I Hear America Singing!
Choral Music of Roy Harris
* Easter Motet, Alleluia
* Mass
* Madrigal, They say that Susan has no heart for learning
* Whitman Triptych
* Three Songs of Democracy on Poems of Walt Whitman
* Symphony for Voices on Poems of Walt Whitman
* When Johnny Comes Marching Home
The Roberts Wesleyan College Chorale/Robert Shewan
Albany TROY164 Total time: 70:12
Summary for the Busy Executive: Important and neglected work from an
important and neglected composer, and it will probably stay that way.
When one thinks of Roy Harris, one thinks of the American symphony,
with good reason. Harris, however, lived a rather peripatetic life,
from one academy to another. At one point, he found himself professor
of composition at the distinguished Westminster Choir College in Princeton,
New Jersey. He had written important choral pieces before the appointment
and would write others after, but I'm convinced this stay confirmed his
commitment to the genre. For one thing, he had access to at least one
great choir under the leadership of the important choral conductor John
Finley Williamson. It's a rare composer indeed who can turn down a
musical Rolls with the driver's door open and the key in the ignition.
Considering how low under the radar Harris's music now flies, you may
be surprised to learn that at one time he and Copland ran neck and neck
for the title of Most Significant American Composer. As late as the
Fifties, one could find fierce partisan battles between Harrisites and
Coplandsmen, but the musical controversies of postwar American life took
a different turn and to some extent swept both men under for a time.
Copland has come back to something very like his worth. Harris hasn't.
The CD mixes masterpieces with pieces that aren't, and thus gives
you a good idea of Harris's range. Not everything, of course, need be
a masterpiece. Even Schoenberg has his trifles. All the works here
come from the period of Harris's greatest critical reputation, the
Thirties and Forties. It was a time, of course, of great social ferment,
with the western democracies under threat from right- and left-wing
totalitarianism and from economic collapse. Curiously, however, it was
also a time of great optimism - unlike our own. Whitman and Whitman's
idealistic vision of the American democracy had great appeal to liberals
and socialists alike, particularly among writers and composers, not only
in the U. S. but also abroad. One sees this in such disparate figures
as Sandburg and Vaughan Williams, of course, but also in Weill and
Hindemith, refugees from the Reich. Harris probably fell hardest for
Whitman among the major American composers of his time. Almost all
the really important work on the CD sets Whitman texts, and not just
the anthology pieces either. With lines from Sands at Seventy and
Inscriptions, Harris obviously knows his Whitman pretty well. I have
no idea of Harris's politics, but the rhetoric he uses about Whitman
differs not a jot from the Thirties liberals and socialists. To quote
Harris from producer John Proffitt's fine liner notes:
Walt Whitman was the great singer of Democracy. He believed
in the preservation of the individual in serving to his maximum /
optimum, the cause of a free society....Whitman had the power
to believe, yet who better than he knew the unavoidable cost of
every step toward freedom, whether that freedom be the wages
of self-imposed discipline or the willing allegiance of all to the
purpose of honest, hopeful social order which can serve in turn
the cause of international good will and understanding.
Politics aside, Whitman's expansiveness suits Harris's artistic nature
down to the ground. Both rely on the cumulative power of their material,
the continual variance of a basic idea or rhetorical trope. You wouldn't
call either artist "streamlined," exactly. If concision is a hallmark
of Modern music (and Modern art in general), then, despite its idiom,
there's something a bit old-fashioned about Harris's symphonies. I
usually sense somewhere in the background the School of Cesar Franck in
Harris's symphonic thought. I happen to dislike the Franck symphony but
do like Harris's, so this isn't an evaluation so much as an attempt to
describe how he goes about writing.
However, the choral pieces achieve brilliant concision. This is Modern
Music and no fooling. Harris rises to the challenge set by the limitations
of the human voice, as opposed to a mess of instruments. He radically
simplifies his usual complex instrumental counterpoint. Indeed, most
of the writing is declamatory, putting the words foremost, much like the
choral music of Harris's pupil William Schuman. In fact, Schuman's
choral writing simply takes Harris's to one extreme.
I'll deal with the trifle first. They Say that Susan has no Heart for
Learning, for women's voices and piano, shows Harris in a surprisingly
suave mood. The rough-hewn, "rail-splitter" quality of so much of his
music is absent here. Indeed, the choral writing and the harmonies are
far more Stravinskian than usual, reminding me of the polished Irving
Fine's (earlier) Alice in Wonderland series. It's a sophisticated
charmer. On the other hand, When Johnny Comes Marching Home (a Harris
favorite, by the way, which also shows up in the "Folk-Song" Symphony
No. 4 and in its own short instrumental setting) comes across as far
more obviously "American" than usual and makes fewer concessions to
vocalism. Of all the items on the program, and short as it is (two
minutes), this comes closest to Harris's orchestral writing. Its rhythmic
and harmonic vigor appeal to me most.
The Mass, for men's voices and organ, unfortunately strikes me as an
ambitious failure - Harris just noodling around for close to half an
hour. The choral writing is quite expert, especially considering the
limited range of men's voices, but the music doesn't seem to go anywhere
or to stick in the memory. Furthermore, Harris does nothing to "open
up" the range of notes. Just about everything "sounds" in a middle
register. Eventually, it wore on me. On the other hand, I've read
rapturous write-ups of this work, so your mileage, as they say, may vary.
