This is a wistfully sad, touching work. It uses an authentic Indonesian gamelan orchestra and violin, and its method of composition results in an inspired confluence of Western and Indonesian musical theory. Lou Harrison (born 1917) is one of the main "West Coast Maverick" composers. This group, which has included Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, John Cage, and younger composers such as Terry Riley and Stephen Scott, have all been interested in unusual instruments, strange scales and harmonies, and aesthetic and theoretical approaches that are far removed from Western historical practice.

In Harrison's case this interest was stimulated by exposure. There was a lot of Mexican, Chinese, and other East Asian, Filipino, and other music to be heard, and Harrison learned quickly that the best buy in musical entertainment during the Depression was the quarter it cost to go to a full evening of Chinese opera. He began to collect exotic percussion instruments and to make instruments from "found objects," de-emphasized harmony in his music often to the vanishing point, and came up with his own unique style, which is strong in melodies and rhythms, full of beguiling new sounds, and charming in its general serenity or high spirits.

Carlos Chávez (1899-1978) was a pioneer in developing classical music and music education in his native Mexico. A fine conductor, he formed Mexico's most important orchestras and often conducted in the United States, including on American radio with the NBC Symphony and the CBS Orchestra. He was interested in new music both from Mexico and the U.S., with a particular interest in blends of various indigenous music styles with Western techniques and orchestras. Among his most important premieres was Tabuh-Tabuhan, Colin McPhee's work that was the first major orchestral piece entirely imitating the gamelan sounds of Indonesia.

Harrison became friends with Chávez and also developed an interest in gamelan. He assembled items from his collection of metal percussion instruments (which includes such items as garbage cans and brake drums) into what he called an "American gamelan" and wrote a violin concerto with that ensemble as accompaniment, all tuned in a particular Balinese mode.

After Chávez died in 1978, Harrison sought to pay him homage in this Threnody. At the time, Harrison had added to his "American gamelan" a genuine Indonesian gamelan made in Bandung, Sunda, named Gamelan Sekar Kembar (Paired Flowers or Matched Melodies).

The Threnody, a piece uniting the Western violin with the Eastern gamelan, is also a piece uniting the Indonesian tuning mode that determines its exact notes with an example of the rhythmic modes that dominated Western European musical theory in the Medieval era. Technically, the piece is described as an eight-layered rhythmic mode over a single maxima entirely in triple divisions. Harrison points out that if he had changed just one part of this description—making the divisions duple instead of triple—the result would have been in a classical Javanese form called Ketawang.

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