Frontier Figures

by Beth E. Levy

  The legend runs as follows: Harris's father participated in one of the last land rushes that opened Oklahoma, then Indian Territory, for white settlement. There the family endured illness, hardship, bad weather, and occasional visits from impoverished Indians during the five years after Harris's birth in 1898. With money won in a rare bout of gambling luck, they then moved farther west in hopes that Harris's mother would recover her health. In Covina, California, they set up a small farm, first planting potatoes and later fruit trees. Rural life was quiet and isolating, but the Harrises cooperated with their neighbors, bartering for supplies and joining together for special occasions (such as when the family acquired the community's first piano). Harris excelled at both music and sports—the former in private and the latter in public.

  The experiences of these years provided a vein of imagery that Harris frequently mined when articulating his aesthetic philosophy or elucidating his creative processes. As we shall see, agricultural language also permeated Harris's ideas about melodic construction. In the oral history interviews, after four decades of intervening successes and failures, Harris described at length the importance of his boyhood on the farm:

  I was born into a family of farmers. Farmers don't talk very much, the ones that I've known anyhow. They sit around the table, have dinner and very little is said. That doesn't mean that they are not thinking, but they are thinking in other terms. They are not thinking in the conventional word terms. They are thinking in terms of the essence of things…. This is because they don't see people very much. They are with animals, plants, the seasons and all that has to do with nature. I think, in a way, that is a wonderful and fortunate beginning for a person who is going to become a composer. This is because music is not a word language, but a time-space language. (OH, 2-3)

  Though vague, Harris was quite consistent in this aspect of his musical metaphysics: despite his considerable activity as a critic and lecturer, he often labeled his commitment to composition as a turning away from words. Furthermore, this aesthetic turn relied upon instinct, inwardness, and a faith in organic processes. When asked to speculate on the sources of his creativity, he maintained: “I think that it is a natural function for a naturally creative person to be creative. I think if he examines it too much, he'll destroy it. My farmer's background would say, ‘Digging up the potatoes to see whether or not they're growing’” (OH, 41).

  With their anti-intellectual stance, Harris's musings place him firmly in line with nineteenth-century romantic aesthetics. In their twentieth-century context, however, they also helped Harris distinguish himself from some of his modernist colleagues. He took great pains to illustrate the roots and results of this distinction, locating the fundamental difference between a truly creative artist and a mere “arranger” explicitly as a function of one's placement with respect to the ruralurban divide: “I've often wondered how a city boy has time. I suppose he finds it somehow, but I've often wondered. I had so many hours all through the spring, summer and early fall in California…. I sometimes feel it would be very difficult for someone to be a good composer if he grew up in a very busy society. I don't think you would become a creator, but an arranger or a kind of journalist dealing with others' ideas which already existed. I think it's very, very important that young composers not be in big cities just for these reasons” (OH, 3, 4-5).

  Though Harris tactfully admitted that he might be “all wrong about this,” he spoke with authority and with obvious, if unnamed, targets. Eclectic, urbane, and well known for their music reviews, Copland and Thomson were two of Harris's most prominent foils. Directly and indirectly, Harris contrasted his own rooted-ness with what he viewed as typically urban posturing and creative bankruptcy. For him, the creative impulse was introverted, personal, and instinctive, requiring only sincere individual commitment and the peace and quiet of the countryside.

