Frontier Figures

by Beth E. Levy

  36. Henry Cowell, “Three Native Composers,” New Freeman, 3 May 1930, 184-86.

  37. John Tasker Howard, Our Contemporary Composers, 145. See also Paul Rosenfeld, “Current Chronicle: Copland-Harris-Schuman,” Musical Quarterly 25 (1939): 372-81; and Rosenfeld, “The Newest American Composers,” Modern Music 15 (March-April 1938): 153-59.

  38. MacDonald Smith Moore, Yankee Blues: Musical Culture and American Identity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 71-72. See especially Chapter 5, the final section of which treats Harris under the subtitle “The Great White Hope”—an adaptation of Howard's “white hope of the nationalists.”

  39. Copland, “American Composer,” 490; Howard, “Contemporary Composers,” 145; PR, 120-21.

  40. Moore, Yankee Blues, 161.

  41. Harris, “The Growth of a Composer,” Musical Quarterly 20 (1934): 188.

  42. Harris, “The Problems of American Composers,” in American Composers on American Music, ed. Henry Cowell ([Stanford, CA]: Stanford University Press, 1933), 15051. This article is modified from “Does Music Have to Be European?” Scribner's Magazine 91, no. 4 (1932): 204-9. Many of the ideas in these essays seem to have taken shape in Harris's first public lectures, given at the Los Angeles Public Library in 1931. Los Angeles Times, 5 July 1931, iii: 17.

  43. Harris, “Problems of American Composers,” 150.

  44. Paul Bowles, “On the Film Front,” Modern Music 18 (January-February 1941): 134.

  10. THE COMPOSER AS FOLK SINGER

  1. Stehman, “Symphonies of Roy Harris,” 265. According to CC, 14, Farwell himself conducted Harris's arrangement of “Peña Hueca” in 1920 with the Pasadena Community Chorus.

  2. Harris, “Notes” for When Johnny Comes Marching Home (New York: G. Schirmer, 1935).

  3. According to Slonimsky (“Roy Harris,” 317), during World War II “the notorious ‘Tokyo Rose' paid Harris the dubious tribute of featuring his overture When Johnny Comes Marching Home on one of her propaganda broadcasts. ‘Stand for democracy as Roy Harris does in his music,' she coaxed. ‘Go marching home!’”

  4. Barbara Zuck (History of Musical Americanism) notes the widespread use of folk songs in the 1930s-40s and discusses some of the political implications of this trend. See also Mark Fenster, “Preparing the Audience, Informing the Performers: John A. Lomax and Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads,” American Music 7 (1989): 260-77; and Crist, Music for the Common Man.

  5. Charles Seeger, “Grass Roots for American Composers,” Modern Music 16 (March-April 1939): 143-49. See also Paul Rosenfeld's response, “Variations on the Grass Roots Theme,” Modern Music 16 (May-June 1939): 214-19.

  6. Harris, “Folksong—American Big Business,” Modern Music 18 (November-December 1940): 8-9.

  7. The Harris scores are in manuscript at the New York Public Library. For an early reaction to the broadcasts, see Conlon Nancarrow, “Over the Air,” Modern Music 12 (November-December 1939): 55.

  8. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land, chaps. 9 and 10.

  9. Lawrence Morton, “On the Hollywood Front,” Modern Music 23 (1946): 141.

  10. The cowboy's anti-industrial connotations, along with his marked tendency to keep to himself, made him an unlikely hero for Marxist theorizing. Nonetheless, some made the attempt, particularly after the failed strike among cowhands in 1883. See Don D. Walker, “The Left Side of the American Ranges: A Marxist View of the Cowboy,” in Clio's Cowboys (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 131-46.

  11. William H. Goetzmann, The West of the Imagination (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 310.

  12. Harris, “Folksong—American Big Business,” 11.

  13. Ibid.

  14. A later performance on 31 December 1942 with the New York Philharmonic under Dimitri Mitropoulos was recorded by the Office of War Information for broadcast to American troops during the war.

  15. Stehman, American Musical Pioneer, 72-79.

  16. Ibid., 73; Nicolas Slonimsky, program note for Folksong Symphony 1940, Vanguard Classics, OVC 4076.

  17. Stehman (“Symphonies of Roy Harris,” 271) calls this “the most complete and up-to-date program note” and suggests that it was written around 1960.

  18. Harris, program note for Folksong Symphony, American Festival Chorus and Orchestra, conducted by Vladimir Golschmann, Vanguard: VSD 2082, 1960.

  19. See Stehman, “Symphonies of Roy Harris,” 265-359. The last movement was originally the first of the four choral settings; its overture-like title, “Welcome Party,” is thus sometimes omitted, as is the case in the G. Schirmer vocal score.

