by Beth E. Levy
Embracing the “naïvety” that allowed Harris to “substitute for Bruckner's heaven the empty prairie,” Mellers continued, arguing that “the music enacts the growth of a civilization.” Starting from “the primitive identity between man and nature,” the symphony “imaginatively re-enacts man's apparent conquest of nature and his achievement of civilization.” With the onset of the pastoral section, woodwind instruments “begin to pick out brief, comparatively fragmentary tunes which are derived from the long, plainsong-like melodies, but which become progressively more rhythmic, perky and assertive, less lyrical and ‘religious.' Ultimately they turn into American hill-billy and shanty-tune: the crude music the pioneer makes to assert his humanity against Nature.” Finally, we reach the brusque fugue subject, which “sounds like a fusion of a late medieval hocket or hiccup (which has disrupted the continuity of plainsong line and rhythm) with the fuguing hymn, and with the music of Middle West dance-hall and honky-tonk. The cruelty within the American wilderness comes to the surface as the creative spontaneity of religious lyricism is defeated. The broken rhythms are savage, the scoring harsh…. this is the only part of Harris's score which reminds us of the urban idiom of Copland.”14 Though the symphony might have moved from the mythic unity of man and nature to the fractured sounds of the American city, it could not, in Mellers's view, close on Copland's urban turf; the “innate heroism of the pioneer re-establishes itself” in the tragic coda that caused Koussevitzky to claim that Harris's magnum opus was the first “tragic” American symphony.15
Harris clearly felt the “weight of history” in this work—whether that history was American history, “western” history, music history, or personal history. As an exercise in autogenesis, the symphony took a stance against the twin poles of Stravinsky and Schoenberg. The slow movement and the boisterous fugue were worlds away from Stravinskian austerity; the consonant and often triadic harmonies also flew in the face of Schoenbergian serialism.16 In a more intimate realm, the symphony was the first major orchestral work Harris wrote after gaining the critical spotlight, and the first since his marriage to Johana Harris (née Beula Duffey), an event he often credited with boosting his confidence. In retrospect, Harris also allotted to the audiences of the American West a special, and perhaps not entirely justified, role in solidifying the reputation of his “Lucky Third.” “Let's not kid ourselves,” he reminisced:
The Third Symphony happened to come along when it was needed. The first season it was greeted with all the same boos and bravos as have been all my works. Then because Koussevitzky was completely sold on it, he took it on his Western tour where it was much more warmly received by the public. So it was recorded. Then within a few weeks it was featured by the Chicago Symphony, the Cleveland Symphony, and broadcast by Toscanini over N.B.C. In the same week Victor released the Koussevitzky recordings and Time magazine hailed the work as the most important American symphony. From then on, the Third Symphony was in. That's the way things happen in America, and there's nothing anybody can do about it.17
WESTWARD EXPANSION—TRAGIC: FAREWELL TO PIONEERS
By the year of the Third Symphony, then, “autogenetic melody” was a sufficiently established concept to form part of Harris's pedagogical and professional arsenal. The ambiguity in the prefix “auto” would continue to serve him well. It could invoke both the highly personal auto of autobiography (or, for that matter, autodidact) and the impersonal auto of the autochthon” The origin of the efficacious term autogenesis remains shrouded in mystery, but it may once again have been music critics who laid the foundation for this part of Harris's aesthetic platform—this time with Mendel leading the way. As early as 1932, not long after Rosenfeld's influential essay, Mendel attempted to clarify the Harris agenda: “Roy Harris is trying to work out an idiom in which the structure shall be based on the self-determined growth of the melodic material, not on any superimposed form…. It must grow as a plant or an animal grows, along lines dictated by its own inner necessity, not imposed on it from above.”18 The parallel between Mendel's “self-determined” and Harris's “autogenetic” is suggestive, but not conclusive in a critical environment saturated with organic theorizing. More striking is the fact that Harris's first documented use of the word seems to have occurred scarcely a year after Mendel's article appeared, explicitly in reference to the “big symphony from the West.”19
Surprisingly, in his program note for the Symphony 1933, Harris uses the term to refer not to the sinuous unfolding of the first movement's lyrical second theme, but to the rather more mechanical, contrapuntal third movement in which most of the thematic material is apparently generated from an opening three-note motive. In his widely disseminated review of the symphony, Henry Taylor Parker picked up the autogenetic idea (though not the term) and put a slightly different spin on it. Rather than focusing on motivic economy, Parker praised Harris's expansive, even long-winded melodic utterances, and it is this sense of the term that Harris (and Cox) would later employ. Couching his description of Harrisian melody between two references to the composer's westernness, the effusive Parker wrote: “From a germ his themes broaden and lengthen in a fashion strange to the short-breathed musical hour. From the themes develops melody long-lined, plastic, outspringing, upswinging, down-turning, unpredictable in its variety.”20 “Autogenesis” thus may have played a role, albeit a murkier one, in Harris's identification with the American West. From the beginning it may have carried a weakly western tinge.
