Frontier Figures

by Beth E. Levy

  So I went over to see Buffalo Bill, I mean Idaho Bill, and here he sat on a bale of hay, smokin' a cigar, and he says, “Young fella, I hear you're goin' back to [get an] education, back in the East. Whaddaya wanna do that [for]?” He says, “There's plenty goin' on out here. We need young fellas like you, and I'll tell you what I'll do if you'll stay with me. I'll give you a string to ride for yourself.” Some of you folks here in Pittsburgh don't know that a string means a whole bunch of ponies that you ride on the range.

  He says, “I tell you what I'll do with you, young fella,” he said. “You guard one of the gates for this Cowboys' Reunion anyhow and see [how] you like it. Maybe you'll get some of that in your blood. Maybe you'll stay here with us anyhow,” and I did….

  That was some Cowboys' Reunion. Of course it was done for the cowboys themselves. It wasn't much of a fair like you'd see, well let's say, in Madison Square Gardens [sic], wasn't professional, but it sure was rough. I remember that probably the most, the most fierce, the roughest one I saw of all was the wild horse race, where a man and his wrangler had to go and rope a wild horse out of a corral, put a saddle on him, and ride him around the track. And I saw some of those horses rise up and buck and fight until the blood ran out of their nose.30

  Harris here aligns the various elements of his artistic stance with the rodeo: disdain for education and the East, respect for the solitary wrangler working for Uncle Sam, fascination with the instinctive or untamed, concern for the continuity of tradition, personal worthiness to inherit valuable resources (in this case ponies rather than folk songs), and mistrust of all things professional. Running through the allusive account of these aesthetic elements is a curious, concrete, and sometimes violent obsession with wild horses. Considering that Harris had already used these mustangs as a metaphor for his own creative impulses—Boulanger had failed to give him “the machinery with which to release and harness the wild horses within him”31—the television fantasy takes on a significance far greater than fiction. The composer was a cowpuncher, and the wild horse race held dangers for both rider and steed.

  It should not be overlooked that Harris's characteristic cowpuncher presents a certain stance toward gender and sexuality. Cowgirls, no matter what their talents or aspirations, were considered comic figures in the mass media—and in Agnes de Mille's Rodeo. And for all the historically homosocial activity of the cowboy, he remained throughout the twentieth century the staunch symbol of a particular brand of heterosexual machismo, as literary critic Jane Tompkins has observed: “Westerns…emphasiz[e] the importance of manhood as an ideal. It is not one ideal among many, it is the ideal, certainly the only one worth dying for.” She notes that the typical western takes place “in a period and in an environment where few women are to be found and where conditions are the worst possible for their acquiring any social power.”32 Although nothing in Harris's music suggests the stereotypical vices of the western hero, many aspects of his life resonate with the aggressive masculinity that the western hero represented. He broadcast widely his commitment to conventionally masculine habits and hobbies. His love of fast cars (see figure 7) resulted in an accident that nearly left him lame. His lifelong enthusiasm for professional sports was spiced with the claim that he was almost signed by the Chicago White Sox as a young man, and (second only to farming) sports provided Harris with a favorite stockpile of metaphors for music and creativity.33

  Concern with masculinity had its impact on Harris's private life as well. His four marriages resulted in at least seven children.34 His last marriage, to the talented pianist Beula Duffey (whom he renamed Johana, in honor of J. S. Bach), counts as his longest and most productive relationship. Their “Sing a Song of Folk” broadcasts were only one of their many collaborations, and it has long been argued that Johana exerted a pronounced influence on Harris's writing for piano. Harris readily acknowledged Johana's expert musicianship and interpretive gifts; his recollections of their married life, however, focus on Johana's role as a willing wife cheerfully performing such domestic duties as keeping the kids quiet during his working hours. Louise Spizizen has shown in detail how Harris arranged a divorce from his third wife while simultaneously supervising the “erasure” of the successful and glamorous Beula, transforming her into his ideal helpmate, Johana, through obvious modifications of her appearance and behavior.35 Harris's preoccupation with control is, of course, not necessarily a gendered trait; however, in the familial contexts which were so important to him, it resulted in exaggerations of the traditional roles for husband and father.

