Frontier Figures

by Beth E. Levy

  With the 1940 issue of Modern Music still readily available, the Folksong Symphony needed no elaborate explanation. Yet, as the years went by, Harris was not content to let the music stand on its own; he wrote a substantial program note for the piece when it was recorded almost two decades later.17 Perhaps feeling it necessary in retrospect to justify the Folksong Symphony's accessibility and appeal to the amateur, Harris reiterated his strong folk ties: his association with prominent folk musicians of the 1930s and 1940s, his scrupulous attention to the ethics of using folk materials, and above all the influential presence of folk song in his family:

  In those days [the late 1930s] in New York, famous folk singers used to gather in our house, amongst them Alan Lomax, Burl Ives, “Lead Belly,” the singers of The Golden Gate Quartet…. Questions often arose about folk music—what is it—who makes it—who owns it—what can one do with it—how can it be best used. We never grew weary of discussing and illustrating our diverse points of view…. As a composer, I felt that folk songs were like The Good Earth, to be cultivated by musicians according to their tastes and skills. Most of us agreed that folk songs were all things to all people, an inexhaustible source out of which music of many conflicting styles could be fashioned, from cheap assembly-line commercial routine to the latest specimens of transient sophistication.

  I was brought up with simple folk attitudes by my pioneer parents. Folk music was as natural to our way of life as corn bread and sweet milk. My mother played the guitar and we hummed along with her after supper on the front porch or in the kitchen. We whistled folk songs as we worked on the farm. When I began to study music I decided that composers were folk singers who had learned to write down the songs that took their fancy; and that therefore folk songs could be recast to suit a composer's purpose, and that they could be legitimately used to generate symphonic forms.18

  Harris here identified the composer as a folk singer while at the same time publicly accepting Engel's hint that what was really wanted from him was a “symphonic form.” Moreover, he continued to assert that the legitimate right to folk song was based on a composer's affinities rather than technical expertise or region of origin. This gave him the geographic breadth necessary to encompass the symphony's diverse choral movements: “The Girl I Left Behind Me” (based on a Civil War song), “Western Cowboy” (based on two cowboy songs), “Mountaineer Love Song” (based on the Appalachian tune “He's Gone Away”), “Negro Fantasy” (based on the spirituals “Little Boy Named David” and “De Trumpet Sounds It in My Soul”), and the “Welcome Party” (based on Harris's old favorite, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”).19

  Of the three regionally or ethnically specific movements—the “Western Cowboy,” the “Mountaineer Love Song,” and the “Negro Rhapsody”—the “Western Cowboy” gets top billing. It is the longest and in many ways the simplest of the seven movements. Harris chose three cowboy songs for elaboration: “The Lone Prairie,” “Streets of Laredo” (or “The Cowboy's Lament”), and “The Old Chisholm Trail.” The first two songs are used as the main melodic basis for a clearly defined ABA' form, where A and B are extended strophic settings and A' is abbreviated to only a few bars. From “The Old Chisholm Trail,” Harris extracted the opening sequence of pitches (A-G, A-E-D) and used them as a punctuating device.

  As a whole, the movement is consistent with Harris's claim that folk song was his natural inheritance and with his characterization of the composer as a folk singer happily in possession of symphonic training. For this reason, it is important—however obvious—that Harris's work is sung and not merely played. By requiring the actual singing of the song, he guards against potentially “formulaic” manipulation, and by retaining the melodic intervals and phrase structures of the original tunes, Harris seems to invite the audience to sing along. Any listener who arrives unfamiliar with the melodies will surely know them by the end.

