Frontier Figures

by Beth E. Levy

  BECOMING WESTERN

  From Farwell, Harris learned the rhetoric of the provincial and received his first exposure to the cosmopolitan; with Boulanger in Paris he experienced the cosmopolitan and dedicated himself to the provincial. But it seems that both the provincial and the cosmopolitan camp—the Wa-Wan contingent and the Boulangerie—agreed that his works presented a departure from existing artistic trends. By the time he returned to the United States in 1929, he had firmly established in his own mind, and in the minds of many others, his striking difference from his colleagues: Harris was not urban or cosmopolitan; he was not a typical Boulanger pupil; he was not interested in the dissonances or intricacies associated with musical modernism; he was not Schoenberg, and he was not Stravinsky. It would have been difficult, however, for Harris to build a reputation entirely from these negative definitions, and in fact he quickly acquired another label, more potent in its connotations and its intangibility. During the 1930s, Harris became western. Through a series of catalytic events, Harris was enthusiastically and openly identified with the American West. The chief vehicles of this change were a 1932 article and his Symphony 1933, each of which linked Harris both directly and indirectly to the West. Whether calculated or accidental, the strategy was successful. Although at age twenty-five he had barely begun composing, by age thirty-five Harris was nationally famous and well on his way to international recognition. The confident, independent, practical character of the Westerner was reaching a new popular high point. American literature had celebrated the West for decades. Now Hollywood too began turning out western heroes by the dozen: singing cowboys, taciturn trailblazers, maverick sheriffs, and honorable outlaws. Once Harris was convinced that he was at home in these parts, his western attributes were embraced and exaggerated by critics, mentors, colleagues, conductors, friends, and most importantly by Harris himself.

  Earlier reception of Harris foreshadowed the critical turning point. Copland, who had introduced Harris to Boulanger, also introduced Harris to the readers of Modern Music in 1926 as one of “America's Young Men of Promise.”12 After describing Harris as “a Californian” who had been “engaged in one form or another of manual labor so that he is seriously handicapped by his late start in music,” Copland continued in a more conciliatory vein: “But on the other hand, he was born with a full-fledged style of his own. Harris is a child of nature with a child's love for his native hills and a child-like belief in the moral purpose of music.”13 The acknowledgment of self-sufficiency and connectedness to nature affirmed ideas that Harris propagated as well; the suggestion that Harris was immature or naive may have been more difficult to swallow, but this too would prove characteristic of the critical reception that followed.

  Three years later, in a longer and more influential treatment of the emerging composer, Paul Rosenfeld, one of the most significant modernist art critics at the time, greeted Harris as an “awkward, serious young plainsman” and “one of the chief potentialities of American music; perhaps of modern music altogether.”14 No longer stamped as a Californian, Harris was reidentified as an Oklahoman—a state farther east but more vividly “western” because of its frontier history. Harris appeared in a chapter along with Horatio Parker, and both were supposed to embody “traditional, probably Scotch-Irish, musical norms” (PR, 117); nevertheless, Rosenfeld's most evocative descriptions of Harris and his music rely on the imagery of the American West. To illustrate his view that Harris's melodies tend to meander “atonally” without obscuring certain implicit tonal centers, Rosenfeld selected a striking metaphor: “This gives his melodic conduct a certain irregularity and looseness, makes it affect one like the sight of a body reeling from side to side, staggering a little and yet never actually losing its balance. Cowboys walk in that fashion, extremely awkwardly and extremely lithely; and so personal a piece as the scherzo of Harris's sextet brings to mind nothing so much as the image of a little cowboy running and reeling about on the instruments, toppling but never falling.”15