  Although we cannot know for sure, Harris's emphasis on mature male heroes may have been a conscious or unconscious reaction against a critical establishment that frequently portrayed him as childlike or naive. As early as 1926 Copland had characterized Harris as “a child of nature with a child's love for his native hills and a child-like belief in the moral purpose of music.”36 Such portrayals became more and more typical as the composer got older, and even Johana endorsed them. When asked to offer a “personal note” for David Ewen's entry on Harris in The Book of Modern Composers (1942), she responded by deftly tying together this and other strands of Harris reception:

  FIGURE 7. Roy Harris during his time in Colorado in the 1940s, posing with his favorite car, “Golden Boy.” Courtesy of Patricia Harris

  Most people think of my husband as a good-natured, easy-going Westerner. And so he is. But he is many other people as well. To me he is a child—always eager—always ready to believe in everyone, always expecting miracles to happen, always being hurt and enraged by the social and economic injustices that he sees and feels everywhere he goes. And yet, he is an unquenchable optimist who loves beauty in every phase of living. In his creative life he is a priest and a devil rolled into one bundle of uncompromising drive.37

  The American primitive, the Western naïf, the authentic artistic voice waiting for the proper trigger to release creative impulses already fully formed within him—these were powerful variants on familiar mythologizing constructions, perhaps newer to American music than to American painting or literature, but still based on commonplace romantic views of artistic creation. They were not, however, the only such devices available to American composers in the 1930s and 1940s, and in the long run they were not the most successful ones.

  THE LONESOME COWBOY

  Harris reveled in the characterizations bestowed upon him by factions of the critical establishment. In some cases he helped to create and shape these characterizations. He remained committed to spreading them, and he continued to believe them, it seems, until the end of his life. From around 1930 until World War II, he was able to adopt or adapt them with relative reliability and great success, yet there were troubling clouds on the horizon for American music's western hero. The essentialism that bolstered his reputation also cast some distorting shadows, and it was not long before the images he had carefully promoted were turned against him.

  The first signs that the edges of the Harris myth had started to fray can be seen in a reevaluation of Harris's supposed “earnestness,” “sincerity,” and “genuineness.” These adjectives had clung to him since his pre-Paris days, and at first they were usually benevolent. Henry Cowell, writing in 1933, opened with a celebration of genuineness as it described the composer: “serious, writing only in the larger forms; continually improving his style; deadly earnest, with a devoted sincerity to musical ideals and high standards and with boundless enthusiasm as to his own possibilities.” The ambivalence of Cowell's final phrase blossoms into a more pointed suggestion that it was the composer's charisma, not his talent, that listeners found appealing, but for the most part Cowell was content to welcome Harris as a rising star.38

  The cosmopolitan critics who had been Harris's uneasy comrades in the Boulangerie were less generous in addressing Harris's supposed sincerity. After all, Harris had always been eager to distance himself from them; they seem to have returned the favor with equal grace. Writing less than a year after Cowell—and just b
efore the Symphony 1933 premiere—Walter Piston amiably congratulated Harris for “surviving the trying experience of being hailed as a genius.” Piston, like Cowell, noted Harris's contagious confidence in his own work, praising this enthusiasm as honest and refreshing. But only a few lines later, he introduced an eventually devastating trope into Harris reception. Before beginning his discussion of Harris's music, Piston planted the image of Harris as a musical innocent, working in happy obliviousness: “It is doubtful whether Harris is aware of the exact nature of the most expressive and telling qualities in his music. The slightly uncouth awkwardness, the nervous restlessness, he would undoubtedly consider defects rather than qualities. If these characteristics are due, as some think, to a lack of technic, let us hope the man can in some way be prevented from acquiring a technic which would rob his musical language of some of its most valuable at-tributes.”39 Piston implied not only that Harris's music might be technically weak, but also that the composer had to be protected from himself if his endeavors were to remain artistically valuable.