  Harris's chief contributions lie in the realms of orchestration and harmonic inflection. The movement's opening shows two of his favorite techniques (example 39). The melody is presented in straightforward dialogue between sopranos and altos over a gentle harmonic framework of root position and second-inversion triads in A major. The sopranos' second entrance contains the first melodic alteration: C replaces C in a turn toward the minor mode, which recasts the harmony but barely disturbs the tune. The following phrase, however, is presented in an entirely new key (F major), almost as if the altos have suddenly lost track of the original tonic, although the sense of aural disjunction quickly vanishes. Such modest adjustments, which occur throughout the movement as Harris explores varied ways of inflecting the tune, actually enhance the tune's apparent autonomy rather than disrupting it. They encourage the audience to listen for melodic phrasing and contour instead of relying on harmony to provide a sense of direction. Indeed, the regularity of the melodic structure—completely at odds with Harris's autogenetic theorizing—forms one of the movement's most striking features.

  EXAMPLE 39. Folksong Symphony, “Western Cowboy,” mm. 8-19 (New York: G. Schirmer, 1940)

  The only fragmentation of the tune occurs after more than four minutes of unbroken folk song; moreover, this instance is clearly motivated by the text. After the men's voices trail off—“Oh bury me not”—leaving a six-beat gap in the tune, the sopranos enter both to complete the melodic phrase and to provide a textual explanation—“and his voice died there.” The men introduce a single phrase of material unrelated to the tune; their monotone F is answered by a reprise, first in the orchestra and then in the chorus, of the now-familiar melody. Instead of confusing (or amusing) the listener, Harris's alterations reinforce the significance and stability of the folk material.

  Harris's concern for a different kind of continuity is apparent in his transition to the second part of the movement's ternary form (example 40). Underneath the chorus's last verse of “Oh Bury Me Not,” Harris introduces the “Laredo” tune into the orchestral texture, allowing the new section to emerge “naturally,” as if the tune that takes over the foreground had actually been present all along. During the eighteen-measure instrumental introduction to the B section, more complicated, loosely contrapuntal writing holds sway, but the choral entrance brings a return to simpler textures. Though this folk melody is eventually used in canon, it undergoes less harmonic recasting than “Oh Bury Me Not,” and it remains both audible and singable through its first four verses, after which modifications in verse five help ease the return to A'.

  In general, Harris's treatment of each tune signals his reverence for the folk product and his unwillingness to trifle with its outline. Rather than distancing himself from accessible melodies or sentimental lyrics, he embraced them wholeheartedly and he seemed to expect that audiences would do the same. The fact that the texts of both songs focus on dying cowboys only deepens the suffusion of nostalgia. The slow tempo and piquant harmonies of the outer sections of the movement ably convey his wistful idealization of life and death on the range; the sprightly gait of the “Streets of Laredo” suddenly slows to a funeral procession as the young cowboy's recollections of past exploits give way to the details of his last rites. The cowboys of the Folksong Symphony, then, correspond less to the emerging aggressive western hero than to the sentimental singing cowboys impersonated by Gene Autry and Roy Rogers.

  EXAMPLE 40. “Western Cowboy,” mm. 117-27

  According to his program note, Harris chose the tunes for his “Western Cowboy” because they displayed “the lonesomeness, hilarity, and tragedy which the early Western cowboys lived with every day.”20 But Harris was not primarily concerned with the historical realities of day-to-day life on the cattle trail. Having bid a fond but firm farewell to the pioneers in 1935, Harris might have been ready to dispense with the elegy, but he clung to his nostalgic attitudes about the past and especially about the West. In his autobiographical fiction about the “Cowboy's Reunion,” it was “nostalgia as lonesome as the prairies” that had led him back to the fair grounds and to wise
old Idaho Bill.

  In a literal sense, Harris's compositional output and his actual biography show deep traces of a pervasive and recurring nostalgia. His sojourns to Europe and the eastern United States were punctuated by returns to Los Angeles and Utah; his wandering from one teaching position to another finally ended in 1961 as he settled in California, not far from the farms of his childhood. In the oral history interviews of the 1960s, Harris enjoyed looking backward at the forces that had impelled his westward homecoming. Upon leaving Pittsburgh in the late 1950s, Harris recalled that he “felt a tremendous yen to get out further west”: “I needed to go where I could see the sky again in a great big bowl. I needed to go where I could see a moon come up that wasn't always red. I needed to see some harvests…. It simply is that primarily, I guess, I am a farmer boy. At least, I am a Western boy. This is something that I can't escape…. [While in France] I longed to see those Western plains, deserts, and all those things…. So, it's very difficult for me to stay away very long” (OH, 529-30). For Harris, the West and the past represented the goals of two kinds of homecoming, one literal and one figurative. In the Folksong Symphony, the cowboy presented Harris with a figure that united the irretrievable past and the ever-receding West in a single nostalgic icon. His longing for the past was, of course, doomed to remain unfulfilled, but Harris continued searching for the West in which he was supposed to have been born.