  20. Harris, program note for Folksong Symphony.

  21. Olin Downes, “Unusual Program by Mitropoulos,” New York Times, 1 January 1943, p. 26, col. 1.

  22. Copland, “Roy Harris,” in Our New Music, 171.

  23. Arthur Cohn, “Americans at Rochester,” Modern Music 17 (May-June 1940): 257.

  24. Herbert Elwell, “Harris' Folksong Symphony,” Modern Music 18 (January-February 1941): 113-14.

  25. Apparently following suit, Harris's student Robert Evett called the Folksong Symphony the equal of Christ Lag in Todesbanden (and an improvement upon Hindemith's Schwanendreher and Bartók's Improvisations). Evett, “Harmonic Idiom,” 101. On Harris's obsession with Bach, see Slonimsky, Perfect Pitch: A Life Story (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 246.

  26. “Symphony in Folk Songs: New Roy Harris Opus the Hit of Eastman Music Festival,” Newsweek, 6 May 1940, 44-45; “Folk-Song Symphony,” Time, 6 January 1941, 34.

  27. The unsigned article to which Harris refers attributes these words to Herbert El-well. “Folk-Song Symphony,” Time, 6 January 1941.

  28. Harris began teaching summer sessions at Colorado College in 1941 and joined the full-time faculty in 1943. He taught there for five years, with a one-year leave of absence in 1945 while he was Director of Music for the Office of War Information. Holm devoted many ballets to western themes and included music by Harris, Cowell, and others. See Edwin Denby, “With the Dancers,” Modern Music 18 (May-June 1941): 269-70; and James Sykes, “Native Notes in Colorado,” Modern Music 20 (November-December 1942): 49-50.

  29. David Hall, liner notes for Composers Recordings, CD 818. Fifteen interludes were planned, but only five were published by Carl Fischer. Two others were edited in 1987 by Dan Stehman and the RHC.

  30. Roy Harris and Johana Harris, “Sing a Song of Folk,” WQED Television, Pittsburgh, n.d. An audio recording is preserved as cassette H2025A in the RHC. Used by permission of Patricia Harris.

  31. Slonimsky, “Oklahoma Composer,” in Crawford, Lott, and Oja, Celebration, 311.

  32. Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 17-18, 44-45; see also pp. 127-28.

  33. For a description of Harris's car accident, see OH, 526-28.

  34. Harris was extremely secretive about his second and third wives; there is no mention of them in the oral history interviews. Scholars are not even certain of their full names. Stehman, American Musical Pioneer, 14-15. He may also have fathered an illegitimate son while in Paris; see Stehman, Bio-bibliography, 5.

  35. Louise Spizizen, “Johana and Roy Harris: Marrying a Real Composer,” Musical Quarterly 77 (1993): 579-606.

  36. Copland, “America's Young Men of Promise,” 17.

  37. Johana Harris, “Personal Note,” in The Book of Modern Composers, ed. David Ewen (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942), 451.

  38. Cowell wrote that Harris “often convinces his friends and listeners of the extreme value of his works by his own indefatigable enthusiasm for them, when in reality they are only mildly interesting and would not be very highly regarded by these selfsame people if they heard them in performances without the stimulating presence of their creator.” Cowell, “Roy Harris,” 64-65.

  39. Piston, “Roy Harris,” 73, 74.

  40. Copland, “American Composer,” 490.

  41. Copland, “Roy Harris,” in Our New Music, 162-64.r />
  42. Ibid., 174-75.

  43. Piston, “Roy Harris,” 73.

  44. Marc Blitzstein, “Composers as Lecturers and in Concerts,” Modern Music 13 (November-December 1935): 50.

  45. Thomson, New York Herald Tribune, 21 November 1940; cited in MacDonald Smith Moore, Yankee Blues, 167.

  46. Alfred Einstein, “War, Nationalism, Tolerance,” Modern Music 17 (October-November 1939): 3, 4.

  47. “For the racialist…the spiritual and economic salvation of the unhappy region is identical with its bloodstream's retention of its ‘purity.' He introduces into the Virginia House of Burgesses bills illegalizing marriage between whites and blacks, and is all for ‘the true folk manner.' East Side boys it is clear to him can never sing in it: also, he proclaims the doctrine that American expressions to be ‘American' must base themselves on the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Noteworthy is the fact that this fascist deems the ribald songs beloved of the people and their ‘songs of social significance,' not in the ‘true folk' manner.” Rosenfeld, “Folksong and Culture-Politics,” Modern Music 17 (October-November 1939): 23.