  Although in the above passage, Harris's “city” is an abstract one, and although Harris's rural Covina was only a few miles from what was even then a burgeoning urban Los Angeles, “the city” for Harris (as for Farwell) almost always meant New York or Washington, DC. Thus, many of his celebrations of the rural also carry a pro-western message. In the oral history interviews, Harris explained his distrust of these eastern cities with varying degrees of civility. Not only were they too closely tied to Europe; they also represented a dangerous and even anti-American centralization of power: “I don't feel that all the wealth and power of a hundred and eighty-five million people should be vested in a hundred and eighty-five people in one square mile in Washington or one square mile in New York City…. I think it should be broken down and scattered out all over the country” (OH, 82-83). More specifically, he noted:

  New York exerts great influence, I think, on Washington, and vice versa. New York is the culture center, I suppose we would have to say, of the nation. In fact, I will go even farther and say that one square mile in New York City controls the mores of the nation. The whole mass media business is pretty well controlled in New York City. That is one of the reasons why it's so difficult to live out West. (OH, 397)

  Here and elsewhere, New York represents the forces of standardization, commercialism, and conformity. These were evils to be resisted, and for Harris the West was the primary site of such resistance. Like countless other artists and intellectuals, and like the mythic cowboys he celebrated in his music, Harris found in the West both a freedom from the Eastern Seaboard and a freedom to redefine Americanness in ways that reflected his own talents and aspirations.

  ENCOUNTERING THE COSMOPOLITAN

  Although Harris made his identification with the rural West seem inevitable, he could have chosen other paths. There were more cosmopolitan influences in his background, but unlike Thomson, Harris chose to minimize their importance or, in some cases, to dismiss them altogether. Harris's earliest musical training was understandably provincial. After learning to play the piano from his mother and studying organ and clarinet with musicians in the Los Angeles area, Harris had a sporadic undergraduate education that was interrupted by his stateside service in the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I. During one of his semesters at the University of California, Berkeley, after the war, he made his initial attempts at large-scale composition resulting in an incomplete work for chorus and orchestra. Alfred Hertz, conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, suggested that Harris take the manuscript to Albert Elkus, a prominent Bay Area composer and teacher, but the latter was not encouraging to the late-blooming composer.

  At last, when Harris was twenty-seven, encouragement, professional guidance, and long-l asting friendship came from Arthur Farwell, former Indianist (now Americanist) crusader. Harris had taken lessons from Fannie Charles Dillon, Farwell's friend and later associate in the founding of the Theater of the Stars, and she seems to have introduced the two men.5 As Harris's biographer Dan Stehman confirms, it is not clear exactly what kind of compositional instruction Harris received while working with Farwell (1924-25), yet, as we have seen, the older composer's influence is undeniable.6 They shared a mystic, missionary zeal and an unabashed commitment that the West was ripe for spiritual battle against the commercial and cosmopolitan forces that they saw dominating American musical life. Perhaps ironically, it was in part thanks to Farwell that Harris began to break free from the limitations of his provincial youth. Farwell helped Harris make professional connections, recommending him as a music critic to the Los Angeles Illustrated News and helping him secure a position teaching harmony at the Hollywood Conservatory, which enabled him to quit his job as a dairy truck driver. Farwell also provided introductions to such influential patrons as Artie Mason Carter (cofounder of the Hollywood Bowl) and Alma Wertheim, who would eventually finance Harris's study in France. By 1926, with Farwell's blessing, Harris had composed an orchestral Andante that won him an East Coast premiere under Howard Hanson and a visit to the MacDowell Colony. There he would meet the young Aaron Copland, who promptly encouraged the less experienced composer to follo
w his example by studying with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Harris set sail almost immediately.

  How did Harris survive his three-year adventure in the early twentieth-century's cosmopolitan mecca? First of all, Harris chose to live outside the city, in the small village of Juziers (where Copland had also lived for a time), with a landlady whom he befriended by helping her pick cherries (OH, 302-3). In retrospect, Harris had a matter-of-fact explanation for this decision: “I suppose one of the reasons was that I was originally a country boy; I was brought up that way, and Paris was very strange to me. It seemed to me very superficial when I first arrived. You know, all the little horns with their squeaks way up high and everybody running around and talking very, very fast. All that sort of thing. It seemed very far away from the kind of burly thing that I had been brought up in” (OH, 314). With no desire to play the American in Paris, Harris maintained a physical separation from the metropolis. He resisted urban life and sought out solitude. This pattern can also serve as a metaphor for his resistance to Boulanger in particular, and to musical modernism more broadly. Though Harris's reactions against these cosmopolitan forces probably grew more colorful as he remembered and recounted them years later, their resonance with early critical assessments suggests that retrospective idealization was not alone in manufacturing the enduring characterization of Harris as a loner or maverick. His American reception immediately after he returned from France in 1929 relied heavily on the idea that Harris remained mysteriously untouched by Boulanger's teaching and contemporary trends in composition; consequently, depending upon one's critical stance, Harris the “autodidact” appeared either freshly original or desperately lacking in technique—or often both.