  To forestall concern about the apparently casual slip from the Celt to the cowhand, the two were promptly reconciled in Rosenfeld's observation that most cowboy songs have a direct lineage in Scotch-Irish folk song. With this potential dilemma safely out of the way, Rosenfeld introduced another new theme in Harris criticism—one which the composer may well have recalled when formulating his own views on folk music. “No doubt,” Rosenfeld wrote, “Harris heard the peasant tunes preserved by his stock all through his childhood. No doubt, they are inextricable elements of his picture of life” (PR, 120-21). Rosenfeld proclaimed that western folk song was Harris's legitimate inheritance through blood and soil: familial roots and rural upbringing. Yet he also suggested that even if Harris had not been born in cowboy country, his style would probably have evolved along similar lines. “The ubiquity of the Scotch-Irish melodies,” he stated, “doubtless merely speeded the inevitable process” (PR, 121). If Harris had harbored any doubts about his individuality or his national role, Rosenfeld's sheer certainty would surely have helped dispel them.

  As early as 1929, then, critics had begun to cast Harris's association with western America as innate, and Harris had no desire to escape what had been framed as inescapable. On the contrary, he rushed in to help shape his own manifest destiny. Not long after Rosenfeld's words were published, Harris received a much more substantial statement of support in the article Arthur Farwell submitted to Musical Quarterly (1932). For better or for worse, Farwell's article announced Harris's arrival to the musical world with the fanfare, “Gentlemen, a genius—but keep your hats on!” and a lengthy analogy to Schumann's famous welcoming of Chopin.16 But while Chopin was probably not complicit in Schumann's rather grandiloquent proclamation, Harris definitely played a role in the manufacture of Farwell's critical salvo. According to Evelyn Davis Culbertson, Harris exerted his influence in determining the article's content and organizat ion, offering quotations about himself, making suggestions about which themes to emphasize, and providing favorable citations from sources including both John Tasker Howard's Our American Music (1931)—an earlier version of the essay cited at the opening of this chapter—and an excerpt from Rosenfeld's 1929 article (EDC, 274-75). The correspondence between Harris and Farwell during the fall of 1931 provides concrete evidence that Harris was intimately involved not just in outlining but even in writing some of the critical discourse that shaped the rest of his career. “Arthur,” Harris prodded in September, “what did you decide to do about an article concerning your friend and pupil—having kept his string quartet and symphonic reduction—lo these many moons?” (EDC, 270). A month or so later, Harris suggested that such an article should emphasize his commitment to “classic” values and his unusual formal expertise: “Again I think it well to say that the form is so lacking in repetition, so constantly reconstituted in melodic line, rhythm etc. that the casual observer will not hear or feel its organic continuity—especially those who have been trained to think of form as a series of sequential mosaics—a pattern of easily discernible characteristics turned inside out and upside down” (EDC, 272-73). Farwell's statement shows Harris's influence: “Form, in the general musical mind of the present period, has degenerated to the obvious, to a mere sequence and juxtaposition of musical blocks, a pattern of easily discernible figures, easily discernible even where the themes have been turned inside out and upside down to present a simulacrum of ‘development.’” 17

  Harris also wanted Farwell to emphasize his aversion to “programmatic tendencies,” and again the older composer dutifully took the hint. Harris wrote that he had “eschewed Programmatic tendencies from the first at a time out West when all the rage was Programmatic—Debussy, Strauss and early Stravinsky” (EDC, 273). Farwell recast the idea thus: “As a youth in the West he eschewed programmaticism and its allied divagations at a time when these ideas were rampant in the musical life about him.”18

  Significantly, in the above citation “out West” became “the West” of Harris's childhood. This
was more than a slip of the pen. At a later point in the sequence of letters, probably in early October, Harris commented: “I hope that you will stress the Western influence as opposed to the Eastern European influence” (EDC, 272). In keeping with Farwell's conflation of the American West and the West of Western civilization, the meaning of the word western is ambiguous in Harris's request: it could refer to Western Europe or to the western United States, taking in either case Stravinsky and his treatment of Russian folk music as its probable foil. For much of the article, however, the American West is clearly the intended point of reference. The article repeatedly invoked Harris's biographical westernness, and its conclusion traced the composer's path to Paris and welcomed his westward homecoming: “Leaving his original West, he went abroad to steep himself in technical resources. Now he feels the urge to go back and identify himself again with the Western earth-rhythm, the Western social consciousness, to refresh and reinforce his original vision and integrate it with his newly gained expressional resource.”19 In Farwell's portrait, Harris was not merely or accidentally western, but purposefully western. Having explored the European options, he chose to return to his roots. Moreover, Harris's “original vision”—presumably predating any Parisian influences—was large enough to subsume anything he might happen to have learned while abroad.