  48. Roger Sessions, “On the American Future,” Modern Music 17 (January-February 1940): 72.

  49. Conlon Nancarrow, “Over the Air,” Modern Music 17 (May-June 1940): 265. The final ellipsis is present in the original.

  50. Marshall Bialosky, “Roy Harris: In Memoriam (But Keep Your Hats On),” College Music Symposium 22, no. 2 (1982): 8.

  11. THE SAGA OF THE PRAIRIES

  1. Margaret Susan Key, “‘Sweet Melody over Silent Wave': Depression-Era Radio and the American Composer” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, College Park, 1995), 166-67, 182.

  2. Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland: 1900 through 1942 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984), 254-55 (hereafter cited as VPAC1).

  3. Howard Pollack, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (New York: Henry Holt, 1999), 312 (hereafter cited as HP).

  4. George Antheil, Bad Boy of Music (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1945), 324-25.

  5. Rubin Goldmark to Copland, 26 April 1921, Copland Collection, Library of Congress, Box 255, Folder 17 (hereafter cited as CCLC, 255/17).

  6. Ibid.

  7. Goldmark to Copland, 21 August 1922, CCLC, 255/17.

  8. Cited in H. F. P., “Advice on Composition from Rubin Goldmark,” Musical America, 16 May 1914, 6.

  9. Copland, “Rubin Goldmark: A Tribute,” Juilliard Review 3, no. 3 (fall 1956): 15. In 1977, Copland told Leo Smit that Goldmark “really should get more credit than he has been given for my early training.” Cited in David Beveridge, “Dvoák's American Pupil Rubin Goldmark,” in Dvoák-Studien, ed. Klaus Döge and Peter Jost (Mainz, Germany: Schott, 1994), 237. See also David J. Tomatz, “Rubin Goldmark, Postromantic: Trial Balances in American Music,” PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 1966.

  10. Surprisingly, Goldmark spent far more time in the West than Copland did. He moved to Colorado Springs in 1894 for his health and taught at Colorado College until 1900. After returning to New York, he continued to spend summers at a cabin in the Rockies, which he described to Copland in a letter of 26 April 1921, CCLC, 255/17.

  11. Copland, “Gabriel Faure, a Neglected Master,” Musical Quarterly 10 (1924): 573-86. Gayle Minetta Murchison also emphasizes the relationships between la grande ligne and Copland's clarity of musical form in “Nationalism in William Grant Still and Aaron Copland between the Wars: Style and Ideology,” PhD diss., Yale University, 1998, 62-63.

  12. See, among others, David Matthews, “Copland and Stravinsky,” Tempo 95 (Winter 1950): 10-14; and Arthur Berger, “Stravinsky and the Younger American Composers,” Score and I.M.A. Magazine 12 (June 1955): 39-40.

  13. Arthur Berger, Aaron Copland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 42.

  14. These questions grew more urgent as Copland became a prominent exponent of “modern music”—both in the journal of that name and in his work as a concert organizer. See David Metzer, “The League of Composers: The Initial Years,” American Music 15 (1997): 45-69; and the writings of Carol Oja, especially “The Copland-Sessions Concerts and Their Reception in the Contemporary Press,” Musical Quarterly 65 (1979): 212-29; and Oja, Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  15. Copland's writings on jazz include “Jazz Structure and Influence,” Modern Music 4 (January-February 1927): 9-14; and “The Jazz Interlude,” in Our New Music (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1940). See also David Schiff, “Copland and the ‘Jazz Boys,’” in Copland Connotations: Studies and Interviews, ed. Peter Dickinson (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2002), 14-21; Stanley V. Kleppinger, “On the Influence of Jazz Rhythm in the Music of Aaron Copland,” American Music 21, no. 1 (2003): 74-111; and Murchison, “Nationalism.”

  16. See Nicholas Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective (New York: Colemann-Ross, 1953), 86-87.

  17. Harris to Copland, 26 July [1926], CCLC. Courtesy of Patricia Harris. Harris had apparently reacted strongly to the jazz idiom of Music for the Theatre. Pollack suggests that the “grotesco” music in the midsection of the aptly named “Burlesque” movement inspired Harris's outburst at an early informal hearing of the score: “It's whorehouse music! It's whorehouse music!” HP, 130. See also Leo Smit, “A Conversation with Aaron Copland on His 80th Birthday,” Contemporary Keyboard 6, no. 11 (1980): 12.

  18. Andrea Olmstead reprints the surviving letter exchange in The Correspondence of Roger Sessions (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 65-71, 73-77. See also Olm-stead's overview and excerpts from the correspondence between these two men in “The Copland-Sessions Letters,” Tempo 175 (1990): 2-5.

