Two concerts last weekend, both superb. My head is still swimming over my first time hearing Harris’ Third Symphony live. That was at Friday night’s all-American concert, conducted by John Adams at Disney Hall. A review should be online soon. (I sent it out to my Bachtrack editors over the weekend, but sometimes there can be a delay pending concert photography.)
In the morning, I spoke to two persons who played crucial roles in Harris’ life and posthumous legacy: the conductor Murry Sidlin, and the community activist and arts advocate John Malveaux, who befriended Harris in his later years. The former was drafted last minute into conducting the premiere of the composer’s last symphony, the “Bicentennial”. Quite a bit of drama behind that event. Over thirty years later, Malveaux organized the second-ever performance of the “Bicentennial”. (Joseph Taylor, a fascinating musician in his own right, conducted.)
An essay will be forthcoming on the “Bicentennial” next month, in time for the 50th anniversary of its premiere. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, I caught the Harris bug bad; my mind has been mostly preoccupied with his music the last few days. Although very different stylistically, it occurred to me that he shared some important commonalities with another composer I’ve recently become an admirer of: Robert Simpson.
Both were composers with similar political orientations. Both had strong convictions about the artist’s civic duty. Both constantly tinkered with their music. (Lionel Pike said that “Simpson confessed to using the eraser very widely”. Similarly, Dan Stehman noted that Harris had a “proclivity toward constant revising and rewriting”.) Both turned to explorations of overtones in their later music. Above all, as symphonists both based themselves on principles of autogenesis.
Simpson listed in his two-volume overview, The Symphony, what he considered were the establishing factors of symphonic form:
The fusion of diverse elements into an organic whole.
The continuous control of pace.
The reserves of strength necessary to achieve [the first two factors] are such as to express size.
In the first place, it was the dynamic treatment of tonality that made all this possible: it was a reaction against the passivity of earlier music.
Perhaps the basic observation one can make about a true symphony is that it is active in all possible ways.
Harris’ symphonies — particularly the purely instrumental ones — embody these ideas. Of course, Simpson’s symphonies also fulfill the above criteria. Just as obvious, too, are the divergent ways in which each composer ultimately explored the implications of these principles. The Englishman, ultimately, was a more consistent composer; the American wider ranging and, in some aspects, more experimental.
Earlier today, I listened to a broadcast of a rehearsal by the Boston Symphony conducted by Serge Koussevitzky of Harris’ Third. In the middle of the broadcast, the host, Olin Downes, recalled the first time he encountered Harris and his music back in 1925. At the time, Marian MacDowell was considering granting Harris a scholarship to study at the MacDowell Colony; she asked Downes for his opinion on the young composer’s music. “All I could tell her”, he recounted, “was that it had a certain spaciousness and ideality of character by a composer who had yet evidently learned little of the actual technique of composition”. As Downes admitted, he could not foresee the mastery that Harris would later develop, much less that his music would compare favorably with the best the old continent had to offer:
[I]n the year 1942, the Boston [Symphony] played on the same program the Third Symphony of Roy Harris [...] and the Sixth Symphony of [...] Shostakovich. And I was not alone among my colleagues in writing that the Third Symphony by Roy Harris [...] was a score more strongly and compactly written than the Sixth Symphony by Shostakovich.
Downes’ insights into Harris’ Third are worth quoting more fully, as they also encapsulate well aspects of his other symphonies:
And [the Third Symphony] has, in fact, some very special attributes [...] [I]t’s quite austere in its style and there are quite learned devices of composition employed in it. [...] That thing — Harris’ ideality — his lack of the merely topical, or jazzical, or realistic in American music, the distance he looks into the future, or — let us say — life itself is the thing which puts him in a special place of his own among American composers.
Again, I’m reminded of Simpson. As Calum MacDonald observed of the “aggressively anti-pessimistic” English composer’s music, it expressed “human character that is sane, honest, downright, tender, humorous, immovable on things that matter, dealing seriously and responsibly with profound issues, embodying the best of which human beings are capable”.
Much the same could be said of Harris. Though it’s unlikely that either composer knew the other’s work well, if at all, their shared commitment to the noblest qualities of the human spirit is uncanny. Not to mention prescient. Because with the world being what it is these days, we could all benefit from being edified by the aggressive anti-pessimism of Harris and Simpson.