Frontier Figures

by Beth E. Levy

  EXAMPLE 37. Cimarron, mm. 1-14 (New York: Belwin Mills Music, 1941)

  EXAMPLE 38A. Cimarron, mm. 62–65

  A simulated shotgun blast (example 38a) sets off a flurry of galloping ostinato patterns, but none dominates the texture and all quickly dissolve into irregular repetition. The hymnlike melody that emerges from this texture just after figure 10 enters one phrase at a time, in the manner of a chorale prelude, while the racing gestures associated with the land run continue above and brassy fanfare fragments lend what von Glahn calls “a martial air” to the pioneers' journey. As the movement comes to rest, a woodwind chorale intones a complete statement of the hymn (example 38b); neither autogenetic nor folksy, this melody represents a melodic and programmatic culmination—in Harris's words it is “the very broad but simple and warm harmony of the march of progress.” As von Glahn puts it, “A listener can almost imagine an ‘amen' after the final chord.”33

  EXAMPLE 38B. Cimarron, mm. 135–42

  Who were the participants in this “march of progress”? Adroitly sidestepping the fact that Harris was too young to have participated in the land run himself, the program note for Cimarron nonetheless conveyed the relevant facts: “Of Scotch-Irish parentage, [Harris] spent his early childhood in the productive atmosphere of the farm in this Cimarron country listening to his parents retelling stories of the last frontier land-rush.” By placing himself and his family in the pioneering vanguard, he changed the emphasis of his engagement with western history, flipping backward in the story to focus on the triumph, not the tragedy, of the pioneer way. He dispensed with the valorization of industrialism that had condemned pioneer ideals as “impractical” in Farewell to Pioneers. Instead, he focused on the role of the frontier in the mythical process of civilization: conquest of the unknown and victory over the “uncivilized.”

  “THE WHITE HOPE OF AMERICAN MUSIC”

  In Edna Ferber's Cimarron, Yancey Cravat is adamant about the diversity of the land run, listing participants from every class and many states; an aristocratic surrey with a black coachman runs side by side with a poor, old homesteader with “a face dried and wrinkled as a nutmeg.”34 Like many Indian advocates, Yancey is rumored to be half Indian himself, with “an Indian wife somewhere, and a lot of papooses,” and though his wife and some of his in-laws are quick to declare his whiteness, his status remains dubious, especially after his son “Cim” takes an Osage bride. In his (implied but denied) racial liminality, Yancey resembles Cooper's Deerslayer, the legendary Daniel Boone, and all the other “white scouts” (including Buffalo Bill) who were racially white but sufficiently attuned to Indian ways that they could harness the wilderness and teach its secret joys and healing virtues to the overcivilized. As we have seen, Harris and his music were expected to have a similar effect on their own overcivilized surroundings. Yet no one was interested in calling Harris a “half-breed.”

  In tracing the origins, consolidation, and dissemination of the Harris myth, we have already encountered repeated references to Harris's parentage. These were not innocent remarks. On the contrary, they served to set up certain expectations about style. Whether the fact was hidden behind elaborate metaphor or revealed with alarming candor, it was terribly important that Harris was white. Rosenfeld's concern to demonstrate the Scotch-Irish lineage of cowboy song when outlining the sources of Harris's style betrays an anxiety about matters of race. Farwell, too, made sure that his readers recognized Harris's heritage when he proclaimed: “From old Anglo-Saxon stock, with Scotch and Irish ingredients, he arises not out of the mechanistic tumult of the times, but out of the broad metaphysical movement which gave birth to Emerson and Whitman.” Even Slonimsky participated in this campaign in his own way—it is hard to imagine what else he might have intended when, while writing up the pre-performance publicity for the Symphony 1933, he described Harris as if advertising livestock: “thirty-five, white, and healthy”!35 Slonimsky was known for writing tongue-in-cheek, but others were all too serious about the importance of Harris's racial background.