  Harris's time in Paris might be expected to resemble that of Copland, Piston, Sessions, Thomson, and the other American composers who studied there early in the twentieth century. Indeed, his departure is symptomatic of American composers' need to study abroad, and his destination is consistent with the general reorientation from German to French models in the wake of the First World War.7 Yet Harris was emphatic in distancing himself not only from his colleagues in the “Boulangerie,” but even from its revered pedagogue. Writing in 1939, Harris framed his outright resistance to Boulanger as a product of his own immaturity, but he still refused to admit that her guidance might have shaped his compositional output: “Had I known then what I subsequently learned, my first year would not have been such a fiasco…. I was like the rookie who came to France to win the war. I would not take it easy, settle down. I was all for immediate action. I rejected Boulanger's formal teaching of counterpoint, harmony, solfeggio. And she had the patience of an angel. She called me her autodidact and allowed me to go my own way.”8 A few years later, as Nicolas Slonimsky was working on his still unpublished account of Harris's early career, the composer apparently offered his biographer a more vehement, third-person account of his own unhappiness under Boulanger's tutelage:

  The first year in Paris was torture to our composer. He was worried and disappointed. He disagreed violently with his great teacher. He came to get knowledge and discipline. She preached both. But her knowledge was a detailed cataloguing of what had already been done; her discipline, a Royalist-Catholic negation of spontaneity. She taught the doctrine of conservation—the tailor-made article designed from any material to meet the needs of the time and place. He was in search of the machinery with which to release and harness the wild horses within him.9

  Boulanger is presented as competent but authoritarian, the proponent of a stifling aesthetic that denied composers the opportunity to express their innermost feelings. The political overtones present in this passage grew even stronger by the time of the oral history interviews, in which Harris mentions Boulanger's subsequent connections with Franco and Mussolini, and her admiration for the clipped gardens of Versailles (OH, 207-9), which he found dreadfully comic. Harris's “wild horses” could hardly feel at home in such a realm.

  The musical counterparts to Harris's personal friction with Boulanger are more complex. Harris and Boulanger agreed on the importance of tradition and of understanding music history, and together they charted a course of study based on the examination of past masterworks including chant, Renaissance polyphony, Bach, and Beethoven. Harris's ideas about organically unfolding melody may also have been derived in part from Boulanger's emphasis on la grande ligne, though he never (to my knowledge) admitted this possibility. In addition, the angel and the autodidact shared a deep concern with the working out of musical form. In this case, however, Harris claimed a fundamental difference between his own organic approach and Boulanger's more constrained formalism. In the oral history interviews, after praising Boulanger's exacting standards and her honesty with her pupils, he continued in a less complimentary vein:

  On the other hand, because she was such a formalist, she depended too much on the codification of traditional formulas. I remember when she asked me to bring my first lesson. She asked me to write some melodies so she could see what my melodic materials were, whether or not I had melodic talent. I brought her a whole book full of melodies in one week. She looked them all through and said, “With this book, I could make a great career.” Well, she was quite wrong, of course, because she thought, and I think she does think, that, if you have materials, you can make a suit of clothes. But a suit of clothes and a symphony are not the same thing. A symphony has to have a kind of new impetus all the time. The same impetus has to be in there driving for the whole work that was able to invent the materials for the work. It has to be there all the time. It's not just that here I give you this seed, and out of this seed grows a tree. (OH, 213)