  Copland noticed this passage in Piston's article and latched onto it, even quoting it in some of his own writings.40 By 1941, when he published a longer assessment of Harris's life and works in Our New Music, he had taken this view of Harris several degrees further. Copland agreed with Cowell and Piston that Harris had real personality. “You can punch that personality full of holes,” he proclaimed. “You can demonstrate to your own satisfaction that the man doesn't know the first thing about composing—but the fact will remain that his is the most personal note in American music today.” Copland coolly observed that Harris's “essential personality” had hardly changed at all since his years in Paris—a remarkable artistic consistency that he viewed as a mixed blessing.41 But having raised the question of whether Harris's consistency should be considered a strength or a weakness, the article abruptly dismisses the question:

  Whatever one may think, it is useless to wish Harris otherwise than he is. One may show how much better his work might have been. And one can fervently hope that it will become continually more integrated. But there is no gainsaying that, such as it is, with all its faults and qualities, it is enormously important to us in the immediate scene. This is true, above all, because it is music of vitality and personality. Plenty of Americans have learned how to compose properly, and it has done us little good. Here is a man who, perhaps, may not be said to compose properly but who will do us lots of good.42

  Copland assigned Harris a specific and significant historical role, but it was a role that Harris played in spite of himself, and a role that nearly required his music to be seen as flawed. In this formulation, Harris's stylistic consistency might indeed reflect the genuineness of his composer's voice, but it also advertised his incorrigible mediocrity and prophesied his eventual obscurity.

  There were protests, too, about the substance and spread of the Harris myth. Already in 1934, Piston had wryly joked about the “blasphemy” of discovering any French influence in Harris's harmonic language; in speaking of Harrisian melody, he had made the obligatory references to the West, the pioneer spirit, and the craggy contours of mountain ranges, but he added an acerbic disclaimer: “References to elements not considered characteristic of the ‘good old U.S.A.' are carefully avoided in this connection, for Harris is, above all, the accepted one hundred per cent American composer.”43 The next year, Blitzstein complained about Harris's overblown gestures: “Can he do nothing about the insistent mood of ‘Olympian' ostentation which has crept in? How often, when a real contour and ‘face' begins to appear in a movement, it becomes dimmed and blotted out by vague rhetorical repetitiousness and posturing, gloomy-grand, or American-sinewy, or what-not!” 44

  Others began to question whether Harris's long-standing profession of authenticity could be taken at face value or whether it might have served merely to attract attention—or worse, to make money. By 1940, Virgil Thomson had (suavely, of course) lost his temper:

  No composer in the world, not even in Italy or Germany, makes such shameless use of patriotic feelings to advertise his product. One would think to read his prefaces, that Harris had been awarded by God, or at least by popular vote, a monopolistic privilege of expressing our nation's deepest ideals and highest aspirations. And when the piece so advertised turns out to be a mostly not very clearly orchestrated schoolish counterpoint and a quite skimpy double fugue (neither of which has any American connotation whatsoever), one is tempted to put the whole thing down as insincere and a bad joke.45

  Thomson tried to strip Harris of his sincerity, allying him with marketing monopolies, and alluding to fascism rather than some more benign form of patriotism.

  Finally, Harris's whiteness and his fervent Americanism took on devastating lives of their own, haunting him in contexts where they were unlikely to win him critical or popular support. Harris had openly accepted prevalent racial theories, embracing his Anglo-Saxon heritage absolutely as an artistic asset. But, with the outbreak of World War II, not everyone retained his conviction that racial awareness was so sound a key to creativity. While composers were fleeing the anti-Semitic policies of Nazi Germany, Harris's rosy view of the direct linkage between race and music was quickly becoming unfashionable and in some circles morally suspect.

  Within the influential circles of Modern Music, for example, voices were being raised against nationalisms of all sorts, but especially against any nationalism that resembled German fascism in its emphasis on race. The refugee musicologist Alfred Einstein, writing in 1939, felt justified in proclaiming that “the greatest foe of freedom, independence and truth in art—and in science—is Nationalism…. Blood and soil do not make the creative spirit; it is rather the spirit…that makes blood and soil. The whole future of America's music will stand or fall by this truth.”46 Later in the same issue (in the article immediately preceding Mendel's essay on Harris's quintet), Rosenfeld drew bleak portraits of “regionalism and racialism,” accusing the regionalist of wanting to keep the “city boys” and the “country boys” carefully separated and equating the racialist's concern for “purity” and “the true folk manner” with a kind of fascism.47 In the subsequent issue of the journal, Roger Sessions expressed his concern about “the present trend toward nationalism and cultural isolationism among American musicians” in equally powerful terms: “A certain number of our musicians, together with a not negligible part of our musical press, is demanding with a voice quite reminiscent of various totalitarian phrases which we have heard, that music which shall ‘express the national feeling,' ‘reflect the American scene,' ‘establish an American style.'”48

