Daily Inspiration Quote by Lou Harrison

Harrison is pushing back against a modernist badge of honor: the habit of turning technique into a public spectacle. In the 20th century, composers were often expected to prove their seriousness by making the machinery audible - serial procedures, dense counterpoint, novel systems that announce themselves as if they were the point. Harrison's line reads like an aesthetic refusal of that posture. He isn't anti-craft; he's anti-posturing. The tools are there, but they shouldn't be the headline.

The subtext is also political, in Harrison's quietly contrarian way. He spent much of his career admiring non-Western musical practices and building new instruments with just-intonation tunings, all while American academia increasingly rewarded a kind of compositional transparency that functioned as insider code. "On my sleeve" implies fashion, performance, status. He's wary of music that asks to be admired for its construction rather than experienced for its sonority, contour, and ritual energy.

Context matters: Harrison came up in an era when the composer could be cast as engineer or theorist, especially in the orbit of postwar institutions. His own work can be technically intricate - alternative tunings, percussion ensembles, gamelan influences - but he wants that complexity to disappear into pleasure, clarity, and communicative surface. It's a statement of confidence: if the piece needs the audience to notice the scaffolding, maybe the building isn't standing on its own.