  19. From later letters, we can see that Copland took pains to reassure Sessions that his jazz days were over. On March 18, 1927, he wrote: “I'm glad you liked the Jazz article. It has helped considerably to get the whole business out of my system,” and in a postscript to his letter of 18 August 1927, he exclaimed: “The Irony of Fate. Now that I am done with jazz an article by I. Goldberg is to appear in the Sept. ‘Mercury' on ‘A. C. and his Jazz.’” The Selected Correspondence of Aaron Copland, ed. Elizabeth [Bergman] Crist and Wayne Shirley (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 54, 57.

  20. Theodore Chanler to Copland, 16 August 1930, CCLC, 249/21.

  21. Chanler, “Aaron Copland,” in American Composers on American Music, ed. Henry Cowell, 51. The essay originally appeared as “Aaron Copland up to Now,” in 1930 in The Hound and Horn. In his editorial postscript to Chanler's article, Cowell felt compelled to comment on Copland's recent growth: “Since the foregoing article was written, Aaron Copland has produced a number of new works, and has materially broadened his tendencies in composition. For one thing, he no longer relies on jazz themes to animate his auditors” (55-56).

  22. Virgil Thomson, “Aaron Copland,” Modern Music 9 (January-February 1932): 71-72.

  23. Ibid., 72.

  24. On Copland and Judaism, see especially Howard Pollack, “Copland and the Prophetic Voice,” Aaron Copland and His World, ed. Carol J. Oja and Judith Tick (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 1-14.

  25. Copland, “The Lyricism of Milhaud,” Modern Music 6 (January-February 1929): 16.

  26. Thomson, “Aaron Copland,” 67.

  27. Jewish Influences in American Life, vol. III: International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem (reprints from the Dearborn Independent, 1921), 65, 70, 75-78; cited in MacDonald Smith Moore, Yankee Blues, 146.

  28. Lazare Saminsky, Music of the Ghetto and the Bible (New York: Bloch Publishing, 1934), 67-69.

  29. Ibid., 123, 125.

  30. MacDonald Smith Moore, Yankee Blues, 131.

  31. Howard, Our Contemporary Composers, 3. Isaac Goldberg, “Aaron Copland and His Jazz,” American Mercury, September 1927, 63-64. See also HP, 518; and David Metzer, “‘Spurned Love': Eroticism and Abstraction in the Early Works of Aaron Copland,” Journal of Musicology 15 (1997): 419-43.

  32. Henry Cowell
, “Bericht aus Amerika: Amerikanische Musik?” trans. Hanns Gutman, Melos 9, nos. 8-9 (August-September 1930): 362-65, 363; “Die beiden wirklichen Amerikaner: Ives und Ruggles,” trans. Hanns Gutman, Melos 9, no. 10 (October 1930): 417-20; and “Die kleineren Komponisten,” trans. Hanns Gutman, Melos 9, no. 12 (December 1930): 526-29, esp. 527.

  33. Daniel Gregory Mason, “…And a Moral,” in Tune In, America: A Study of Our Coming Musical Independence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931), 160-61.

  34. Copland's longtime friend Harold Clurman recalls this episode in All People Are Famous (Instead of an Autobiography) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 33.

  35. For more on prejudice against Jews in France, see Jane F. Fulcher, “The Preparation for Vichy: Anti-Semitism in French Musical Culture between the Two World Wars,” Musical Quarterly 79 (1995): 458-75. Fulcher endorses and provides a broader intellectual context for Leonie Rosenstiel's claim that Boulanger considered Jews a less creative race. Rosenstiel, Nadia Boulanger: A Life in Music (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 198-99. It is important to note that many Boulanger pupils, including Copland himself, vehemently disagreed with Rosenstiel's characterization: “[Boulanger] and I became close friends, and there were other Jewish students who were Nadia's friends. It is impossible that one of us would not have noticed anti-Semitism in her behavior. Especially during the war years, we were very much aware of such things.” VPAC1, 65.

  36. See Klára Móricz, Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008).

  37. For further discussion of these themes in relation to Music for Radio, see my chapter “From Orient to Occident: Aaron Copland and the Sagas of the Prairies,” in Aaron Copland and His World, ed. Oja and Tick, 307-49.

  38. Crist and Shirley, Selected Correspondence, 5-9.

  39. Copland, “Composer from Brooklyn,” in Our New Music, 228-29.

  40. Davidson Taylor, “Tomorrow's Broadcast,” North American Review 241 (March 1936): 51.

  41. Marc Blitzstein, “Coming—The Mass Audience,” Modern Music 13 (May-June 1936): 25.