Roy Harris
      The Great American Ninth

* Memories of a Child's Sunday
* Symphony No. 9
* Symphony No. 8 "San Francisco Symphony"*

*Alan Feinberg (piano)
Albany Symphony Orchestra/David Alan Miller
Albany TROY350 Total time: 66:34

Summary for the Busy Executive: Actually, the Great American Eighth (maybe)
and a very puzzling Ninth.

 From the height of Greatest American Symphonist, Roy Harris's music
sank to critical eclipse during the last quarter-century of his life (he
died in 1979). There was always something old-fashioned as well as modern
about Harris's work, and many writers chose to hear only the first.
Furthermore, the modernism wasn't of the "right" sort - neither dodecaphonic
nor overtly Stravinskian - so Harris got hammered from two sides, although
organizations still commissioned him.

Harris's years in the sun were the Thirties and Forties, and almost
everything that gets recorded comes from that period. Thanks probably
to Leonard Bernstein, with two wonderful recordings, Harris's Symphony
No. 3 (1939) has remained in the public consciousness. Both decades,
despite the serious economic and political threats, curiously enough
exuded great optimism and a Romantic outlook uninflected by irony. Writers
burned to write the Great American Novel, without ever questioning the
value of such a goal. Composers likewise itched to sing the Great American
Symphony. Even the hard-boiled ran only skin-deep, as one can tell both
from Raymond Chandler's novels and from Bogart's classic roles. Harris,
less aggressively urban than either Chandler or Bogart, nevertheless fit
in with the temper of the times. The worth of his work aside for the
moment, he wrote big, epic symphonies and he thought of himself as
explaining and exemplifying the American soul, without discomfiture at
the thought. The years following World War II changed much about the
American temper. Postwar was "smaller" in spirit, less morally sure.
Philip Marlowe may have consorted with rough characters and probably
would have been embarrassed to talk about certain things, but he held
himself to a code of conduct. Postwar writers had and have trouble
figuring out what such a code might consist of. With the possible exception
of Faulkner (approved of, after all, by the prominent postwar Existentialist
guru, Sartre), the great American novelists pre-war and during - Steinbeck,
dos Passos, Lewis, Hemingway - all got treated like the too-bluff,
too-hearty uncle who clapped everybody on the back and strained soup
through his mustache. Harris apparently lived up to the role.  His
personality had its theatrical, self-aggrandizing side - which apparently
took to the "homespun genius" role - and this contributed to his critical
problems. Other composers sniggered once he left the room. Very few
writers on music have actually examined his work in any detail. Outside
of Dan Stehman's Roy Harris: An American Musical Pioneer (Twayne; now
out of print), I know of no critical study written in the past twenty
years, academic or otherwise, other than Stehman's bibliography and
catalogue.  Indeed, one finds far more titles on the linguistic philosopher
Roy Harris than on the composer.

Is the later work worth examining? Just everything I've heard answers
strongly in the affirmative. Furthermore, I'm eager to hear "minor"
Harris - the things not symphonies and the shorter, less ambitious work,
for example - and mainly because of this CD.

The program begins with a charmer, Memories of a Child's Sunday, a
three-movement suite dedicated to conductor Artur Rodzinski's then very
young son Richard. It may surprise some listeners, used to the Harris
epic, in that it stakes out no grand emotional territory. It's Harris
in a lyric mood. Even here, however, Harris's lyricism doesn't resemble
that of other people. The musical language is so entirely his own, for
one thing, particularly his sense of harmony. You can see that his
fondness for modulation by thirds and enharmonic shifts comes from French
composers, particularly someone like Faure, but you can't mistake the
two. The chords themselves seem highly individual. To some extent, they
result from competing contrapuntal strands, perhaps in different modes.
They inhabit some idiosyncratic space between harmony and modality,
neither more one than the other. The work itself is a meditation on,
rather than a depiction of, childhood, and it doesn't strike me as
particularly child-like. I kept thinking of Wordsworth's definition of
poetry: "emotion recollected in tranquility."

