Frontier Figures

by Beth E. Levy

  8. Sara Eddy, “‘Wheat and Potatoes': Reconstructing Whiteness in O. E. R0lvaag's Immigrant Theory,” MELUS 26, no. 1 (spring 2001): 129-49; Eric Haugtvedt, “Abandoned in America: Identity Dissonance and Ethnic Preservation in Giants in the Earth,” MELUS 33, no. 3 (fall 2008): 147-68.

  9. Some of his impressions of these trips are recorded in diary form. Ernst Bacon Collection, Library of Congress, Box 36, Folder 23 (hereafter cited as EBC, 36/23): “Notebooks, 1912 June 27.”

  10. For details, see Leta E. Miller and Catherine Parsons Smith, “Playing with Politics: Crisis in the San Francisco Federal Music Project,” California History 86, no. 2 (2009): 26-47, 68-71.

  11. See, among others, Paul Griffiths, “Tribute to a Neglected Composer,” New York Times, 17 September 1998.

  12. Bacon's tribute reconciles Sandburg's love for nature with his evocations of industry by noting that he “sang the praise of smoke and steel (that was some time ago).” Bacon, “A Tribute in Reverse” (typescript), EBC, 40/33.

  13. Horgan to Bacon, 1934?, EBC, 45/61.

  14. Bacon, “Native Soil” (typescript), in the unpublished collection “The Honor of Music,” EBC, 32/24. A shorter and more carefully edited version of this material appears under the same title in the Sonneck Society Bulletin 14, no. 1 (spring 1988): 9-10.

  15. Bacon, notes for a “Talk on Regional Music,” EBC, 40/19.

  16. Horgan to Bacon, 1 May 1941, 12 August 1941, EBC, 45/61.

  17. Bacon, “Has the Native Opera a Future?” Musical Courier, 22 February 1944.

  18. Bacon, “Notebooks, misc., n.d. EBC, 39/1.

  19. Bacon, “Has the Native Opera a Future?”

  20. Wallace Stegner, “Living Dry,” in Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 61.

  21. Prologue to A Tree on the Plains as it appears in the program notes for City Summer Opera's world premiere (1991) of the 1963 revision of the opera, City College, San Francisco.

  22. Horgan to Bacon, 1 July 1958, EBC, 45/61.

  23. Bacon, “Comments and Problems,” The Argonaut, 9 November 1934. Ernst Bacon Papers, Music Library, University of California, Berkeley.

  24. Bacon, preface to From These States (Gathered Along Unpaved Roads) (New York: Associated Music Publisher, 1951); Bacon also collected eight folk song arrangements for voice and piano under the title Along Unpaved Roads: Songs of a Lonesome People (Los Angeles: Delkas Music Publishing Company, 1944).

  25. In another typescript essay, he noted: “A million Sequoia seeds scattered over Death Valley will not do what one acorn will, properly nourished in the Sierra ramparts. What is needed is a true regionalism, of time and place, even a little insularity.” Ernst Bacon, “How a Major Career…,” EBC, 33/2.

  26. Bacon, “Folk Song” (typescript), EBC, 32/14.

  27. Ibid.

  28. While some of the opera's association between jazz and sex must be attributed to Horgan, Bacon later endorsed and exaggerated the association, in an undated essay called “Jazz and the Like”: “Jazz is youth, impatience, irresponsibility, irrepressibility, sex, often pornography, impertinence, and a compulsive return to barbarity…. It is the supreme equalizer, giving us a taste at once of the virtue and the vice of commonality.” EBC, 34/10.

  29. Bacon, “The Singer,” in Words on Music (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1960), 41.

  30. Like many pianist-composers before him, most notably Liszt and Ravel, Bacon's scalar experiments were often linked to generating chords. The notes of any octatonic scale may be conceptualized as the combination of two diminished seventh chords, for example, or otherwise distributed into a combination of major and minor triads linked by a root progression of minor thirds. For details, see Arthur Berger, “Problems of Pitch Organization in Stravinsky,” Perspectives of New Music 2 (fall-winter 1963-64): 11-42; and chapter 2 of Pieter van den Toorn, The Music of Igor Stravinsky (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 31-72.

  31. Bacon's “Our Musical Idiom,” is discussed in Severine Neff, “An American Precursor of Non-tonal Theory: Ernst Bacon (1898-1990),” Current Musicology 48 (1991): 5-26.

  32. Bacon also provides octatonic music for the neighbors' frenzied fight, for Buddy's description of running water in town, and for parts of Mom's rebuke.