  What allowed Harris's European experiences to be so readily dismissed? It was, Farwell suggested, a matter of recognizing the importance of Harris's formative years and acknowledging his true “teachers.” This proved particularly important when coming to terms with Harris's melodic writing: “If we would get at the melodic rationale of Harris, we must throw over every melodic convention, and follow him to his early life in the West. There are his teachers of melody—the broad horizon, the long undulations or the craggy lines of mountain contours, winding streams, and the gracious curvature of tree branches. This is not fiction, but fact, and the melody of Harris, as well as much else in his music, is not to be understood without a recognition of it.”20 With a certain admirable modesty, Farwell allowed elements of the western landscape to dwarf his own pedagogical role, wisely deferring to one of the few avenues of instruction open to the legitimate autodidact: learning from the land. Farwell here relied on one of the oldest and most potent tropes ever to shape statements of American identity in the arts. As we have seen, imagined inspiration from the western landscape has traditionally held a power to obscure contradictions and to make the complicated seem simple. Like Thoreau or Whitman, like Kit Carson or Buffalo Bill, Harris had a legendary closeness to the land that seemed to be both cause and effect of his special abilities, at once the inner source of his creative strength and the outward manifestation of his worthiness to wield such strength.

  As one of Harris's first mentors, Farwell made plain his high hopes—expectations which even Harris found daunting on occasion (EDC, 275). But underlying Farwell's enthusiasm was something stronger than a teacher's pleasure in the pupil's success; like many paternal figures, he rediscovered in Harris what he himself had once hoped to become. In the 1910s and early 1920s, when Farwell organized his projects to reform the “art-life” of the United States, his idealism often appeared naive. Farwell's fascination with the West was sincere enough, but his calls for action came at the wrong time and had to rely on musical examples that the public found either trivial or esoteric. These difficulties were eclipsed by Roy Harris's brilliant arrival. Although Farwell's attempts to ground his own attitudes with western rhetoric may have sounded forced at the turn of the century, they seemed realistic and captivating when applied to Harris during the Great Depression. With a nationwide, government-sponsored network disseminating images of self-made men and populist propaganda, provincialism and regionalism became mainstream. In this context, Harris's western heritage and emerging mythic stature gave Farwell free rein to indulge in colorful speculation, and he rose to the occasion, offering his own précis of Harris's special role: “We have had musical sensations ad nauseam during the past twenty years, which may have added to the gaiety of nations, but which have pointed no path onward…. But Harris is not a sensation. He is a product, a first-fruit perhaps, of a deep rebellion of the general human soul, though more especially the Western American soul…. It may be that he will prove to be the protagonist of the time-spirit.”21 With typically Farwellian mysticism, he charged Harris with a mission that was not merely musical. Whatever metaphysical historian Oswald Spengler's idea of the “time-spirit” might have meant to Farwell or his audience, its protagonist was surely engaged in something more important than spinning shapely melodies, even if those melodies were temporarily its most potent sign. And while Farwell could not successfully act as a spokesman for his own time, Harris could.

