It had to be Lou: at 84, Lou Harrison remains one of the great American composers. (music).

"I've had a lot of fun writing," says Lou Harrison, the current dean of American symphonic composers. "I still do. If it's fun, it's real. If it's no fun, then it isn't art. Art is advanced play."

On March 7-8, two months before his 85th birthday, the marvelous maverick will be feted at San Francisco's Other Minds Festival. Harrison will deliver the preconcert talk for the world premiere of his new "Scenes From Nek Chand" for steel guitar and enjoy performances of seven other works he wrote between 1952 and 2000.

In the book Lou Harrison: Composing a World, Harrison states that music is essentially "a song and a dance"--a combination of winning melody and lively rhythm. The roots of his unique style reach back to the San Francisco of the 1930s, when he studied with Henry Cowell and gave joint percussion concerts with John Cage. After a year in Los Angeles studying with Arnold Schoenberg, Harrison migrated to New York City in 1943. There he worked with choreographer Lester Horton, developed a close friendship with Virgil Thomson, and conducted the premiere of Charles Ives's Third Symphony, which he also edited. When Ives received the Pulitzer Prize for the symphony in 1947, he shared it with Harrison.

Harrison's music evolved after he settled in Aptos, a California coastal community east of Santa Cruz, in 1953. Trips to the Far East in the 1960s and subsequent study of traditional Javanese gamelan contributed to a cross-cultural style that unites Harrison's passion for life with a deep concern for humanity's future.

One of the works on the Other Minds program, "Music for Bill and Me," celebrates Harrison's 33-year life partnership with William Colvig. Harrison's house is filled with American gamelan instruments that Colvig designed. Though Colvig died in March 2000, Harrison affirms that "these are Bill's voice, and they'll go on."

While Harrison joshes that he expects to live "at least 30 more years," he finds today's cultural and political climate sufficiently distressing to make him glad he wasn't born "one minute later."

With a voice that mixes distress and wit, Harrison observes, "Our whole civilization is become prepackaged in aluminum boxes, whereas we used to box things with beautiful papers and different-color ribbons and bows. Are we going to blow this planet to hell or reduce it to Venus? I can't attend a Hollywood movie anymore. I have to go read Wordsworth or Longfellow in order to counteract the violence. If you think about what's happened between 1917 and the present, it's enough to give you the shakes! Which I have." He laughs, adding, "I can hardly write my signature anymore."

Although the openly gay Harrison never experienced antigay opposition in music circles, even when he had a black lover in the still very segregated late 1940s, he asserts, "To this day, a gay has no real civil rights in this country ... you get angry after a while."

For an ideal introduction to Harrison's music, the composer recommends Lou Harrison: A Portrait (Argo), featuring jazz great Al Jarreau as narrator. As an encore, the infectious and moving Rhymes With Silver (New Albion), written for choreographer Mark Morris, is great enough to ensure that Harrison's music will still be enjoyed and explored at the turn of the next century.

Serinus is a music reviewer, musician, and editor of Psychoimmunity & the Healing Process.