  33. Bacon, “Teaching and Learning” (aphorisms), EBC, 30/19.

  34. Horgan, “Ernst Bacon: A Contemporary Tribute,” in the typescript catalog Ernst Bacon (Orinda, CA): January 1974.

  35. Bacon, “An Honorable Science,” April 1988, EBC, 32/26.

  36. Harris and Adams as quoted in the typescript catalog Ernst Bacon (Orinda, CA): January 1974. The Adams quotation is taken from a letter dated 24 May 1963, EBC, 43/2. Bacon acknowledged his long friendship with Adams in the typescript “On Ansel Adams,” 28 April 1989, EBC, 39/9.

  37. Bacon, “Notes on Style,” from Works to 1969, reprinted in program notes for the City Summer Opera.

  38. Commissioned by the Louisville Orchestra and performed by the New York Philharmonic in 1949, Wheat Field at Noon is part of Thomson's Three Pictures for Orchestra.

  39. Bacon, untitled, handwritten essay, n.d. A related typescript, “Too Much Music,” states that the “queen of the arts” has become “a ubiquitous, strident slattern, a stench to the ear, a major pollution of the atmosphere. That it is sweet rather than sour makes it no better. Would you swim in a lake of Coca-Cola?” Though this typescript is also undated, it appears to be the near-final draft of “How Much Music,” April 1988. EBC, 40/28, 33/5.

  40. Bacon to the magazine True West, 7 April 1988; EBC, 40/34. See also “The New Hideousness,” in which Bacon states: “It is all in the spirit of pioneering, [crossed out: (call it progress if you like)], a tradition too glorious to reveal its historical underside.”

  41. Stegner, “Variations on a Theme by Crévecoeur,” in Where the Bluebird Sings, 105-6.

  8. HOW ROY HARRIS BECAME WESTERN

  1. Copland, “The American Composer Gets a Break,” American Mercury 34 (April 1935): 490; “Log Cabin Composer,” Time, 11 November 1935, 36-37. I have explored this myth in “‘The White Hope of American Music'; or, How Roy Harris Became Western,” American Music 19, no. 1 (1999): 131-67.

  2. John Tasker Howard, Our Contemporary Composers (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1941), 133. Many of these ingredients were already present in Howard's earlier book, Our American Music (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1931), 572: “In some respects Roy Harris is the white hope of the nationalists, for this raw-boned Oklahoman has the Southwest in his blood. And he puts it in his music.”

  3. Copland, “Roy Harris,” in Our New Music (New York: McGraw Hill, 1941), 164; reprinted with a postscript in The New Music, 1900-1960 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1968).

  4. Nicolas Slonimsky, “Roy Harris: Cimarron Composer,” unpublished manuscript (1951), Music Library, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles (hereafter cited as CC); “Roy Harris, Composer of American Music,” Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles, typescript (1983) in the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter cited as OH).

  5. Barbara A. Zuck, A History of Musical Americanism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1980), 222.

  6. Dan Stehman, Roy Harris: An American Musical Pioneer (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984), 13; EDC, 254-85.

  7. For a concise treatment of this aesthetic reorientation, see Alan Howard Levy, Musical Nationalism: American Composers' Search for Identity (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983).

  8. Harris, “Perspective at Forty,” Magazine of Art 32, no. 11 (1939): 639, 667.

  9. Excerpts from Slonimsky's manuscript are published in “Roy Harris: The Story of an Oklahoma Composer Who Was Born in a Log Cabin on Lincoln's Birthday,” in Crawford, Lott, and Oja, eds., Celebration of American Music, 311. See also Slonimsky, “Roy Harris,” Musical Quarterly 33 (1947): 17-37.

  10. See Robert Evett, “The
Harmonic Idiom of Roy Harris,” Modern Music 23 (January-February 1946): 100-107.

  11. Harris, “Sources of a Musical Culture,” New York Times, 1 January 1939, part ix, 7-8.

  12. Copland, “America's Young Men of Promise,” Modern Music 3 (March-April 1926): 13-20.

  13. Ibid., 17.

  14. Paul Rosenfeld, An Hour with American Music (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1929), 107-25 (hereafter cited as PR).

  15. PR, 118-19. The work in question is the Concerto for String Quartet, Piano, and Clarinet (1927), the first large-scale work Harris completed in Paris.

  16. Farwell, “Roy Harris,” Music Quarterly 18 (1932): 18.

  17. Ibid., 20-21.

  18. Ibid., 24.

  19. Ibid., 31-32.

  20. Ibid., 25.

  21. Ibid., 19.

  22. This version is from OH, 371-72. Other incarnations include Stehman, American Musical Pioneer, 52; CC, 38-39; and OH, 222-23. Harris also related this anecdote (complete with faux-Russian accent) in the first part of a lecture series entitled “Roy Harris Speaks on Contemporary Music” and in a video interview from the 1970s held at the Roy Harris Collection, California State University, Los Angeles (hereafter cited as RHC).