  In a sense, the most significant legacy of Downes's 1934 diatribe against the Symphony 1933 may have been that he transmitted John Tasker Howard's salient characterization of Harris as a “white hope” to a national audience far larger than Howard's specialized readership. It is no coincidence that the adjective is racially charged, and no coincidence that the phrase met with such widespread delight in both critical and popular provinces. Originally coined in anticipation of the white boxer who could dethrone black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, the “white hope” carried a similar mandate in musical circles. In simplest terms, the issue was jazz.

  Harris's reception cannot be dissociated from the sometimes violent debates of the 1920s and 1930s about the proper relationship between jazz and American composition. Henry Cowell treated these questions explicitly in his 1930 contribution to the New Freeman, entitled “Three Native Composers.” In describing Harris, Cowell employed some of the same images that Rosenfeld had used—more evidence that links between Harris and the West had spread very rapidly: “Roy Harris…has a personal approach bristling with originality and cowboy punch. He is a real Westerner and has both the direct vehemence and the crudity characteristic of Westerners.”36 The vocabulary is familiar; more telling is the way Cowell chose to frame his discussion. The essay begins with a long paragraph on jazz, arguing against the idea—“based on the curious bias of the Parisian's concept of America”—that using jazz elements is the best path for “sophisticated” American composers. The paragraph closes with a categorical assertion: “The Anglo-Saxon American has no more talent for writing or playing jazz than the European. Both of them are more than bungling at it.”

  Having set forth his opinions on jazz, Cowell made an abrupt critical swerve. As if suddenly recollecting the “Three Native Composers” of his title, he confessed that “misconceptions concerning jazz” were not the main focus of his article. Rather, they “serve to clarify the issue which is this: What have Anglo-Saxon Americans done in the way of original composition?” The problem, Cowell indicated, was that the public did not usually perceive Anglo-Saxons as a well-defined American group. Thus Cowell's version of Harris's westernness is much more than a recycling of Rosenfeld's terms. Harris's “pronounced Western American breeziness,” his combination of “commonplace” and new approaches to melody and form, his “gaunt angularity seeming to spring from plains and sharp mountains”—these things were now part of the catalog for a certain kind of com-poserly whiteness. Such whiteness was not available to everyone—Protestant Anglo-Americans were the favored candidates—and even among this elite group, a cultivated provincialism was necessary insurance against the pitfalls of overso-phistication and rootlessness.

  It had long been understood by music critics of many nations that a composer's proclivities could be explained by race. The reception of Dvorak's “New World” Symphony provides ample evidence that racial rhetoric was an important component of music criticism in the United States at the turn of the century. Farwell's fascination with Spengler shows that ideas about the different creative capacities of the races continued to hold their appeal through the 1920s. So critics of the 1930s who received Harris's efforts as representative of the Anglo-Saxon in music were participants in an older, larger discourse of racial-musical determinism. In Howard's seminal monograph Our American Composers (1941), for example, we find one of the clearest and most casual explanations of the musical results of racial difference: “While racially Harris seems to derive definitively from the Scotch-Irish element of his ancestry, Aaron Copland embodies the Russian-Jewish element transplanted to American soil. Thus we find that while Harris reflects the prairies and vastness of the West, Copland brings us the sophistication of the cosmopolitan cities on the seaboard.”37 Did anyone flinch at Howard's matter-of-fact binarisms? Were any eyebrows raised at his choice of the forceful conjunction “thus”? Probably not at the time, for he was only restating generally accepted truths. Perhaps more than
any other single factor, one's race was supposed to determine what could be authentically reflected in one's art—that is to say, what could be considered genuine and what had to be dismissed as artificial or contrived.

