by Beth E. Levy
If the music of Symphony 1933 displayed nothing that had to be read as western, it nevertheless contained much that could be so interpreted, especially in the first movement's two main themes (example 32). The aggressive, upward-thrusting first theme, played by unison horns, sets the symphony's predominantly brassy tone, and the blaring final cadence makes sure that listeners remember it. The movement also features the percussion prominently; timpani solos mark its opening and many subsequent structural points, and other instruments follow suit by punctuating rather than accompanying melodic lines, resulting in a coarseness that many critics understood as an American vernacular. In addition, Harris juxtaposed sections with abrupt discontinuities in textures and instrumentation, and he constructed long passages using easily audible, propulsive ostinati, a technique favored by Farwell and the Indianists—not to mention Stravinsky.
Among the specific passages ripe for a western interpretation, two examples should suffice. In one of the episodes following the first main theme, we come across an unexpected patch of metrical irregularity with a suddenly faster pulse. Nervous woodblock and marcato upper strings appear off-balance, first anticipating, then echoing, then anticipating brass interjections that will only later take shape as a melody. For reviewers who wanted or expected a western work, the mental leap from this kind of asymmetrical rhythm to Slonimsky's “dry energy of the mountain air” or Rosenfeld's reeling cowboys would not have been too hard to make. If such critics then began listening for Farwell's “gracious curvature of tree branches” and “craggy…mountain contours”—or if they were simply curious to learn how a heliotropic melody might behave—they could have found no clearer confirmation than the movement's lyrical second theme, as shown in example 32. It traverses a wide range in a sparse soundscape, soaring over an undulating brass motif and utterly indifferent to the contrapuntal fragments in the lower voices. The melody relies on the quarter-note triplets that characterize most of the movement's main themes, but it achieves a completely different mood through a casually wandering chromaticism and a contour built of arched figures variable in duration.
EXAMPLE 32. Symphony 1933, first movement, mm. 11-23, 174-94 (as it appears in Dan Stehman, “The Symphonies of Roy Harris: An Analytical Study of the Linear Materials and Related Works” [PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1973], 1062-63).
The critics may have waited until after the performance to write their reviews, but Slonimsky and others had already suggested what direction their figurative language should take. The pump had been primed, in other words, and the premiere unleashed a veritable flood of biographical allusion and botanical metaphor. At the very least, reviewers commented on the symphony's propulsive rhythms—its “rugged, driving sincerity,” its “breadth and vigor,” its “important and forceful expression.” Critic Moses Smith summed up, “The symphony speaks the American language. This music is virile. It has a destination.”28 Henry Taylor Parker of the Boston Evening Transcript—a critic whose initials and acerbity inspired the epithet “hard-to-please”—identified the symphony's “destination” as a western one and proposed geographical reasons for the symphony's appeal. In an effulgent review, whose opening sentence described Harris as a “composer of music from the West,” Parker waxed rhapsodic:
For Mr. Harris's symphony is unmistakably American—American of the Far West that nourishes itself rather than of the East that naturally and inevitably draws from Europe a part of its esthetic sustenance; less still of that nondescript Middle West lying somewhat inertly between. The new symphony is American, first, in a pervading directness, in a recurring and unaffected roughness of speech—an outspoken symphony…. In the second place, Mr. Harris's symphony is American in the nature of its rhythms, the scope of its melody…. They seem to derive, besides, from the West that bred Mr. Harris and in which he works most eagerly—from its air, its life, its impulses, even its gaits.29
Whether or not Parker knew of Rosenfeld's prior attention to Harris's cowboy gait and Farwell's framing of the western landscape as the source of Harrisian melody, this review illustrates that, at least for some, Harris's westernness had become an article of faith.