  AFTER THE FOLKSONG SYMPHONY

  The reception of the Folksong Symphony gave Harris conflicting directions about how best to continue pursuing musical counterparts for his mythic westernness. The symphony's early performances (1940-43) received a motley assortment of reviews. In the minds of many critics and composers the work represented a tragic abdication of Harris's heroic role in American music. Rosenfeld, Cowell, Mendel, and Slonimsky remained (perhaps tactfully) silent. Those who did comment usually felt obliged to comment on the work's misleading title; many also expressed reservations about Harris's treatment of folk tunes. Olin Downes, for one, praised Harris's intention to link the high school chorus and the professional symphony orchestra, but he found the symphony unsatisfactory, dismissing its music as “an example of what should not rather than what should, can, and will be done by native educated composers.” He thought Harris had failed to reconcile the folk idiom with his own symphonic language.21 Copland lodged a related complaint, arguing that the symphony lacked variety because of Harris's overbearing approach: It “shows no real feeling for the individuality of the songs given symphonic investiture. Each of the sharply contrasted tunes is approached from the same angle and given a typical Harris workout.”22

  Harris still had some friends in the high places of American music criticism. Arthur Cohn, writing for Modern Music, called this work “music for the masses, from the masses,” offering a view of Harris's adoption of folk materials that was diametrically opposed to Copland's: “The folk melodies are not patchy, spasmodic fragments developed à la textbook, but full and complete, spun out healthily and organically.”23 Herbert Elwell, a former member of the Boulangerie, registered another early vote of confidence. After a series of disclaimers about the title of the piece and about the length and voicing of specific passages, he wrote:

  There are a half-dozen first rate American folksongs in the work, from Johnny Comes Marching Home to The Gal I Left Behind Me. To assimilate this material, words and all, and to give it out as sounding fresh and momentous as it does in this music, is to meet a supreme artistic challenge comparable to the decorative problem of the chorale prelude…. It almost involves nourishing the exalted conviction, le peuple, c'est moi. Yet I find nothing presumptuous about such an attitude in Harris, because his expression of it shows too deep a reverence for emotional realities to bear any symptoms of megalomania.24

  By evoking the chorale prelude, Elwell also alludes to J. S. Bach—an homage that had considerable force for Boulanger's students and a gesture that Harris would certainly have appreciated.25 Furthermore, in Elwell's view, Harris's willingness to speak for the people and his “reverence” for their “emotional realities” could atone for a multitude of potential sins, including occasionally exaggerated sentiment or temporary breaches of symphonic decorum.

  Quite apart from critical squabbles about the uses and abuses of folk song, the symphony was a stunning popular success, inspiring enormous enthusiasm and a media field day involving substantial articles in both Newsweek (6 May 1940) and Time (6 January 1941).26 Harris would later recollect with delight the spontaneous outpourings of support from audiences in New York City, Boston, Detroit, Cincinnati, and especially Cleveland, where the work had its first complete (seven-movement) hearing at a performance for the Music Teachers' National Association (OH, 415-16, 404-5). “That Saturday night they just filled Severance Hall,” he remembered. “There wasn't even standing room. And they shouted, and the drummer got so excited that he beat on the big bass drum. We went to a place to have beer afterwards, a big place, and when we came in the people who were there started singing folk songs to us from the symphony. It was wonderful. That's when Time magazine said that my music was like the nation standing up and shouting hello” (OH, 389-90).27 The Folksong Symphony allowed Americans to stage their national unity. Its song selections were multiethnic and multiregional; it could and did accommodate massive performing forces, including citywide conglomerate high school choirs. Moreover, with special free performances under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Music Project and eventually radio broadcasts to U.S. troops overseas, the symphony reached a wide American audience in a patriotic mood. Throughout the early 1940s, Harris reworked material from the Folksong Symphony in other media, most notably in his collaborations with Hanya Holm's ballet company during his residence at Colorado College.28

