The prolific and long-lived Lou Harrison slowly gained a reputation for writing some of the most serene and lovely American music, particularly among composers generally counted as "maverick" or "avant-garde."

The elements of his music that cause him to be ranked with the West Coast experimenters such as Partch, Cowell, and even Riley are his deep interest in Eastern music and other non-European musical cultures, his attraction to Partch's just intonation tuning system, and his own tendency to reject chordal harmony altogether.

The primacy this puts on rhythm, melody, and tone color (and his attraction to Eastern modes) often makes his music sound far Eastern in inspiration.

The unhappiest period of Harrison's life came at the end of a residence in New York City, where he lived during most of the 1940s. The pressures of big city life on him, to which he was temperamentally unsuited, ultimately caused a nervous breakdown. It was following his hospitalization for that calamity that he changed his style to that described above.

He also chose rural settings for his residence from then onward. In 1951 he was offered a teaching post at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Indented as only a summer residence, this stretched into two years. Work he did there won him a Guggenheim Award, which enabled him to make his living primarily as a composer and to move to (then-) rural Aptos, CA, where he made his home thereafter.

Songs in the Forest was begun in North Carolina, but not completed at that time. Harrison took the work up again in 1992, revising and completing it in time for a San Francisco reunion of Black Mountain College members.

Despite the title, the work is instrumental, with three movements preceded by readings of poems written by Harrison himself. The orchestration is flute, piano (which is sometimes fuzzed by inserting paper through the strings), percussion, and narrator. The three movements are marked "Slowish, "Fastish," and "Largo." The music is brightly modal, with a calm, spiritual Eastern flavor. Altogether a performance takes about nine minutes.

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