At the midpoint of his review, Parker had offered a bit of wisdom: “Those that like to define a composer by his environment will discover Western origins ad libitum.” But not everyone was interested in playing that critical game. Most notably, when Koussevitzky took the symphony to New York the week after the Boston premiere, it faced a much cooler crowd. The work was a qualified success, but critics expressed more serious doubts. The abruptness and rough edges that had seemed “virile” in Boston now left Harris open to charges that his music was crude, awkward, mechanical, or overly episodic. Olin Downes led the tide of skepticism from his post at the New York Times. He paraphrased earlier critics' observations about Harris's “earnestness and determination,” but failed to see how the work represented more than an unripe essay at symphonic development. “Much has been written in recent years about Mr. Harris,” Downes noted. “There are not lacking those who see in him a present white hope of American music.” Downes reintroduced Howard's ringing reference to Harris as a “white hope” only to disagree with it. Instead of sharing Howard's optimism, Downes labeled the symphony “fussy,” “academic,” and “immature.” Even more damning, he maintained that “the rhythms and figures of the ‘Sacre' haunt pages of the first movement.” The work was not merely unready, but also derivative, and Downes—perhaps overcome by the desire for a snappy ending—closed his review by calling Harris's symphony “an American ineptitude.”30
The discrepancy between Boston's reactions and New York's proved to be one of the most dramatic and far-reaching aspects of the symphony's critical reception. A week after the performance, Arthur Mendel's response to Downes appeared in the Times along with a detailed rebuttal. A similar controversy greeted Harris's second symphony only a few months later; Irving Kolodin, writing for The New Republic, took a position similar to Downes's and was promptly attacked by two Harris supporters.31 At the height of this journalistic showdown, according to Slonimsky's unpublished biography of Harris (another work which Harris seems to have had a hand in crafting32), the composer and some of his friends determined that they should respond “by an appeal to the Vox Populi.” They are said to have reprinted the Downes and Parker reviews side by side and distributed them to libraries, journalists, and other musicians, “so the people could decide.”33 Through the entire controversy, Harris and his symphony remained in the news; thus, his national reputation was spread and reinforced through a debate in which western-ness was one of the key terms. Readers were asked to choose sides: was Harris “an American ineptitude” or a western hero? It did not take long for the public summarily to reject the former view. In 1934, just after Koussevitzky recorded the Symphony 1933 in Carnegie Hall for Columbia Records, Harris signed his first major publishing contract with G. Schirmer. In 1935, RCA Victor commissioned and recorded his concert overture, When Johnny Comes Marching Home, and Harris began organizational work for the Composers' Forum-Laboratory of the Works Progress Administration. During the mid-1930s, Harris raked in commissions as fast as he could fill them—from the Boston Symphony (via Koussevitzky), the League of Composers, Columbia Records, RCA Victor Records, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, and the Columbia Broadcasting System.34 By 1936, he had garnered enough popular support to win first place among American composers in a nationwide poll conducted by CBS, and in 1937, he was ranked highest among American composers in a Scribner's Record Poll.35 Farwell's vision of Harris as the protagonist of the “time-spirit” appeared to be coming true. Harris had arrived at the forefront of American musical life, and the western iconography that had accompanied him since 1929 had helped prepare the way at every stage of his rapid advance.
9
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Manifest Destiny
AMERICAN AUTOGENESIS AND THE THIRD SYMPHONY
Marking the apex of Harris's career was his Third Symphony. Though man
y listeners single out the Fifth or the Seventh as his finest symphonic achievement, it is the Third and only the Third that remains in the standard repertory. At the time of its first performances, it seemed to represent the fulfillment of all the quasi-messianic hopes that had been vested in the composer. Harris had at last achieved his manifest destiny, uniting his vaunted “personality” with technical innovation in the prestigious genre of symphonic writing. Critics have praised the symphony for its “American flavor” or its organic unfolding, but few have recognized that these two features were intimately linked in Harris's mind through the theory of melodic “autogenesis.”
