Music and Vinyl: Roy Harris

Roy Harris (1898-1979) grew up in rural Oklahoma, and after studying piano and clarinet went to the University of California at Berkeley. Largely self-taught as a composer he had lessons from Arthur Bliss in the 1920s, and with Aaron Copland's help he spent time in Paris with Nadia Boulanger (like so many other young composers). Returning to the US after a back injury he formed links with both Howard Hanson in Rochester and Serge Koussevitzky in Boston.

Roy Harris

The Boston link was crucial to Harris's reputation. After Koussevitzky's first performance of his Symphony 1933, this became the first American symphony to have a commercial recording. But the breakthrough piece for Harris was his Third Symphony in one movement, again premiered by Koussevitzky (in 1939). This has been described as the quintessential American symphony, and is certainly the most widely performed.

Allmusic's description of this piece is well worth quoting:

"Let's not kid ourselves," Roy Harris once wrote. "My Third Symphony happened to come along when it was needed." At that time, American musicians and audiences had begun to throw off their deference to European musical models and were hungry for music that expressed something uniquely American. Harris' Symphony No. 3, conceived in an organic form that takes more inspiration from natural growth than from traditional symphonic development, and molded from indigenous musical materials, satisfied that hunger, propelling Harris to fame and heralding the beginning of a new tradition in American symphonic music.

Much of the music in the Symphony No. 3 comes from a violin concerto that Harris abandoned after the great virtuoso Jascha Heifetz refused it. The symphony itself was originally commissioned by Hans Kindler, at the time the conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra. However, after completing the work, Harris doubted the ability of the NSO to give an adequate performance, and instead presented it to Serge Koussevitzky, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in an attempt to repair a rift between the two men. The symphony proved an adequate peace offering, and it received its premiere under Koussevitzky's baton in 1939.

The work itself is nominally in one movement, but Harris identified five sections: "Tragic," "Lyric," "Pastoral," "Fugue-Dramatic," and "Dramatic-Tragic." A long, rich, rustic melody on the cellos alone opens the "Tragic" section; it is then harmonized in parallel fourths and fifths by the other strings, and finally receives a independent accompaniment. This sequence of events might be seen as a brief recounting of the early history of music. Horns enter at the beginning of the "Lyric" section, then support a broad melody in the violins which takes cues from the preceding section. After a climax with punching horns and pleading strings, the music settles into the "Pastoral" section, the longest of the five. The winds finally enter in this section, and enter a dialogue with the strings; the woodwinds play fragments, while the strings play music that swells and subsides quickly. The music seems to be pulling itself together from elemental roots, until the winds begin to play little related melodic fragments, derived from folk music, over shimmering string chords; it sounds something like the world's most beautiful hoedown.

The horns then enter with boisterous melodic turns that foreshadow the subject of the "Fugue-Dramatic" section. This is one of the more famous melodies in American music, exuberant, open, airy, played on rich strings and sonorous brass, and supported by decisive timpani strokes. Harris develops this for a while in a contrapuntal fashion, but eventually the music slips into a minorish mode and becomes the "Dramatic-Tragic" section. This envelops a melody similar to that of the opening movement in ambiguous harmonies from the brass, and punctuation from the tympani. It eventually becomes a march, with the same texture, and some gigantic percussion eventually propels it towards a thunderous conclusion. All who wish to become familiar with American music need to acquaint themselves with Roy Harris' Symphony No. 3.

This 1962 recording of the Third Symphony from Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic has a spacious "open prairies" feel to it and seems to me a more convincing performance than the 1987 Deutsche Grammophon version (with the same performers) which is at a lower voltage albeit in plusher sound. The somewhat brash, almost cinemascopic CBS sound seems an ideal fit for the music.