The hypothetically western connotations of “autogenesis” seem still more plausible when one takes into consideration Harris's Farewell to Pioneers. Written in September 1935, three years before the Third Symphony, it is Harris's first overtly western work and one of his most extensive essays in “autogenesis.” In fact, one might say that the evocatively titled Farewell to Pioneers (Symphonic Elegy) takes ideas of “autogenesis” as its musical and programmatic subject matter. What could have offered a stronger invitation to experiment with the idea of autogenesis than a depiction of self-made men and women? Indeed, what could have allowed a more tangible expression of the western heritage that had lately brought Harris such rewards? Farewell to Pioneers, Harris maintained, “is a tribute to a passing generation of Americans to which my own father and mother belong. Theirs was the last generation to affirm and live by the pioneer standards of frontiersmen. They were born of and taught by a race of men and women who seemed to crave the tang of conquering wildernesses and wresting abundance from virgin soil.”21 Not everyone was convinced by Harris's tribute. In fact, the 1936 premiere received reviews that were at best lukewarm. Colin McPhee, for example, lamented that Harris had decided to publish the work before it had been heard, noting that “much will have to be done before it can sound…. The orchestra is once more the ‘voice' of the composer, holding the unwilling listener with its personal tale.”22 Even Harris's much-vaunted “personality” could not save him here—on the contrary, McPhee condemned the work in part because he disliked being manipulated by the nineteenth-century leanings of its composer's “voice.”
Although the premiere was a critical disappointment, it seems likely that Farewell to Pioneers earned a place in Harris's teaching canon, for this brief work supplied one of the primary exhibits in Cox's discussion of “autogenetic” melody. Though he opened his thesis with a passage from a more sophisticated work, Harris's Fifth Symphony, Cox turned to the Farewell to Pioneers for his very next illustration (example 34). As Cox observed, the “fundamental idea” generating the passage is a systematic scheme of widening intervals. The first bar (m. 71) yields first a semitone, then a major second, minor third, and major third. The second bar continues the expansion in a less systematic way, touching on a tri-tone and a perfect fourth and stretching the range of this measure as a whole to the perfect fifth B-F#.
In this and other passages, Harris aimed (or so he told Cox) for “a gentle variation of both pitch and rhythm design so subtly conceived that the auditor is gradually and almost imperceptibly le
d onward and onward into fresh and new fields of melody.”23 Yet these fertile melodic fields eluded listeners. McPhee was not the only critic to reject the work; it had very few performances and was never recorded.24 Something was obscuring the endless possibilities for development that its themes were supposed to have promised.
EXAMPLE 34. Farewell to Pioneers, mm. 71–85 (as it appears in Cox, “The Autogenetic Principle in the Melodic Writings of Roy Harris” [Master's thesis, Cornell University, 1948]).
At least two explanations for the failure of Farewell to Pioneers come to mind, each reflecting a concept of autogenesis different from the melodic autogenesis that Cox painstakingly described. The difficulties seem to stem not from Harris's melodic techniques, but rather from the historical self-fashioning evoked by his title: the odyssey of the American pioneers. In the first place, Harris purposefully eschewed technical sophistication because, according to the program note for Farewell to Pioneers, any overrefinement would have been out of place: “this last generation inherited social and economic standards which were direct and simple. They abhorred subtlety and nuance as evidence of an urbanity which could not survive the rigors of Nature's laws.”25 The melody has none of the rhythmic interest and delightful flexibility that had characterized parts of the Symphony 1933. Its design is intentionally stark, the changing articulations only emphasizing the driving insistence of nearly incessant eighth notes.