Harris's friends (Farwell included) waxed equally rhapsodic whether describing the natural beauties of his harmonic language, his intuitive mastery of counterpoint, or his scientific principles of orchestration. But it was Harris's handling of melody that most consistently drew wider critical attention. Perhaps recalling Rosenfeld's praise for Harris's “lithe” cowboy gait or Farwell's discovery of corollaries for Harrisian melody in the western landscape, Walter Piston remarked in 1934: “The continual change in length of the rhythmic units making up a melodic line imparts a sense of wandering and seeking which may account in part for the attempts to describe Harris' music in terms of the great open spaces of the West, the American pioneer spirit, and even the distant outline of a mountain range.”1 Copland followed suit: “His melodic gift is his most striking characteristic. His music comes closest to a distinctively American melos of anything yet done—in the more ambitious forms. Celtic folksongs and Protestant hymns are its basis, but they have been completely reworked, lengthened, malleated.”2 Together, Piston and Copland allude to the two most important elements of Harris's melodies: the continuous evolution of material and the presence of folklike qualities.
When Harris himself isolated and described each of these aspects of his work, he was responding to the contradictory demands posed by modernism's romantic roots. To cash in on the rhetoric of authenticity that had already marked his reception so prominently, Harris aligned himself with the natural; to maintain this reputation in an age obsessed with technological innovation, he aligned himself with the rational or scientific. The quandaries posed by this dilemma left their traces throughout writings by and about the composer. Take, for example, Slonimsky's account of Harris's melodic habits: “Harris has always emphasized that he is a Man of Nature. His melodic inspiration comes to him from communion with nature, during his solitary walks…. In this he is entirely a romantic, with this difference, that he translates his immediate moods into a rational and self-consistent language of rhythms and modes” (CC, 66).
Harris's insistence on the natural or intuitive inspiration behind procedures that might otherwise have seemed overly cerebral was at its most forceful in his descriptions of “autogenetic” melody. We are indebted to Harris's student Sidney Thurber Cox for the clearest explication of Harris's “autogenetic principle,” in a 1948 master's thesis that includes examples provided by Harris himself.3 Among the features Cox cataloged are variously proportioned melodic arch figures, hierarchies in the placement of melodic climaxes, and the manipulation of interval content to suggest gradual expansion or contraction.4 All of these components work together to create a type of melodic development through variation that should, as Cox observed, “expand and extend the possibilities inherent in the original germ” in such a way that “the process will not strike the auditor as being too facile, or too reminiscent of traditional practice.” Distance from tradition was not the only—perhaps not even the primary—target for Harris's autogenetic theorizing. Lest there be any confusion, Cox continued: “This is in direct contrast to the method of Stravinsky and his followers, who prefer to truncate and foreshorten melodic phrases rather than to expand them. They reiterate and vary, and piece together the mosaic bits so formed, and achieve a sort of development by sheer exploitation of the material, but it would seem that any process of diminution such as this could not be so aesthetically satisfying as one which expands from a germ, constantly generating new life from the old.”5
We find ourselves on a familiar battleground as Cox deploys the “mosaic” metaphor—a cousin of the “tailor-made” aesthetic—to denigrate Stravinskian composition as the “sheer exploitation” of innocent material. Because Harris's own ideas about melody were intimately connected to ideas about form, his theory of autogenetic melody could participate in the fight against the allegedly formalist neoclassicism of the Boulangerie and its favorite Russian icon. With the Third Symphony, Harris attempted to counter Franco-Russian neoclassicism by crafting a single-movement symphony, in a flexible form, with an explicit emphasis on the gradual unfolding of materials. By almost all contemporary evidence, this attempt was successful.
