Frontier Figures
Page 28
Octatonic pitch collections accompany a wide range of moods and actions in A Tree on the Plains, but they seem most prominent in the interludes that mark the opera's progress through the day. In the prelude, which suggests the early morning “shimmer of the plains,” Bacon's bass line first falls through a diminished seventh chord (E-C-A-F#) with chromatic motion above; it then rises through the same octave range, but fills in the gaps between notes to form an octatonic scale (F#-G-A-B-C-D2-E-F) in the low register, supporting chords drawn from the same scale (example 31). In “The Heat of the Plains,” which separates morning and noontime, the orchestra makes a mosaic of octatonic fragments over which Lou speaks about the drought. When Lou moves from speech to song, his pitches are chosen more freely, but the first and last phrases of the vocal line reflect the orchestra's octatonic predilections. “Before the Rain” features octatonic oscillations and cymbal riffs that shadow the windmill creaking to life. And to depict “The Plains at Night,” Bacon relied on half-step sighing figures (“Night wind. The mill going softly.”) that stretch but do not rupture the primarily octatonic fabric.
Of the opera's short landscape paintings, only “Moonset/Dawn” is more or less free from octatonic material. Nonetheless, human characters have the last words and the last music. After Buddy leaves his family behind, rushing into the night at the call of another plane motor, the ensemble number “Morning after the Rain” returns to the folkloric mood of “Frog Went a-Courtin,'” with triadic melody and a backup chorus of tenors and basses calling cattle to pasture. The very last chorus, which Horgan called Handelian, resembles an oratorio finale in its choral “Halleluias.” While the distinction is far from absolute, Bacon's allusion to folk and religious genres (with clear tonal centers) reinforces an opposition between the human music of grief and celebration and an impersonal musical environment full of whirling rotors and waving grass. Although it makes unlikely bedfellows of airplane propellers and octatonic mockingbirds, A Tree on the Plains is fundamentally pastoral, not just in its setting but also in its charting of the changing relationships between the natural and the artificial and in its strained hope that a balance between them can be maintained in perpetuity. “Nature,” Bacon wrote, “will finally harmonize anything. Even the most presumptuous billboard will in time acquire some grace, when the lichen, the weeds, the trees and fields take over.”33
EXAMPLE 31. Bacon, A Tree on the Plains, Prelude, mm. 1-14
THE COMPOSER AS ECOLOGIST
In an obituary tribute to Bacon, Paul Horgan wrote: “A sort of pedal point that resonated throughout Ernst's life was his deep love for the natural world in all its great elements…. With his instinct for understanding secrets of the land, he would have made a brilliant geologist.”34 Bacon could indeed be called a geologist, or more accurately, a geographer; dozens of his pieces bear place names as their titles, and he wrote a letter to the editor describing the “honorable science” of geography: “It is orientation; it is multiplied environment; it is river courses, cities, deserts, mountain ranges, ocean currents, forests, minerals, tides, islands, continents, populations, nationalities…. It is where we live.”35 Better still, Bacon might properly be considered an ecologist, concerned with the politics of preserving native nature from outside threats. This fact was not lost on his contemporaries. Roy Harris called Bacon's writings “a penetrating analysis of the forces and factors which threaten the natural development of the musical life of our people,” and Time magazine described A Tree on the Plains as “a signpost that opera is turning from an exotic plant into a wayside flower.” Perhaps most telling is the praise bestowed on Bacon by Ansel Adams: “You are like a clear dawn wind in the midst of the foul smogs of contemporary cultural decay.” Bacon in turn called Adams “my oldest friend in the West” and memorialized to him in the elegy Remembering Ansel Adams.36
Bacon's ecological impulse shaped his attitude toward folk music, which he saw as corrupted by commerce and conserved by poverty. It shaped his stance on musical traditions more generally, as he wrote in his “Notes on Style”: “Some people have called me ‘eclectic,' which says in essence, that I honor my musical ancestry; that I do not have to break laws to be relatively independent.”37 The laws of music were for Bacon deeply linked to the laws of nature, not by a facile organicism of motivic relationships but by a scientific awareness of the intricate interrelationships between flora, fauna, and habitat.