Second and more importantly, Harris placed this theme—and all the others in Farewell to Pioneers—in a barren environment where “organic” melody could hardly be expected to thrive. The piece unfolds over a series of ostinato figures (one of the few techniques that both of his teachers, Farwell and Boulanger, would have approved). There are four main sections (example 35), based on four ostinati, the third of which dissipates into a repeated rhythmic motto after nine repetitions. The first and third ostinati are rhythmically and intervallically related; the second and fourth ostinati are based on tritone alternation. Rather than molding the piece into a sonata form, Harris chose an additive structure without prescribed section lengths or thematic functions.
EXAMPLE 35. Ostinati in Farewell to Pioneers (New York: G. Schirmer, 1935)
Harris did make a few gestures toward linking the four sections—the five-bar transition between ostinati one and two and the gradual dissolution of ostinato three, for example. But the cumulative result remains blocklike and impenetrable, suggesting a series of static backdrops more than an evolving scene. In his thesis on autogenesis, Cox actually chose for his example the only measures in the piece where ostinati do not absolutely dominate the texture. For these fifteen bars, the lower strings rest from their reiterations, though after one measure's pause, their rhythmic work is dutifully carried on by the entire brass section, molto marcato. The sheer accumulation of ostinato patterns led McPhee to observe: “The orchestra labored along far more wearily than did any of the most fatigued pioneers.” Incessant repetition undoubtedly also contributed to the displeasure of reviewers for the Philadelphia papers, who called the piece “a bit relentless in its monotony” and a “cheerless journey” that “begins at nothing and ends at nothing.”26
EXAMPLE 36. Farewell to Pioneers, mm. 1-10
The beginning of Farewell to Pioneers in particular betrays the contradiction between autogenesis and musical landscape painting. Its opening melody shares some of the autogenetic traits Cox described: fragments that are recognizably—even crudely—related to one another, and a sense of progression created by the melody's gradually lengthening phrases and slowly rising register. Any perceptible “organic growth” in this melody remains stunted, however, by frequent rests, limited pitch content, and the restrictive space in which the melody travels (example 36). The initial ostinato figure, with its parallel perfect fifths in low registers, precisely recalls the ostinati of the Indianists. For Farwell and Cadman, such ostinati had served to depict the picturesque vastness of nearly empty spaces and to project onto indigenous peoples the qualities of “the primitive”: a heroic but ultimately doomed persistence, the tragic inability to change. Such connotations are in fact well suited to Farewell to Pioneers. The work was, after all, both elegy and eulogy—not for a “vanishing race,” but for a “passing generation.” “Time has called them,” Harris's program note proclaimed, “and Industrialism has relegated their ideals to the shelves of the impractical.”
Paradoxically, autogenetic melody and the pioneer program were put at odds in this context. It is not so much that autogenetic procedures cannot be found in the score, but that such procedures are audibly overwhelmed by the persistent ostinati. Melodies, whether autogenetic or not, are dwarfed in this hostile soundscape; or, as Mendel might have put it, the melody was not allowed to dictate the form. The autogenetic process was ultimately thwarted by a setting in which the individuals supposedly central to the program were granted less sonic presence than the imaginary landscape engulfing them. At the same time, Harris seems to have neglected the timbral considerations that usually play such a key role in the evocation of musical landscapes. Compared to the varied palette that Debussy used to color his “Nuages”—or, closer to home, the one that Copland would use in his Appalachian Spring—the sonorities of Farewell to Pioneers are bleak indeed. This lack of timbral differentiation may have been an unintentional side effect of Harris's concentration on melodic matters, or even a simple miscalculation, since, as McPhee noted, the work was published before it had been performed. On the other hand, it may have faithfully reflected Harris's own views about the stark difficulties of pioneer life, collective difficulties that—at least at first—seemed incongruous with his own heroic individualism.
