Hard Road

Throughout the past summer and into the fall, Roy Harris was completing his Twelfth Symphony, a fifty-minute work in homage to Père Marquette, for performance in Milwaukee in November. In conjunction with the symphony, he scheduled another new work, a concerto for piano and brass instruments, which was composed for his wife, Johana Harris, a very great pianist and virtuoso, assoluta who, for reasons of her own, has refused to have a concert career, and since she only rarely appears in public, is something of a legend. He himself was the conductor.

Thirty years ago, an event of this magnitude would have received wide attention. But since the end of the Second World War Harris’ reputation has been on a slow slide. He still gets performed, he still receives commissions, but his influence has declined to the point where major conductors and major chamber groups do not keep his music in repertory. Record companies make no effort to keep up with his output. Most young composers are not interested in what he is doing and do not study his scores.

Harris was a late starter and a late bloomer. When he was pushing thirty, the Guggenheim Foundation sent him to France to study with Nadia Boulanger, from whom he has sometimes said that he learned nothing at all. Whether he did or didn’t, he came back from Paris ready to preside, in collaboration with some of his colleagues, over a musical revolution which consisted, among other things, in replacing or displacing a great many older people who made up an American Establishment of sorts. These included Mrs. H. H. A. Beach, John Alden Carpenter, and Edward Burlingame Hill, who were talented, skillful, and (in Hill’s case) pretty good, but behind the times by European standards.

Possibly the new wave was a response to a felt need, though if it was felt, it was certainly not by concert audiences—indifferent, as always, to repertory. Whatever the reasons, Harris found his niche in history anti slipped into it at exactly the right moment. And he took over like an heir coming into his estate.

Mystified outsiders assumed that Boulanger’s pupils constituted a sort of musical Mafia. The effect was overwhelming. Schoenberg, writing to his brother-in-law as late as 1949, said:

They have taken over American musical life lock, stock and barrel, at least in the schools of music. The only person who can get an appointment in a university music department is one who has taken his degree with one of them, and even pupils are recruited and scholarships awarded to them in order to have the next generation in the bag.

Schoenberg gives the impression of a far tighter organization than ever actually existed. Rivalry among the Boulanger pupils would alone have precluded such a cohesiveness, and there were strong figures, men as unalike as Howard Hanson and Roger Sessions, who were not part of any Boulangerie but did have a hand in running things.

Harris’ position in the power structure was an odd one. He was a loner and still is. He exuded contempt. which he made no effort to conceal, for most of his contemporaries and a great many of the honored dead. Wagner was “the pisspot of the 19th century.” So much for Wagner. Then, there was a jingle beginning: “A beard and a stomach named Brahms.”

Unlike many of the other Frenchtrained musicians, Harris’ music had about it something of the Teutonic gravity that American audiences expected and liked in symphonic works. This may not be the reason for his having been taken up by Koussevitzky, as was Copland. To the two composers, it was an enormous advantage to have access to the Boston Symphony, but it was even more useful to have so highly respected a conductor as a press agent. Occasionally, one or the other of them would fall from grace, but the ruptures were short and the world was never aware of them. Koussevitzky said that Harris and Copland were great, and until he died he kept saying so with such authority and such monotonous regularity that a chunk of the public received the message as incontrovertible truth.

Harris, particularly, was fortunate in his press. He had a smoldering feud with Olin Downes, the music critic of the New York Times, at a time when Downes’s approval would have been the kiss of death. He got a great deal of mindless adulation from people who did not know what they were talking about, such as the tin ear in Boston who got the idea that the first symphony was atonal (which it is not, by any conceivable definition) and, therefore, great. But, more than that, he won the respect of some of the most hardheaded and astute listeners in the country. One of these was Herbert Elwell, the critic of the Cleveland Plain Dealer who, being a good composer himself, commanded the respect of other composers. Another, Paul Rosenfeld (some of whose papers were recently reissued in book form) , wrote for liberal weeklies and influenced an enormous amount of opinion. Perhaps the most influential was Nicolas Slonimsky, a musicologist of phenomenally broad taste, who is respected as one of the great authorities on twentieth-century music. In the early forties, Slonimsky wrote a piece about Harris called “America’s Composer Number One,” which had a wide circulation and got a mixed reaction, particularly from other composers who thought that they had been fouled.

Harris’ fame at that time was at its height, and if he had been hit by a truck in, say, 1944, he would have left all the music on which his reputation rests. There is, after all. such a thing as dying at the right time, and whatever personal inconvenience is involved for the composer, the effect on his historical position can be considerable.

This is an unsavory topic and not one worth belaboring, but in terms of what happened to Harris, it is worth looking at the careers of men like Griffes and Gershwin, who went to their reward in time to corner a place in the future, as opposed to composers who lived on after their styles had become officially obsolete.

Harris brought his own style to full maturity with the Third Symphony (1938), and he has remained true to it. I suspect that, in his heart of hearts, he thinks that there is only one really good and true style: his own. For a composer, this is not an improper view. Of the reasons given for writing music at all—to communicate, to convey emotional states, to fill a need, and so forth—the one least open to challenge is the need for a personal fulfillment that is not satisfied by anybody else.

In fact, Harris went through considerable stylistic contortions between his Opus 1—the 1928 Piano Sonata—and his Opus 55, the Fifth Symphony (19 13) • The sonata, to be blunt, is an ugly work. At the time it was written, it was a not uncharacteristic product of Mme. Boulanger’s bakery. Many years ago, Harris himself said that you had to put more into it than you could get out of it, that it was too hard to play, and the hell with it. I wonder if he would say so now. The difficulties, which once were staggering, will have fallen to the new virtuosity. In effect, however, it is still an affront to the listener—a punch in the gut, a slap in the face.