On the other hand, the Easter Motet, Alleluia, for choir, organ, and
brass uses simple word-painting to create great drama. The text asks
the risen, victorious Christ to have mercy on us. Christ rises to an
ascending musical line and has mercy to a descending one. The alleluias
are strong and simple, with mainly two-part antiphony (back-and-forth)
between the men and the women. Harris wrote it on commission toward the
end of the war, and it's a strong effort, reflecting the hope of the
time.
The Whitman pieces, all a cappella, begin with the Symphony for Voices
of 1935, written for Westminster and Williamson. The Whitman Triptych
for women's choir (1938) and the Three Songs of Democracy for mixed
(1941) both use Harris's discoveries in the earlier work, so it makes
sense to deal mainly with the Symphony.
Harris originally wrote four movements but decided to scrap the first
one (he reworked it for women's voices and inserted it into the Triptych).
My acquaintance with the Triptych convinces me there was nothing musically
wrong with the movement. It may not have fit Harris's philosophic
program. Harris wrote explicitly about the meaning of each movement.
The present first movement, "Songs for all seas, all ships" (familiar
to listeners of Vaughan Williams's Sea Symphony), talks of the sea as
a shaper of human life and as a metaphor of humanity in progress. The
second movement, "Tears," means to Harris the "sea of human suffering,
the cost of freedom." The finale optimistically hymns the progress of
humankind. Musically, what's left is a monument of the American choral
repertoire. It may not be a true symphony, unlike the Vaughan Williams
Sea Symphony, but it is indeed genuinely symphonic in the way it moves.
One can hear this most clearly, I believe, in the last movement, which
sets the text:
Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,
Cheerful, for freest action form'd under the laws divine,
The Modern Man I sing.
Each of those lines gets its own characteristic musical idea. Each
is introduced, then combined in a spectacular contrapuntal and choral
display with the other two, which winds down into a kind of coda. The
number of parts grows to as many as eight, but Harris uses the choir as
a vocal orchestra, again keeping to the limits imposed by the voice.
The elaborate - even extravagant - forces usually create new colors,
rather than a sonic mass, and Harris comes up with some inventive textures
indeed, sometimes combining spoken voice with the singing. Before this
CD, I had never heard the piece, although I had come across mentions of
it. I've still got to study it for a while before I really "get" it in
my imagination's grasp. Right now, its power overwhelms me. For those
of you wondering what it might sound like, I'd recommend listening to
William Schuman's Prelude for Voices as something approaching its scope
and emotional punch. Indeed, Schuman very likely appropriated his
teacher's discoveries for his own work, especially his own Whitman
settings.
Most of this music demands a great choir and a great choral interpreter.
Roberts Wesleyan is a good, well-trained, disciplined group. Its attacks
are clear, its diction is, at its best, good enough. However, it lacks
a great choral sound. Though the students are well-trained, their voices
are too young, and they don't blend well, either within or among sections.
More problematic, however, is Shewan's direction. I lay the problems
on Shewan's doorstep because the choir has made it obvious that it does
what it's told. Shewan is a wonderful choral technician. However, these
performances offer, almost constantly, an undifferentiated wall o' sound,
where Harris's music requires a hierarchic layering of vocal lines. Some
lines, at almost any point, need to be heard more than others, and it's
Shewan's job to figure out which ones. Most obviously, obvious "grounds"
(short phrases repeated to the same text) almost always cover up lines
which extend and vary. This elementary mistake may be most obvious in
the first movement of the Symphony, but it crops up throughout the entire
program. In the second movement, the choir erases the soprano soloist.
Indeed, the problem of proper balance is so acute that despite the
individual diction of the sections, the words - the meanings - Harris
took such pains to communicate are mostly lost, even with my copy of
Leaves of Grass open before me. However, the music is so difficult,
I have to admit that it's a feat getting choirs to this level. Surely,
no choir in my city of New Orleans would do as well as Roberts Wesleyan.
In the Mass, Shewan fails to shape the lines, but it's hard for me to
say what that shape should be. The effect, at any rate, is this
"undifferentiated middle" and adds to the monotony of the piece.
Harris gives no help at all.
Despite all, I recommend the disc. The performances give you the
measure of these works, even if they don't reach an ideal. This is a
rare opportunity to hear great music. Hardly any one in the United
States is doing major a cappella choral work before a large public. We
should be grateful someone is willing to invest the incredibly hard work
of Shewan and his singers. It's just so rare. I see very little interest,
even among professionals and academics, in serious choral music these
days. Professionals don't want to spend time sweating over the preparation
of Ives if the public is just going to sniff. I'm told by my local
public radio station that if it plays a choral work at a time other than
Christmas, listeners switch stations. I have no reason to doubt it.
The a cappella choral concerts - unless a program of Spirituals - in my
city play to a few oddballs, the crickets, and the wind. Part of it may
arise from the lack of decent public-school music programs, which devote
resources, if any, to the marching band - music as the soundtrack for
jockolatry. I've never really understood this, since a decent choral
program costs a lot less and affects a greater number of students. So
much for progress.
Steve Schwartz
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