The first movement, "Bells," features a long-striding theme against a
background of unusual, beautiful chord changes. The effect is primarily
pastoral. The slow second movement, "Imagining Things," is also the
longest.  Because I have the titles to guide me, it reminds me of a kid
lying back in the grass and looking up at the clouds. Stehman's liner
notes profess to hear an element of nightmare in the music. If Harris
intended that, it's flown right by me. I should also say that the emotional
effect of Harris's music in general on Stehman differs markedly from its
effect on me, but this is all to Harris's credit. It suggests that one
pigeonholes Harris only with difficulty. The third movement, "Play,"
uses themes very much like playground cries, without becoming overtly
pictorial. The music isn't particularly childlike. It's more a matter
of childhood seen through a distance of years. Even here, however, there's
a puzzle. The movement ends abruptly. It took me too many seconds to
catch on that it had indeed ended.  I don't really know what to make of
it.

In the Fifties, Harris wrote a large cantata on St. Francis's Canticle
of the Sun for solo voice and chamber ensemble. I've never heard it, but
Stehman's write-up has made me eager. Perhaps Albany can fit this in to
their release schedule. At any rate, shortly thereafter, Harris received
a commission from the San Francisco Symphony for a new work. Since San
Francisco is simply St. Francis when he's at home, Harris decided to
rework some of the cantata material for a new symphony, his eighth.
Conventional religious musical iconography is completely absent. Indeed,
the symphony makes a tremendous effect even if you don't know the program.
It surprised me a bit that Harris chose such a text, but only because I
thought him more artistically limited than he turns out. In short, I
thought of him in terms of the Artist Explaining America to Itself. I'm
now convinced Harris is bigger than that, a composer of wide-ranging
interests. Who knows what can happen when you get to hear something other
than the same pieces over and over again?

The work consists of five movements, played without a break: "Childhood
and Youth," "Renunciation," "The Building of the Chapel," "The Joy of
Pantheistic Beauty as a Gift of God" (music from the Canticle appears
here), and "Ecstasy after the Premonition of Death." Stehman provides
a brief analysis, which I agree with, as far as it goes. Stehman tends
to emphasize Harris's hybrid structures. He sees, for example, a
fugue-cum-variation form in the third movement. That's certainly one way
to look at it, and it's justified by score analysis. However, there's a
great difference between music on paper and music heard, between music
experienced primarily as space (the length and width of a score) and
music experienced primarily in time.  These hybrid structures strike me
as constituents of a more important rhetorical or dramatic wave. In
short, I don't see Harris consciously dreaming up a fugue-cum-variation
as such. Instead, I believe that the form comes into being because
Harris's normal procedures of continual variation and contrapuntal
exposition first suggest the shape, which the composer then refines -
sort of like an artist seeing images in a heap of his squiggles.
Furthermore, with Harris, the rhetorical structure - the dramatic builds
and fade-aways, what happens in time rather than on the page - takes
precedence over any static form, which helps mainly the analyst rather
than the listener.