WESTWARD EXPANSION—TRIUMPHANT: CIMARRON
Harris retained both autogenetic and ostinato techniques, but he soon identified himself with a more colorful array of western ancestors, both real and imaginary. The culmination of this process, and Harris's closest approach to western autobiography, can be seen and heard in Cimarron (1941). Dedicated to his natal state of Oklahoma and named for one of the regions of Indian Territory opened for white settlement by the land runs that began in 1889, Cimarron was a generous gesture by a composer whom Oklahomans were proud to claim as a “native son.”27 As the first of Harris's pieces for symphonic band, the work represents another milestone in Harris's career that was marked by a western reference, and it shows the composer experimenting with an ensemble that was self-consciously distant from the European symphony orchestra.28
In his choice of title, Harris did more than reference the Oklahoma land runs. As Denise von Glahn has pointed out, he evoked a web of cultural references loosely linked to the Spanish cimarrón, meaning “wild,” “untamed,” or sometimes “escaped”: a parched southwestern river, an infamous city in Kansas, numerous dime novel place names and characters, and especially the northwest portion of Indian Territory, crossed by the Santa Fe Trail and home to battles of resistance by Plains Indian tribes—the Osage, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Comanche. Von Glahn observes: “The name was synonymous with images of the frontier—open land, rugged men, strong women, brave scouts, resourceful settlers, dangerous natives, lonesome cowboys—America at its earthiest.”29 What's more, no less an authority than Paul Rosenfeld had called Harris a “Cimarron” in the first paragraph of a review from the mid-i93os.30
Of all the “manifestations of cimarron” that von Glahn describes, Edna Ferber's novel Cimarron (1929), adapted for film in 1931, offers by far the most dramatic encapsulation of the land runs that shaped Harris's piece. “It was History made in an hour,” declares Ferber's frontier protagonist, Yancey Cravat:
They came like a procession—a crazy procession—all the way to the Border, covering the ground as fast as they could, by any means at hand…. It takes generations of people hundreds of years to settle a new land. This was going to be made livable over night—was made—like a miracle out of the Old Testament. Compared to this, the Loaves and Fishes and the parting of the Red Sea were nothing—mere tri
cks…. A wilderness one day—except for an occasional wandering band of Indians—an empire the next. If that isn't a modern miracle.31
With a combination of biblical prophecy and contemporary know-how, Yancey Cravat's fellow settlers tumbled into what appeared to be “promised land.” In most respects Harris's Cimarron story was not so very different.
Harris himself was born after the Oklahoma land runs, and his family spent their Oklahoma years many miles east of Cimarron County. Yet the program note printed in the score unsurprisingly smacks of autobiography. Though technically anonymous, it includes a substantial paragraph “in the words of the composer” and gives an outline of events: “The work tells the story of the beginning of a sleeping, uncivilized land—nature undisturbed by man—gradually becoming intensified to an utmost height of excitement.” At the climax, “the percussion with the resounding staccato of a shotgun, lets loose a drum shot report, representing the firing of a ten-gauge shotgun, to release those men on horseback, foot and wagons lined along the Cimarron banks at noontime prepared to make a dash for the land on which to build their homesteads.” After the mad rush, there emerges a “steady sonorous idealistic march representing the progress of pioneering toward an established civilization.”32
This is a far cry from the pessimistic program of Farewell to Pioneers. Rather than eulogizing the passing of the pioneer family, Cimarron ennobles the advancing forces of white civilization committed to settling previously “undisturbed” land. It presents an invasion, not a retreat. Even the initial evocation of landscape illustrates some of these differences. Instead of symmetrical whole-tone wanderings or tritone-driven ostinati, Cimarron offers directional diatonic melodic fragments over a static but consonant bass (example 37). As a whole, with its combinations of gong, vibraphone, and tenor saxophone, the opening possesses considerably more timbral interest than does the parallel passage in Farewell to Pioneers, even though Harris had recourse to fewer instrumental families. Interjections by oboe and muted trumpet enliven the otherwise bleak texture, suggesting the region's gradual awakening. Von Glahn has linked the opening tenor saxophone solo, marked “sweet, lonesome” with the western's “lonesome cowboys,” and she aptly observes that the echoes offered up by oboe and other winds recall the “bucolic duets” of earlier pastoral pieces; the “Open Prairie” of Copland's 1938 ballet Billy the Kid may also be hovering in the background as Harris's Cimarron crescendos toward its climax.