  Harris's next treatment of cowboy song, however, abandoned the already old-fashioned, nostalgic cowboy crooner in favor of a more aggressive western hero. “Streets of Laredo” is the opening selection in an inviting group of piano pieces entitled American Ballads (1945). The work may have had its origins in musical interludes for a series of broadcasts on a Denver radio station.29 The resulting suite is similar to the Folksong Symphony in that a movement on a western theme takes pride of place in an otherwise geographically diverse collection. Moreover, at least in this movement, Harris remains faithfully committed to presenting folk material completely and recognizably. “Streets of Laredo” takes as its basis one of the same tunes that constituted the “Western Cowboy” of the Folksong Symphony, but the piano miniature reverses a number of the symphonic movement's traits (example 41). Harris dropped the mournful tune “Oh Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie” and elaborated only the more energetic “Laredo” tune. The pace is upbeat—the headlong introduction begins at dotted-half note = 72 before slowing to dotted-half note = 66. The spiky chordal homophony of the opening features stark sonorities of stacked fourths (upbeats to bars 1 and 4) and the grit of major-seventh chords on prominent downbeats (mm. 1, 3, 4, and 6). After the tune enters in bar 13, a dotted rhythm borrowed from the first measure of the melody gently propels it along. The piece shares the ternary structure of the symphony movement, but the jaunty outer sections more than balance a quasi-funereal middle section whose tempo and thumping bass line illustrate the unsung phrase “Beat the drum slowly” from the original song text. Jocular ribaldry and exaggerated pathos have replaced nostalgic sentiment as the cowboy's primary colors.

  OF MEN AND MUSTANGS

  Harris did not outgrow his cowboy inclinations. On the contrary, even when other American composers retreated from descriptive content into greater and greater abstraction, Harris kept up his assertive Americanism and his western ties. As late as the 1950s, Harris and his wife, Johana, produced a remarkable cowboy episode for the television station WQED in Pittsburgh, sponsored by the Pennsylvania College for Women, where Harris was employed (1952-56). In an audiotape of this fifteen-minute broadcast, the second in a series entitled “Sing a Song of Folk,” the
Harris couple conjure up a Wild West show of their own. Johana provides wonderful piano improvisations on cowboy songs during the en-tire program; she sings verses of “Chisholm Trail” interspersed within a narrative of Harris's own invention, a revisiting of the Cowboys' Reunion that he had described in 1940 in “Folksong—American Big Business.” He reencounters the fictional cowpokes Idaho Bill and Shorty Kelsey, this time in a scenario with far stronger autobiographical implications. Again, Harris's retelling brooks no paraphrase:

  EXAMPLE 41. American Ballads, “Streets of Laredo,” mm. 1-10, 33-41 (New York: Carl Fischer, 1947)

  I remember I was on my way to go back East, and a fellow came up to see me, I was standing there, and he says: “Are you the Harris boy?” and I said, “Yes.” He said, “I hear you're going East to go to college,” and I said, “Yeah, that's right.” And he says, “Well, uh, Idaho Bill wants to talk to you.” And so I went over, and here was old Idaho Bill. He'd been a friend of Buffalo Bill. And Idaho was down there—I might tell you he raises horses for Uncle Sam. He's got an enormous ranch up there in Idaho. And he shipped down a whole trainload of mustangs, real mustangs. If you've never seen a real wild mustang that's been born and raised on the range and never been in a barn or had a saddle on his back or a bit in his mouth, you ain't seen nothing I can tell you that. He had a whole trainload of 'em.