  Harris was not the direct target of these attacks—in fact, he might not have acknowledged any similarities between his innocent love of nation and the rabid nationalism decried by the critics cited above. Yet Harris's Americanism was falling ever further out of step with the attitudes of his colleagues, and his racially charged rhetoric began to invoke unpleasant analogies. In a quarterly report for Modern Music (April-May 1940), Conlon Nancarrow condemned one of Harris's radio broadcasts on these chilling grounds: “WQXR has recently given two recorded programs of Harris' music. On one of them, the composer in person presented his ‘rhythm-of-race' theory. I wonder if he feels that it ‘can't happen here' and that therefore, because of immunity, all this doesn't really matter; or that it can happen here and would be a fine thing….”49 Few dared to be this blunt in 1940, but the damning implications of Nancarrow's scenario show how quickly the territory on which Harris had built his reputation could become precarious.

  During the 1930s and into the 1940s, Harris had many sympathetic compatriots who were also engaged in producing the kind of all-American music he espoused. Copland, William Schuman, and others joined Harris in writing wartime fanfares, symphonies, ballets, and choral works devoted to patriotic themes. As late as 1945, when Cowell hired Harris to work for the Office of War Information, many other prominent American composers could have filled the bill. Yet Harris's hea
rtfelt justifications of the differences between American and European music lasted much longer, and eventually worked against the growing internationalism and valorization of abstraction that would take hold in the 1950s and 1960s. Swimming upstream, Harris remained true to his patriotic (and programmatic) beginnings by writing the “Gettysburg” Symphony in 1944, Kentucky Spring in 1949, the cantata Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight in 1953, a Folk Fantasy for Festivals in 1956, the “Abraham Lincoln” Symphony in 1965, and even the Bicentennial Symphony 1976, shortly before his death. Ultimately, these works suffered from a critical neglect that betrays embarrassment with their insistent Americanism, as much as their consonant musical style or questionable counterpoint.

  After Harris's death in 1979, numerous obituaries addressed these accumulated questions about Harris's music and his career trajectory. Among the most extensive and thoughtful such treatments is an article-length reflection on the composer entitled, “Roy Harris: In Memoriam (But Keep Your Hats On).” Here, Marshall Bialosky adds Harris's name to a roster of tragic figures in the history of American music: “What is the tragedy of Roy Harris? It is the tragedy of a man who was declared at the very outset of his career—by important composers and critics alike, not to mention himself—capable of great achievements in composition, but who was able in the end only to acquire the trappings and the publicity of a great composer. Then he was robbed of even that by onrushing musical history, which in an age of high technical achievement, atonalism, serialism, indeterminate and chance music, electronic and computer music, made nationalism suddenly obsolete.”50

  Harris was not exceptional in being both an advocate and a victim of certain kinds of racial and national determinism, but he was more profoundly, and in the end more adversely, affected by them than most of his white colleagues. The national and ethnic characterizations that had gathered around him were too strongly established and too publicly sanctioned to be politely overlooked after the cataclysmic racialist-nationalist debacle of World War II and the changes it brought to American musical life. Unlike Cowell, Harris did not balance his overt Americanisms with radically experimental abstract works. Unlike Copland, he took no radical steps to dissociate himself from his supposed racial heritage; on the contrary, he continued to celebrate it, though not exclusively, all his life. Unlike Gershwin, Harris survived well into the second half of the century, by which point such strong ethnic associations and accessible content (at least in American art music) were often more a liability than a strength. For the forty years that stretched from the symphonic triumphs of 1939-40 to his death, driven and encumbered by a legend he had helped to create, Harris held his ground.