 2003 and that of his partner William Colvig before him, Miller and Lieberman expanded and updated Composing a World as Composing a World: Lou Harrison, Musical Wayfarer in 2004 in paperback (hereafter Musical Wayfarer) for the University of Illinois's series Music in American Life. Lou Harrison (hereafter Harrison) is the launch book of another Illinois press series, American Composers. I will compare Harrison to Composing a World in order to establish any similarities and differences between them and to determine whether there is a need for two books from a single perspective (albeit from two authors) to appear in such a short space of time. I did not have access to Musical Wayfarer, so that all comparisons will be between the out-of-print hardcover edition and the 2006 publication.

In 1999, David Nicholls wrote in a review of Composing a World (Notes 56, no. 1 [September 1999]: 155-57) that Harrison, as an individualist, should be examined idiosyncratically....

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