  Here, Harris's critique invokes the same connotations that he used to denigrate the city composer: the “journalist,” the mere “arranger” of other people's ideas, equally adept at piecing together commercial music for New York or producing made-to-order scores for Hollywood. Harris positioned his own “organic” forms against the idea of form as a sterile container for melodic material, explicitly connecting his own dynamic forms with what he called “autogenetic” melody, in which the parts of a melodic line were carefully interrelated so as to achieve an impression of organic growth.

  In Harris's version of music history, composers who failed to achieve interesting and original forms were either lacking in creative talent or suffering under misplaced musical priorities. Looking back on the aesthetics prevalent during and after his time in Paris, Harris recalled an unhealthy emphasis on dissonance at the expense of attention to form and melody: “We had a long period which I called modern academic. You could take the most obviously dull melodies and put them in the most square melodic designs with very little formal development, just boxlike pieces. But, you could make them very dissonant, and that made it modern. Of course, we've grown out of that pretty well because it was too easy to do” (OH, 112). Harris considered dissonance both aesthetically unsuccessful and profoundly at odds with nature. He chose a less traveled path: “I concentrated harmonically on the development of modern consonance, exactly the opposite of the way most of them have been concentrating on dissonance…. I felt the greatest part of music was a consonant thing, and of course, this was supported by my philosophical attitudes, that nature keeps the world in perpetuity through coordination, not through disorientation. I'm sure I'm right about it. Even the physicists say that” (OH, 288-89). Clinching his argument with a not-quite-deferential bow to the hard sciences, Harris aligned himself with the powerful thesis that art should be “natural.” He posited a kind of natural truth in consonance—what he liked to call an “a priori value”—that informs much of his harmonic writing, particularly his practice of scoring chords so that they are reinforced by the overtone series.10

  Hand in hand with the Keatsian equation of beauty and natural truth came the more strident assertion that composers who did not share Harris's unpopular proclivities were false in some way, either to their own better judgment or to their audiences. Harris's convictions about the p
roper hierarchy of musical elements allowed him to dismiss, for example, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. In the 1960s, he related his initial reaction to the work: “Melody was poor, there was hardly any harmony; it was all orchestration and rhythm and dynamics…. What happened was that music was really doing exactly what we were doing in our marketing: it was all going into packaging. You see? Very few people have agreed with me” (OH, 286). With this single gesture, Harris advocated a surprising reversal of conventional modernist wisdom: lyrical melody and consonant harmony, so often linked with sentimental pandering to the general public, here became the tools that would save music from the perils of the marketplace that had driven Stravinsky to rhythmic and orchestral extremes.

  Harris charged Stravinsky with a grave but common crime: cheapening a work's content by striving for sensational effects. Harris did not venture to attribute the scandalous premiere of the Rite of Spring to the high standards or artistic integrity of its audience members, but he was a firm believer in the infallible wisdom of the popular audience. “If we create an indigenous music worthy of our people,” he opined, “it will make its way swiftly and unfalteringly.”11 He had great faith that good pieces (including his own) would be both successful and in demand. What else could have led him—well before the height of his popularity—to the shockingly confident decision that he would write only on commission? Harris's diatonic musical language, his avoidance of dissonance, his reliance on Americanist imagery, and (especially after 1940) his commitment to writing works that could be performed by amateur or school groups—all these elements gave his music a market value that he felt obliged both to advertise and to rationalize. His concern for profit was rendered respectable by his widely publicized view that composers were to be socially useful and should thus be valued (and paid) as other professionals were. Harris's pursuit of popular acclaim thus blurred the boundaries between idealism and materialism. This strategy might have set him apart from the more esoteric modernists of the 1920s, but it put him right at home in the left-leaning politics of Depression-era America.