Stehman relates "Childhood and Youth" to the "Play" finale of Memories.
He calls it a set of variations on a striding theme. It is that, but
I think you hit closer to home when you note that it's a movement of
capricious mood changes that coalesce into something increasingly coherent.
The movement, almost willfully fragmentary, nevertheless carries you
along. It's like being on a fast-moving train switching tracks at high
speed. I think it indicates Harris's great sense of musical progress,
essential for a symphonist. At the end, it converges like the head of
an arrow to the second movement. Stehman calls that movement "an ascent
from darkness into light." I don't experience it that way myself. Indeed,
I take the second through fourth movements as a large super-structure,
where themes of striving character get three different treatments: slow
and singing (and shot through with canons, besides), virtuosically
contrapuntal, and virtuosically instrumental. The second movement leads
inexorably to the third, and the third to the fourth. As I've said,
Stehman sees the third movement as a hybrid of fugue and variation. On
paper, I'd agree. But it sounds like no fugue or variation set you've
ever heard. It's not *a* fugue as much as it is *in* fugue. That is, a
lot of fugal devices show up, but the familiar structural landmarks of
fugue (like the "fugal answer") are not apparent to the ear. It's certainly
not a fugue even like the famous one in the Third Symphony, which is
itself fairly unusual. The main theme seems adumbrated in the second
movement, which also introduces a solo trumpet - according to Stehman,
representing the voice of St. Francis. The first movement has functioned
as a kind of introduction - a Beethovenian mulling over of "how should
we get this going?" - turning quickly from one idea to the next. The
second and third movements increase both tension and focus of the musical
argument. The fourth movement releases all that tension in a display of
orchestral fireworks. In the invention, delicacy (even fragility), and
abundance of textures, it prefigures something like late Tippett,
especially the Triple Concerto. It seems to portray the bounty of the
ecstatic imagination. Harris wrote a virtuosic piano part (played
originally by his wife, the remarkable Johana) and the scoring also
features tuned percussion used with great subtlety. The solo trumpet
comes back in as filigree. Those who think of Harris as a blustery
bully-boy of a composer should hear this.  Things wind down to a final
chorale which recalls themes from previous movements. Actually, Harris
does this recalling throughout the symphony, with such ease and with
such "naturalness" that it took me five movements to realize what indeed
he had done. I consider the entire work one of the finest American
symphonies, and it's from a period critics have regarded as Harris's
Decline. If that's a fall-off, I've missed something bloody wonderful.

Harris began his Ninth shortly after his Eighth (he completed both in
1962).  The Ninth shares at least two themes with the Eighth that I can
hear, but the context and rhetorical impulses of the symphonies differ
tremendously.  One can think of the Eighth as lyrical and pastoral, even
joyous. The Ninth consists of sterner stuff. Harris has titled its three
movements "We, the people," "... to form a more perfect Union," "... to
promote the general welfare." He further breaks down the last movement
into three subtitled sections from Whitman, a major source of inspiration
throughout his career: "Of Life immense in passion, pulse, power,"
"Cheerful for freest action formed," "The Modern Man I sing." Just reading
this leads one to expect some awful jingo, perhaps the source of the
usual picture of late Harris. Harris definitely foils expectations. This
isn't some grand hymn to the American Constitution and the Spirit of a
Free Citizenry, but more a tract for the times. Its energy is searching,
even angry, and it strikes a contemporary rather than a mythic note.
I've found not one purely optimistic moment in the piece. The hope is
always tempered by unease.

It opens with pushing, "big-shoulder" music, heavy on horn and trombone,
with lots of open fifths and driving, asymmetrical rhythms. Stehman
considers the movement as close to standard sonata-allegro as anything
else in Harris, although he admits it's an odd one. The themes are all
laid out in the beginning, without a formal separation into "first" and
"second" subject exposition. It's all done by contrast of character.
Essentially, Harris lays out his materials and moves in the blink of an
eye to development. The contrasts are extreme: bustling, martial energy
vs.  melting, sadly tender lyricism. The calls to arms are put aside by
the sad songs which in turn get interrupted by brass and drum. Again,
as in the Eighth, Harris invents new and effective orchestral textures.
Toward the end, it ramps up and goes out stamping its feet, but not in
triumph. For all its vigor, the energy seems to be directed toward no
emotional goal. There's a "purposeful aimlessness" to the entire movement
- purposeful, because you know Harris means it. Furthermore, Harris has
so mastered symphonic rhetoric that, despite the sharp mood swings, you
keep riding the train.