  23. Dan Stehman, “The Symphonies of Roy Harris: An Analytical Study of the Linear Materials and of Related Works” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1973), 81, footnote 4.

  24. Slonimsky, “From the West Composer New to Bostonians. Background for Roy Harris, About to Be Heard at Symphony Hall,” Boston Evening Transcript, 24 January 1934, pt. 1: 7, col. 1.

  25. Ibid., col. 2. Punctuation as in the original.

  26. Stehman, “Symphonies of Roy Harris,” 95. Stehman gives the following probable distribution of the extensive borrowed material in the first movement of the Symphony 1933: mm. 1-10, from American Portrait, “Speed”; mm. 11-57 and mm. 123-33 from a String Quartet (first movement); mm. 58-113, mm. 174-279, and mm. 300-378 from a lost orchestral Toccata.

  27. Harris, “Symphony: 1933,” Boston Symphony Orchestra Programme, ed. John B. Burk, 26-27 January 1934; cited in Stehman, “Symphonies of Roy Harris,” 82.

  28. Moses Smith, “Stravinsky's Ballet Feature of Program at Symphony,” Boston Evening American, 27 January 1934; and George S. McManus, “Music,” Boston Herald, 27 January 1934, 4; cited in Dan Stehman, Roy Harris: A Bio-bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1991), 377-78.

  29. H[enry] T[aylor] P[arker], “Manifold, Abundant, Individual,” Boston Evening Transcript, 27 January 1934, pt. iii: 4.

  30. Olin Downes, “Harris Symphony Has Premiere Here,” New York Times, 3 February 1934, 9; Theodore Chanler was somewhat kinder in “New York, 1934,” Modern Music 11 (March-April 1934): 142-47, but he had similar reservations: “It gave me the intuitive assurance that beneath all this composer's erratic inadequacies and undiscipline there flows a deep current of music.”

  31. Irving Kolodin names Harris as the first in his list of “false prophets” for American music in “Wanted—An American Composer,” The New Republic, 16 January 1935, 273. Two indignant responses appear in The New Republic, 13 February 1935, 19-20.

  32. According to Robert Stevenson, “Roy Harris at UCLA: Neglected Documentation,” Inter-American Music Review 2, no. 1 (1979): 59-73, the biography was written “under the composer's eye” in Tennessee; Harris's departure from that state in 1951 might help explain why the manuscript remained unfinished.

  33. CC, 42. Slonimsky says that a thousand copies of this document were printed. I have found none extant, but the fact that Time magazine's article “Log Cabin Composer” cites excerpts from exactly these two reviews may provide indirect evidence for its existence.

  34. David Ewen, Composers Since 1900 (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1969), 263.

  35. See Robert Strassburg, Roy Harris: A Catalog of His Works (Los Angeles: California State University, 1973), 29.

  9. MANIFEST DESTINY

  1. Walter Piston, “Roy Harris,” Modern Music 11 (January-February 1934): 74.

  2. Copland, “American Composer,” 490.

  3. Sidney Thurber Cox, “The Autogenetic Principle in the Melodic Writing of Roy Harris,” MA thesis, Cornell University, 1948. Cox studied with Harris at Cornell and at Colorado College.

  4. Stehman adduces similar examples in his dissertation, “Symphonies of Roy Harris,” and more briefly in American Musical Pioneer, 26-29.

  5. Cox, “Autogenetic Principle,” 5.

  6. See Zuck, History of Musical Americanism, 221-43, esp. 226-27.

  7. Elliott Carter, “Season of Hindemith and Americans,” Modern Music 16 (May-June 1939): 250-51; Thomson, “Harris and Shostakovich,” in The Musical Scene (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), 123-24.

  8. Olin Downes, “New Work Given by Koussevitzky,” New York Times, 12 March 1939, p. 60; William Schuman, “Letter to the Music Editor,” New York Times, 12 March 1939, sec. 3, p. 6. For more information on the Harris-Schumann relationship, see Steven R. Swayne, Orpheus in Manhattan: William Schuman and the Shaping of American Musical Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

  9. Copland, “Composers in America,” in The New Music, 124-25.

  10. Elliott Carter, “American Music in the New York Scene,” Modern Music 17 (January-February 1940): 94.

  11. Boston Symphony Orchestra Programme, ed. John N. Burk, 24 February 1939, 780; cited in Zuck, History of Musical Americanism, 237.

  12. George Henry Lovett Smith, “American Festival in Boston,” Modern Music 42 (October-November 1939): 44; Strassburg, Catalog, 13.