  “BIG SYMPHONY FROM THE WEST”

  The first unmistakable signals that Harris had leaped to the center of American musical life came with his Symphony 1933. Given the kind of advertising Harris's associations with the West had recently received, it is not surprising that the rhetoric of westernness infiltrated both the way Harris described the symphony's conception and the critical reception of the work (though not necessarily in that logical order). The story of the work's origin provided one of Harris's most cherished anecdotes. It exists in numerous variants, and the most detailed is one of the last. In an oral history interview from 1966, he related his initial interaction with Serge Koussevitzky during the spring of 1933 and the circumstances that led the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra to commission a symphonic work from him:

  Koussevitzky said, “Copland has told me about you (I know you anyhow from Nadia Boulanger), but Copland says that you are the American Moussorgsky.”

  You see? And we had a laugh about it.

  He said, “You must write me a symphony.”

  So I said, “What kind of symphony do you want?”

  And he said, “Oh, I want a big symphony from the West.”22

  This account is plausible enough, especially considering that Farwell's (or Rosen-feld's) recent western characterizations may have been echoing in the background. There is a certain aptness, too, in the Harris-Musorgsky analogy in that both have often been portrayed as autodidacts. The friendships between Copland, Boulanger, and Koussevitzky are well known; furthermore, according to Stehman, Koussevitzky would probably have seen Harris's earlier score, American Portrait, when it was entered in (but then withdrawn from) a competition that the conductor helped judge.23 But the story of the symphony commission is curiously absent from any sources predating 1951, indicating that the composer either kept his exchange with Koussevitzky strangely private for almost two decades or else recollected (or developed) it sometime after the fact. Indeed, the striking coincidences between the language of the anecdote and the wording of some of the publicity surrounding the premiere suggest that in the end it made little difference whether the composer shared the conductor's words with certain favored critics or whether he later fashioned their words into a more compelling, autobiographically enriched formula.

  Harris's anecdote would have been right at home, for example, in Nicolas Slonimsky's article for the Boston Evening Transcript of 24 January 1934, just two days before the work's premiere. Slonimsky provided nearly two full columns of biographical background and musical description under the headline “From the West Composer New to Bostonians.” His readers, the potential audience for the upcoming concert, could have memorized some of the familiar themes: Harris's pioneer parents and his early days on the farm, the difficulty of preserving a “native idiom” amid “European syntax,” and the achievements of a composer whose “inspiration is derived from the nature about him.” “His music is born not invented,” Slonimsky opined. “It reflects not the European ready-made manufacture, but a free and somewhat mysterious firmament of America.”24 So great was the European threat that Slonimsky even felt compelled to reframe Harris's growing interest in medieval and Renaissance music as a lesser-known aspect of his all-American style. After discussing Harris's
harmonic language, he dismissed the argument that references to the church modes might reflect Harris's interest in older music (which was unfortunately European): “Ascetic intervals that suggest monastic origin, are reflective in an American composer, of the spacious Western deserts. Harris is not a poet of the city and does not take interest in ‘depicting the age of machinery.' In his music he is always a Westerner; his rhythmical verve reflects the dry energy of the mountain air; his melodic line is heliotropic.”25

  The preconception that Harris was characteristically western seems to have been the primary motivation for linking the Symphony 1933 and the West. There is nothing in the symphony that requires a western interpretation. In fact, Harris took almost all of its material from earlier sketches and compositions. This borrowing may have been a necessity given that he had only a few months to complete the entire score (and copy the parts) for Koussevitzky's rehearsals in the fall, but it does raise questions about the anecdote regarding its commission. The bulk of the third movement, for instance, consisted of reworked material from a previous symphonic effort, the American Portrait: 1929. That work celebrated what the composer considered generally American features—its movements were titled “Initiative,” “Expectation,” “Speed,” and “Collective Force”—but lacked any specifically western references.26 Harris's own description of the 1933 symphony also adhered to these relatively abstract attributes: “In the first movement I have tried to capture the mood of adventure and physical exuberance; in the second, of the pathos which seems to underlie all human existence, in the third, the mood of a positive will to power and action.”27 All of these traits were advantages for the western hero Harris was becoming, but none was geographically determinate.