A great many of Harris’ early pieces—the clarinet concerto, the Trio, the “Three Variations on a Theme” for string quartet—are imbued with a bizarre combination of overt rudeness to the listener and a sorrow beyond solace. His first enormous success was the First Symphony (1933) . Listening now to a recording that Koussevitzky made shortly after the piece was completed, I’m astonished at the incoherence of it. It seems to be made out of angercold fury, steaming rage, all the makings of a bad scene. Whatever happened to it? I’ve never seen a score, and I don’t know where there is one, or whether the orchestra materials are available.

During the thirties, Harris’ great problem as a composer was housebreaking his style and coming up with some sort of message that people wanted to hear. This meant a radical break with going trends in modern music in point of rhythm and harmony.

In the matter of rhythm, Harris, by taste and inclination, is given to considerable freedom. Much of his music—the first couple of minutes of the Third Symphony will do as an example—does not lend itself at all to conventional rhythmic notation. However, fairly early in his career, Harris had some nasty experiences with conductors. He wrote a toccata for orchestra which was supposed to be performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Artur Rodzinski. The score is characterized by frequent changes of meter, common now, rare then. Rodzinski was not able to cope with the piece, and did not find this out until rehearsal. There were words, there were fisticuffs, the composer was dragged from the stage, and the work has still never been performed.

After Harris became a Koussevitzky protégé, he had to make compromises in order to be played. Surviving recordings would not indicate that Koussevitzky’s ineptitude was ever as great as the legend has it, but whenever he had trouble with a new piece, it was the composer’s fault, and Harris—never anybody’s fool—learned how to write music with the optional cuts built in, so that if the old boy fell on his ear in rehearsal, there would be something to salvage. For the Boston Symphony Harris wrote some delicious music that has never been heard, but his approach to rhythm is plainer than it would be if he had always had access to performers as good as the going American conservatory product.

As for harmony: the Viennese moderns claimed to have emancipated the dissonance. Harris hoped to offer consonance the same courtesy. To explain his own procedures, he developed the beginnings of a system which introduced three novel concepts: a musical semantics based on chord color; a way of moving from one chord to another without reference to either conventional voice-leading or conventional rootprogressions; and a method of building chords in which none of the notes was treated as a dissonance. He arrived at a personal idiom which is, in some ways, a private language. Now that he has written so much, it is clear that his theories are far less important than the music that supports them.

In 1936 (with the Piano Quintet),

Harris anticipated the general sweetening in tone that was to mark the music of the forties. He became overconfident, and in his overconfidence, he sometimes let himself go a little slack. He allowed his perfected harmonic style to serve as a vehicle that he could jump into and drive off as he did Golden Boy, his gorgeous 1941 Lincoln Zephyr car. Writing without difficulty, he sometimes wrote by the yard. Composers do tend to repeat themselves, and with a prolific composer such as Harris, the repetitiveness is more apparent than it would be in somebody like Carl Ruggles, who, throughout his career, wrote little and with evident difficulty. With Harris, the hitch is that the style he most enjoys, the so-called “whitenote" style with not much going on and obeisances to D Major all over the place, is the one best calculated to lose him friends within the profession. And, right now, this is where friends count.

Harris’ favorite poet is Whitman. The affinity is a reasonable and natural one. but it accounts for a kind of tuneless meandering that one finds in many of Harris’ most ambitious works. He used to say that, in first draft, his own themes tended to sound like “There’s a long, long trail a-winding.” This is a pleasant conceit, but there is no body of notebooks to support it. The first draft of a Harris tune is usually the last, and more often than not it is like the first few notes of the Third Symphony: straightforward, asymmetrical, and not particularly arresting.

In giving his idiosyncrasies their freedom, Harris is bound to repel audiences and alienate critics. But his strength—and this is most unusual and very great indeed—is that, given the alternative of saving his skin by changing his style or doing what he thinks is morally and aesthetically right, he has chosen to keep his integrity intact. This is doing it the hard way, and it is following the hard road. The hard but royal road.

Since Harris has grown old—he is almost seventy-two—you could say that it is all over but the shouting. This is not true—not true of him, not true of Copland or Piston or Sessions. The one thing that these men have in common, besides their age, is boundless energy. In vigor, in talent, in skill, even in his voice and appearance, and of course his prejudices, Harris is quite the man he was at forty. Barring some disaster, he is good for another twenty active years. The shouting has been over for a long time, but it will come back. Perhaps he will live long enough to enjoy it.

Critical literature is full of bromides about how badly Society treats the Artist. In our culture, however, it is also the Artists who abuse and mistreat each other. There is always a cheering section whooping it up for some prominent figure—Harris, Wallingford Riegger (remember him?) , Stravinsky, Ives, Mahler, Mozart, Cage, Webern—whomever. If there were one scintilla of intelligence, judgment, or real discrimination behind the mass movements that begin with the professionals, trickle down to the public, and are finally dissipated when everybody needs a clean plate, chics and trends just might take on some meaning.

Harris’ story is interesting as a case. He has written perhaps fifteen first-class pieces and some other very good ones. So? Not enough? Most of this music is as good as it ever was because it is exactly what it is. And it is not the audience that has changed, only the enthusiasms.

What Harris has attempted to do is to create a lifework, an oeuvre, and in pursuing this goal he has been remarkably successful. At his age, this should not he his only satisfaction.