  13. OH, 387. This story is repeated with varying amounts of detail in Evett, “Harmonic Idiom,” 102-3; Strassburg, Catalog, 13; and in interviews preserved at the RHC.

  14. Mellers, Music in a New Found Land, 73-75.

  15. Harris's first attempt at an ending in 1938 avoided the tragic collapse of the final, successful 1939 version. For details, see Stehman, American Musical Pioneer, 67-68; and Stehman, “Symphonies of Roy Harris,” part 5.

  16. Autogenesis represented not just an attack on neoclassicism but also a correction of twelve-tone technique, as Arthur Mendel noted in 1939. An early Harris advocate, he praised the Passacaglia theme of the composer's Piano Quintet for its “free, asymmetrical, ‘autogenetic' growth” and its pitch content: “The theme is so eminently singable, so strongly diatonic and tonal in feeling, that one is surprised to realize that it contains every note of the twelve-note scale.” Modern Music 17 (October-November 1939): 25-36. See also the description of this Passacaglia theme preserved on cassette H1555, RHC.

  17. CC, 64-65; a shorter explanation appears in Slonimsky, “Roy Harris,” 315.

  18. Mendel, “Music: A Change in Structure,” The Nation 134, no. 3470 (6 January 1932): 26.

  19. Stehman cites Harris's program note for the Symphony 1933 as the earliest instance of the term autogenetic that he has encountered in his extensive research. Stehman, “Symphonies of Roy Harris,” 84n8. Perhaps misreading some advance publicity, an anonymous writer for American Music Lover called the symphony “autogenuous” in 1938: “Roy Harris—American Composer,” 3, no. 11 (March 1938): 409.

  20. H[enry] T[aylor] P[arker], “Manifold, Abundant, Individual,” part 3, p. 4.

  21. Roy Harris, program note for Farewell to Pioneers, Journal of the Philadelphia Orchestra, 27 March 1936, 813; cited in the preface to Stehman, American Musical Pioneer.

  22. Colin McPhee, “New York's Spring Season, 1936,” Modern Music 13 (May-June 1936): 39-42.

  23. Cox, “Autogenetic Principle,” 13-14, 5.

  24. Stehman, Bio-bibliography, 73, 334.

  25. Stehman, preface to American Musical Pioneer.

  26. McPhee, “New York's Spring Season.” See also Edwin H. Schloss, “Chavez Makes Bow as Guest Maestro,” Philadelphia Record, 28 March 1936; and Henry Pleasants, “Music in Review,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 28 March 1936; cited in Stehman, Bio-bibliography, 334.

  27. CC, 1, 70. The Cimarron land run of 189
3 opened the panhandle of Indian Territory, not the area of the Harris farm (near Tulsa). Stehman (American Musical Pioneer, 1) notes that there is some uncertainty about when the family moved to Oklahoma (and thus about the location of Roy's birth in 1898). His father's claim is dated 1901, but territorial records may simply be incomplete.

  28. Cimarron was written for the Tri-State Band Festival in Enid, Oklahoma. Harris may have been aware of Edwin Gerschefski's article “To the Brass Band,” Modern Music 14 (May-June 1937): 188-92, which extols the band as an ensemble uniquely “in touch” with the people and as a “more lively and vital factor” in the West and Midwest than in the East.

  29. Denise von Glahn, The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003), 180-97.

  30. Paul Rosenfeld, “Harris,” in Discoveries of a Music Critic (New York: Vienna House, 1972), 325; orig. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1936.

  31. Edna Ferber, Cimarron (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1930), 14, 16; cited in von Glahn, Sounds of Place, 191-93.

  32. Program note in the published score (Mills Music, 1941). Von Glahn observes that the mixing of fact and fiction is key to Ferber's novel as well. Ferber made a short research trip to the Oklahoma State Historical Library, and she framed her book by saying: “Only the more fantastic and improbable events contained in this book are true.” See Ferber, Cimarron, ix-x; and von Glahn, Sounds of Place, 190.

  33. Von Glahn (Sounds of Place, 197) hears the Indians of Oklahoma Territory in the accented timpani strokes on beats 1 and 2 of measures 48-54. While I find her suggestion both attractive and plausible, for me this association is undermined by the 5/4 meter, the interruptive rests, and the fact that the melody, too, appears “stuck” at this point, making the percussion seem part of a more general attempt to create tension and anticipation.

  34. Ferber, Cimarron, 15. The film exaggerates the racial and class diversity of the novel, showing a variety of vehicles in the land run and featuring Indians and a Jew more prominently than in the original book.

  35. PR, 117, 119-20; Farwell, “Roy Harris,” 31-32; Slonimsky, “From the West,” 7.