Perhaps there is even an ecological component to Bacon's octatonicism, with its compositional economy of reuse and recycling. For that matter, one might tease out some ecological strands in Virgil Thomson's contrapuntal evocation of “Nature minding its own knitting,” and interestingly enough, Thomson's longest evocation of waving grain shares Bacon's aim: to preserve and maintain an internally complex stasis through contrapuntal or cyclic rotation. Thomson explained: “Wheat Field at Noon is a landscape piece,” a set of “free variations or developments of a theme containing all twelve tones of the chromatic scale arranged in four mutually exclusive triads” presented in such a way that all twelve-tones are continuously sounding, “a harmonic continuum that is static because it is acoustically complete.”38
Thomson did not fancy himself an environmentalist, but Bacon did. Particularly as he grew older, he cranked out dozens of letters to the editor registering his outrage on subjects ranging from mandatory retirement to the interstate highway system. He reserved his most trenchant critique for what he called “sound pollution.” In an untitled essay the composer railed:
There is no worse pollution today than noise. Its victims are not primarily land, water or sky—but humans, indeed all humans subjected to it, whether they know it or not. Apart from the terrible engines of war, the worst offenders are the gas engine and music (I mean music spewed electronically into the streets, homes, stores, offices, factories, restaurants, even lakes, resorts, camps, even some wilderness areas and mountains, deafeningly and amazingly loud in dance halls, dives, etc., inescapably in TV and Radio and vastly overused in movies). What the gas engine cannot reach, music will.39
Calling to mind camping trips disturbed by loud rock music and the “jazz bath” of modern shopping, Bacon proposed a species of conservation as the only possible solution. He wrote to the magazine True West that the cross-country trips of his youth bore little relationship to the modern interstate, with its “discordant signs, shops, and gas stations, each screaming in self-praise. The inevitable exclamation is blanketing the land, though somewhat de-decibelized in mountain areas.” Speaking of the burgeoning of water-hungry Los Angeles, Bacon observed: “The entire West beckons to population problems in the future and cannot be permitted to ‘pioneer' recklessly henceforth. In short, to save the True West, it will need protection, as we have learned to give the grizzly and the beaver.”40
The pioneering that Bacon invokes is more complex than the simple, steady march of civilization that Crèvecoeur and Jefferson envisioned for agrarian America. As Wallace Stegner has pointed out, the ideal of the family farm was so powerful that it was extended, with tragic consequences, into areas where the climate could sustain only a very different kind of farming. Putting down roots in such soil is a precarious business. The westward moving farmer is the protagonist of countless covered wagon novels, and yet, Stegner writes, “these are novels more of motion than of place, and the emigrants in them are simply farmerpioneers on their way to new farms. They have not adapted to the West in the slightest degree…. The farmer's very virtues as responsible husband, father and home builder are against him as a figure of the imagination. To the fantasizing mind he is dull, the ancestor of the clodhopper, the hayseed, and the hick.”41
These placid pastoral attributes help explain the rise of the gunfighter as America's favorite western hero in the 1930s and 1940s. But, as Stegner's own writings show, the geography of the American West also changed the farmer, and those changes are reflected in the prairie scores of Sowerby and Foss, Thomson and Bacon. Explicitly or implicitly, their pioneers
operate in an environment of crucially limited resources. While Sandburg's prairie boys might see themselves secure in nature's bounty, in fact they are hired hands, organized into the threshing crews required to operate the machinery made necessary by western agribusiness. In Thomson's and Bacon's hands, the farmer-pioneer is thwarted both by nature itself and by the machinery that seemed to hold the best promise for a pastoral future.
All these works dramatize in one way or another the problems (political and aesthetic) of transposing the pastoral idyll onto the American frontier. The heroism of their twentieth-century pioneers typically resides in their struggle against nature, not their ability to live in balance with it. They work in a world where progress has already veered toward destruction and where efforts toward conservation have a special relevance: these frontier figures are at once the agents of violence against the natural order and the first victims if the balance tips too far. On the frontier, the recovery of a precarious pastoral balance requires an impulse not just to conservation, but to restoration—to the reversal and erasure of pioneering progress. In the end, it was not just the intrusion of the frontiersman into the Garden of the World that gave an American flavor to the pastoral mode. It was the land itself, and the abiding historical paradox that America's Garden of Eden was also its Land of Canaan.
PART FOUR
Roy Harris
Provincial Cowboy, White Hope
Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of the White Steed of the Prairies…. He was the elected Xerxes of vast herds of wild horses, whose pastures in those days were only fenced by the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghenies. At their flaming head he westward trooped it like that chosen star which every evening leads on the hosts of light. The flashing cascade of his mane, the curving comet of his tail, invested him with housings more resplendent than gold and silver-beaters could have furnished him. A most imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen, western world, which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the glories of those primeval times when Adam walked majestic as a god, bluff-bowed and fearless as this mighty steed…. Nor can it be questioned from what stands on legendary record of this noble horse, that it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so clothed him with divineness; and that this divineness had that in it which, though commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain nameless terror.
—HERMAN MELVILLE, MOBY DICK
8
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How Roy Harris Became Western
LOG CABIN COMPOSER
“Born in a log cabin on Lincoln's birthday in Lincoln County, Oklahoma”—this is the inevitable and emblematic opening of any biography of Roy Harris. From the beginning of his career until the present, these phrases have encapsulated crucial aspects of the composer's life: his humble but self-sufficient beginnings, his association with the rural West, and his almost magical ability to represent anything and everything genuinely American. This was indeed the stuff that myths were made of, and in Harris's case, fact and fancy were quickly entangled in a journalistic and autobiographical web.