Completed in 1938 but substantially revised in 1939, the symphony was given ten times by the Boston Symphony Orchestra during the 1939-40 season. In 1941-42, American orchestras programmed it on more than thirty occasions.6It was the first large-scale American work conducted by Arturo Toscanini, and it won subsequent praise from Thomson, Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Elliott Carter, and Colin McPhee, among others.7 Olin Downes was famously late to the New York premiere, but even he registered his approval, noting that the symphony displayed “a greater unity of thought and style than any other work of Mr. Harris that we have heard.” William Schuman, unsatisfied with the enthusiasm that New York's critical establishment had mustered for his friend and teacher, made his own report to the New York Times to catalog the work's virtues: “Its melodic material reveals once again Harris's remarkable gift,” he began. “The contrapuntal writing is explicit, the orchestration is original and colorful. The harmonic texture is decidedly on the consonant side, although the combinations are largely polytonal. These materials are successfully wrought into a form, autogenetic in character, wherein each idea is brought to its logical conclusion.”8
Although Slonimsky later called Harris's Third “the least ‘autogenetic'” of the composer's symphonies (CC, 134), autogenesis was a watchword at the time the revised symphony had its premiere. Indeed, Harris seems to be representing its organic processes from the very opening of the score (example 33), where the leisurely low strings intone a series of unpredictable but interrelated phrases. As Copland put it, “Harris—at least in the opening and pastoral sections of this symphony—builds the music out of a seemingly endless succession of spun-out melodies, which, if not remarkable in themselves, together convey a remarkable impression of inexhaustible profusion of melodic invention.”9
In addition, the work as a whole was meant to convey both self-sufficiency and organic growth in its formal structure, which Harris split into five sections:
SECTION I: Tragic—low string sonorities
SECTION II: Lyric—strings, horns, woodwinds
SECTION III: Pastoral—woodwinds with a polytonal string background
SECTION IV: Fugue—dramatic
SECTION V: Dramatic—tragic
The central pastoral section, replete with triadic woodwind utterances, conjures up a static expanse; the climactic and boisterous fugue quickly succumbs to its own enthusiasm, with brass and percussion evolving or devolving from counterpoint to propulsive exuberance.
EXAMPLE 33. Roy Harris, Symphony No. 3, mm. 1-38 (New York: G. Schirmer, 1940)
As was to be expected, pastoral references and brassy fanfares carried American connotations for the “Log Cabin Composer,” as Elliott Carter observed: “The emphasis is prevailingly on qualities of American pioneer life, physical strength, unflinching courage, strong conviction and the grand, lonely bleakness of certain stretches of the natural scene.”10 The program notes made it generally known that there was “an air of the West” in Harris's music and stated that the symphony showed “our persisting racial self-consciousness and root-seeking.”11 Other critics were more geographically specific, referring to “the bleak and barren expanses of Western Kansas” or “the endless rolling plains of the pioneer west and its vast wilderness
.”12
Interestingly, however, when called upon to recount his own narrative of this, his most famous work, Harris chose to emphasize the west of “western music” rather than the trans-Mississippi West. Stretching his World War II chronology a bit in retrospect, he recalled that “just about that time”:
Hitler was taking over one country after another, my students began to be drafted, and we were at war. I wrote the Third Symphony because I didn't know what was going to happen. I thought maybe this would be the last one. And I remember I wrote it as a kind of survey of the evolution of western music. Instead of writing about it, you know, I wrote the actual music, starting with monody and organum, and going on into fauxbourdon harmony, gradually into polytonal counterpoint, and then into fugue. The whole thing was a kind of survey…. that's the way it was conceived, but I also wanted to write a work which had a large Gothic arch, which began at the beginning and never did stop until the end. That was what Koussevitzky got so excited about.13
Confronted with Harris's musico-historical exegesis and the composer's lingering western connotations, British critic Wilfrid Mellers managed a remarkable fusion of the two:
It resembles Bruckner if one could imagine a Bruckner with no past…with nothing, indeed, but the American wilderness. Like a Bruckner symphony, it starts with the emergence of life from the void…. The sense of growth and endeavor in the length of the melody, powerfully suggest man alone in the prairies: the music is “religious” in that the continuously evolving monody sounds like a rudimentary, open-air plainchant, a spontaneous, God-given creativity; while it is modern, and perhaps specifically American, in the speech-inflected plasticity of its phrasing and in its harmonic fluidity.