Stehman calls the second movement (along with the slow movement of the
Fifth) "Harris's finest symphonic slow movement, and one of the richest
utterances of its kind in the American repertoire." I think Stehman too
cautious. The second movement counts simply as one of the finest slow
movements by anybody I've heard. In three sections (two large ones
sandwiching a short middle), it begins with a threnody in the solo viola
over an accompaniment in the lower instruments, with commentary by other
orchestral soloists. Having written the symphony for Ormandy and the
Philadelphia, Harris takes advantage of the fact and richly divides his
strings. One can think of the movement as a song with accompaniment,
except that, as is usual in Harris, the accompaniment consists of
independent lines of counterpoint. The section becomes increasingly
intense as the music climbs upward through the registers, most notably
the violas, who end up somewhere in the viola Himalayas. This leads
directly to a striving theme first heard in the Eighth Symphony. The
passage, the first dynamic apex of the movement leads to the St. Francis
solo trumpet in an extended variation of the opening viola solo. Variants
of the striving theme run throughout the accompaniment. The final section
builds as the trumpet and its associated themes become more and more
insistent. The work ends on shouts from the brass, followed by - incredible
- paroxysmal, spasmodic, sobbing stabs from the strings.

The finale is a virtuoso contrapuntal display - an update, if you will,
on the "Rondo-Burleske" of Mahler's Ninth. One of its purposes is to get
your jaw to drop. The Whitman subtitles will send the alert Harris fan
to the 1935 Symphony for Voices, the final movement of which sets those
subtitles.  The movement consists of three large sections and a coda,
like the Symphony for Voices finale. Indeed, it exhibits the same general
plan, except that it significantly expands and extends the earlier work.
I haven't checked to see whether the themes are identical or even "family."
I suspect not. At least, I didn't recognize anything. There are three
main themes, each of which gets its own contrapuntal exposition and which
Harris combines in the coda.  Stehman points out that the themes at first
glance don't seem to "go" together, so the coda pretty much amazes. For
some reason, however, Stehman wants to call this a triple fugue. I don't
even know why he wants to call it a fugue at all, as if simply what it
is weren't wonderful enough. Again, the usual fugal landmarks, if any,
Harris has buried so deep they might as well not be there, except for
the analyst to have something to do. Most listeners wouldn't feel as if
they had missed something.

The first theme relates to the striving tune in the slow movement's
central section. The second theme, first heard on the solo oboe, leaps
around like a flea on a hot brick. Indeed, as Stehman remarks, it seems
less like a theme than an excess of nervous energy. What further interests
me is that it appears over the sobbing strings of the previous movement.
All three ideas - or, more accurately, variants of those ideas (Harris
doesn't like to merely repeat; it's his equivalent of standing still)
are combined against one another, as in a triple fugue. However, the
rhetoric also relates as much to rondo, particularly to rondo-sonata,
itself a hybrid. The movement seems about to end on high spirits, but
Harris adds something angrier, more ambivalent. I haven't cracked its
emotional secret. For sure, however, it ends neither with optimism nor
benediction. It seems to want to go on, although the brakes have definitely
and very suddenly been applied. This is not a simple piece, technically
or psychologically speaking. It lies a long way from jingo.

Standards of playing have risen so high since I first began listening
to classical music that I think the concept of "regional orchestra" has
lost most of its meaning. Neither symphony is particularly easy. The
Albany players not only get the notes, they invest their lines with
something extra, and not just the solos. The amount of detailed care
spent on these scores is obvious. Praise also to conductor David Alan
Miller for pulling the at-times Harris jumble into significant and
beautiful shapes. The only nit I have to pick concerns the thinning out
of string tone in the multi-divisi passages. This is probably simply a
matter of numbers - somewhere from ten to twenty players short. Certainly,
I hear no weakness in the strings most of the time. As to performances,
these are considerably more than stopgaps, as we wait for Michael Tilson
Thomas to develop an interest in Harris. Beautifully recorded besides,
they may well turn out landmarks in the critical resurrection of Harris's
work.

Steve Schwartz