  In his book Yankee Blues, MacDonald Smith Moore examines the racial politics of American musical life between the world wars, focusing on three categories: Yankees, blacks, and Jews. Making extensive comparisons with Copland and Gershwin—two prominent Jews whose works were unmistakably influenced by African American musical traditions during the 1920s—Moore notes that Harris was a favorite choice to take up the “the torch of culture” from New England's musical patriarchs and to carry it through the midcentury: “Proponents of an Anglo-Saxon redemptive culture preferred to pass the Yankee torch into non-Jewish hands. Shunning New York, and in the spirit of Winthrop, Emerson, and Whitman, New England's advocates sought their star of hope in the West. A broad range of critics nominated Roy Harris to be American Music's ‘Great White Hope.' Though not a Yankee, he of Lincolnesque bearing hailed from the plains. Ebulliently Harris accepted the nomination.”38 Harris was not the only logical candidate. As Moore points out, certain prominent New Englanders such as Daniel Gregory Mason and Charles Ives promoted other young composers, including Cowell, Hanson, and Douglas Moore, to carry Anglo-American musical culture forward. Nevertheless, as Yankee Blues narrates, “their selections fell by the wayside as Roy Harris was chosen by acclamation in the early thirties.”39

  During this period, Harris's whiteness was an asset because it allowed him to claim as his natural (read: racial) inheritance certain compositional practices which were gaining popularity, most notably a reliance on Anglo-American folk music. Through his acknowledged westernness and strong rural ties, Harris bore a unique mantle of musical and moral authority when it came to incorporating folk music into large-scale pieces. Cowboy songs, in particular, fell within Harris's jurisdiction by virtue of their supposedly Scotch-Irish lineage and because of the persistent cowboy imagery that had infiltrated the composer's reception.

  Harris's association with the potent images of the American West gave him an edge over other potential “torchbearers.” It was indeed crucial that Harris be white, but his popularity grew in part because he also set himself so visibly apart from “Eastern” culture. In an atmosphere of American exceptionalism, a New England pedigree counted for less than a genuine western accent. A “prophet from the Southwest” had more to offer than a Yankee gentleman.40 As Howard had observed, it was to be expected that Harris's music would reflect “the prairies and vastness of the West” because of his ancestry; as Rosenfeld wrote in 1929, Harris had grown up hearing the “peasant tunes preserved by his stock.” Harris had open access to an abundant rhetoric of authenticity that was only reinforced by his western ties. All the usual strategies lay open to him: recollection of childhood experiences and recognition of blood ties, inspiration by nature and justification by race.

  Harris shared the critical establishment's underlying assumptions about race and authenticity. He was fully convinced of the connections between race and composition; he had no trouble linking creativity with awareness of one's racial heritage. In a quasi-autobiographical article for Musical Quarterly (1934), Harris spoke of the young composer's desire to create “music that will be true to his race, to his time, to himself.” The article begins with a Farwellian proclamation: “Call it romantic fervor, call it a longing for truth, call it the atavistic burgeonings from the depth of the race-soul. Always it is a lonesome hunger that gnaws within the human heart, forcing us to search for an understandable race-expression.”41 Harris did not openly proclaim himself an Anglo-American culture hero, but he was well aware of the racial component of his appeal, frequently mentioning—in program notes, articles, and interviews—both his parents' Anglo ancestry and his own musical debts to their favorite folk melodies. As we shall soon see, protestations of authenticity would become the foundation for his later insinuations that he was more entitled to dip into folk sources than his colleagues were.

  Harris couched his musings about personal artistic authenticity in extensive discussions of what it meant to be American in music. Association with the West was powerful, but it never replaced the overarching sense of national identity that Harris cultivated before, during, and after his most famous western works. Like many intellectuals grappling with the problem of identity in the United States, Harris tried to make the national character conform to a racial character, outlining its inherent traits and describing its quasi-biological origins. According to Harris, the “characteristic American” had certain typical moods and habits: “Our dignity lies in direct driving force; our deeper feelings are stark and reticent; our gaiety is ribald and our humor ironic. These are moods which young indigenous American composers are born and surrounded with, and from these moods come a unique valuation of beauty and a different feeling for rhythm, melody, and form.” In particular, Harris argued, American composers possessed a distinct and asymmetrical sense of rhythm: “This asymmetrical balancing of rhythmic phrases is in our blood; it is not in the European blood…. We do not employ unconventional rhythms as a sophistical gesture; we cannot avoid them. To cut them out of our music would be to gainsay the source of our spontaneous musical impulses.”42 By this logic, composers who lacked this typically American rhythmic accent either were trying too hard to make their music sound European or were simply deaf to the rhythms of life around them.