Even before Harris returned from his Parisian studies in 1929, he was the subject of intense critical activity. The eagerness with which his efforts were received in print allowed characterizations about his life and works to crystallize rapidly. By 1935, Aaron Copland could accurately report that “a considerable legend has already grown up around his log-cabin origins and early life as a truck driver,” and in the same year, Time magazine could include under the heading “Log Cabin Composer” a concise restatement of virtually all the components of the Harris myth.1 John Tasker Howard looked back at the impressive expectations Harris faced: “When he first appeared on the scene, in the late ‘twenties, he seemed the answer to all our prayers. Here was a genuine American, born in a log cabin in Oklahoma, like Lincoln, tall, lanky, rawboned, untouched by the artificial refinements of Europe or even the stultifying commercialism of cosmopolitan New York; a prophet from the Southwest who thought in terms of our raciest folk-tunes. Small wonder that we called him the white hope of American music.”2
All the familiar ingredients are present here: a pinch of American history, a respect for geographic generalization, a healthy dose of physical masculinity, a dash of good humor, and a significant statement of racial identity with pronounced religious overtones. It would take a special kind of man to undertake this messianic mission: together, Harris and his critics made sure he fit the bill. They were successful during the 1930s. But in the end, the critical conviction required to sustain this mythmaking enterprise faltered. Already in 1941, Copland preferred to present the Harris myth in a more questioning light: “One has been conscious of a persistent attempt to relate the Harris personality to the open prairies and the wooly West—to picture him as a kind of boy-pioneer composer.” Copland repeated almost verbatim his earlier assertion about Harris's legendary “log-cabin origins and his early life as a backwoodsman,” but he now felt compelled to add, “Actually, Harris grew up in a small town in the environs of Los Angeles.”3
Of all the individuals treated in this study, Harris was the most profoundly affected by his association with the American West. And, as Copland's evocation of an urban Los Angeles suggests, the meanings of this association changed over time. Along with the prominent composers of his generation, Harris went questing for musical Americanness, and for many years he seemed uniquely equipped to tackle the task at hand. First and foremost, Harris truly was a Westerner. No matter how the fluid boundaries of the West were construed, Harris's Oklahoman birth and Californian childhood placed him safely within its wide open spaces and gave him particularly easy access to certain wellsprings of American self-identification. During the decades after World War I, when the measure of artistic Americanness was still calculated as a function of one's distance from European models, Harris had special symbolic connections to that mainstay of American exceptionalism, the western frontier. In addition, because his father was a farmer, Harris could and did invoke agrarian ideals. Harris thus had biographical access to two of this country's most powerful national myths: the United States as a confederation founded upon self-sufficient agricultural enterprise and America as the triumphant realization of westward expansion and Manifest Destiny.
Invocations of the American West are so common in Harris's music, writings, and critical reception that even attributes not necessarily attached to his westernness took on a vaguely western glow, helping him turn potential professional liabilities into assets. Harris's isolation from East Coast musical centers became symbolic of his distance from cosmopolitan and commercial forces. His late start in formal composition and his rocky relationship with Nadia Boulanger bolstered his subsequent claims to artistic independence. Furthermore, Harris's humble origins and artfully cultivated candor (not to mention his commitment to diatonic harmonies and predominantly melodic writing) enhanced his ability to achieve that highest of all Americanist desiderata: a plausible sense of sympathy with the American people, however defined—as actual audiences or as imaginary “folk.”
In part 3, I explore how these tropes shaped Harris's earliest and most successful decades and reflect briefly on his precipitous decline. After examining the role of the West within the cycle of critical reception and self-fashioning that accompanied his rise to prominence, I turn to a number of Harris's works on western themes to show how a rhetoric of westernness influenced his decision making at every level. Though certain general associations with westernness may have influenced a very wide range of Harris's works—for example, through his theories of folklike and “autogenetic” melodic construction—much more can be gleaned from the programmatic works that deal explicitly with western expansion, such as A Farewell to Pioneers (1935) and Cimarron (1941), and especially from his manipulation of cowboy songs in works like the Folksong Symphony (1940) and American Ballads (1945). As we shall see, the contradictions of the mythic cowboy shaped Harris's life both in fact and in fantasy; and while th
e popular appeal of the cowboy spurred his rise to fame in Depression-era America, the reinterpretation of cowboy characteristics in light of Cold War politics just as surely contributed to his fall from grace.
PROVINCIAL SON
Serendipity and selective memory gave Harris the perfect pedigree for a western hero. By the time Harris had reached national prominence and had begun to think about recording some of the formative experiences of his childhood and early career, a mythology had already grown up around him that, while based on biographical truth, also demanded a certain conformity to legend. By midcentury, a loose collection of anecdotes—delightfully and repeatedly recorded in an unpublished biography of 1951 and a series of rambling oral history interviews conducted in 1962, 1966, and 1968-69—had solidified into a Harris hagiography preserved by the composer himself and by his dwindling legion of followers.4 Determining the precise percentage of fact and fiction in these accounts may no longer be possible, but in the end, that may be less important than recognizing how thoroughly the two became enmeshed: the older man's recollections of the younger man's preoccupations, goals, and ambitions show not only what wonderful raw material Harris's mythologizers had to work with, but also how thoroughly Harris himself had absorbed their clichés.