  Harris participated fully in the confusion of biological and environmental factors that has typically enabled Americans to discuss their national identity without abandoning models based on the older, more ethnically uniform nations of Europe. He described the mysterious process through which typically “American” traits—behavior patterns, characteristic moods, and even peculiar physical features—were slowly becoming apparent in American life: “Wonderful, young, sinewy, timorous, browbeaten, eager, gullible American society, living in a land of grandeur, dignity, and untold beauty, is slowly kneading consistent racial character from the sifted flour of experience and the sweat of racial destiny. Slowly, surely, there are emerging American types, with characteristic statures, facial expressions, and temperament.” In explaining the evolution of the “characteristic American,” Harris was careful to disengage the terms of his discussion from mere blood inheritance: “Our climate plus our social, political, and economic customs have produced this characteristic American by the same biological process that characteristic Frenchmen, Germans, and Englishmen were molded from the same Aryan race-stream.”43 In Harris's view, people (like plants) must draw nourishment from the soil and must evolve in response to the environment if they are to survive. The confluence of organicism and nationalism is in itself hardly surprising, for the two have been intertwined since the eighteenth century. What is peculiar to the American context, with its political union of so many ethnic and cultural groups, is that environmental factors are seen as actively uniting disparate groups rather than explaining already acknowledged national or racial differences.

  Harris never proposed a time frame according to which these imagined processes might mold the “characteristic American,” nor did he maintain that the American continent could somehow erase the color line. Harris was no racist. On the contrary, he was politically liberal and was sympathetic to the political and economic struggles of black Americans. Over the course of his career, he supported integrated education and spoke out against racial prejudice, particularly during his brief tenure at Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville (1950-51), where he cancelled a summer festival after a black student was denied admission. But when it came to race and music, whether as a calculated strategy or by unconscious oversight, Harris tended to drop African Americans from his discussions. He stopped short of calling his “asymmetrical” rhythms “jazzy,” and even if he had recognized a connection between his own syncopation and “jazz,” he might not have had black music in mind, as Cowell's strictly Parisian purview for jazz made clear.
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br />   Among his many folk song settings, Harris did treat a number of black spirituals with great success, occasionally in freestanding pieces but more often—as Farwell had—in collections that defused racial implications by grouping movements drawn from diverse regions or ethnic groups, such as the Folksong Symphony, the Folk Fantasy for Festivals, or the piano suite American Ballads. More telling is his film score for One Tenth of a Nation (1941). Here Harris simultaneously lamented the lack of educational facilities for blacks in America and apparently managed to avoid using much African American music in his score. For some on the American music scene, the decision was easily justified. Paul Bowles reviewed the score in his column for Modern Music, finding it “satisfactory” in both musical quality and political ideology: “I don't even reproach the composer with having chosen not to include one Negroism in his score, even if he did decide to use folk-music and had to get it in the British Isles. The film was made by Whites for Whites; it is without ethnographic overtones. And since it was only a sociological plea to the White population, its creators were esthetically free to use whatever idioms they thought most effective, provided that each element was completely subservient to the discipline essential in a propaganda film.”44 In the political arena, one ought to act on one's social obligations, but the creative artist had to write from within. According to this philosophy, Harris had little choice but to rely on Anglo music—that was how white composers effectively communicated to white audiences. Aesthetics and politics were equal, but separate.