Home-Grown Composer

Half a century ago, when frail, poetic Edward MacDowell was No. 1 U. S. composer, the models for high-brow music were Brahms, Grieg, Wagner. Just before World War I, Kulturbolschewiks Arnold Schonberg and Igor Stravinsky (TIME, March 11) led a revolution against musical romanticism. When the revolution was over, U. S. composers still found themselves writing European music. Such U. S. composers as Aaron Copland and John Alden Carpenter tried to go native by using jazz tunes, but only the tunes were American. The musical grammar and syn tax still sounded like Brahms or Stravinsky. Today there is still probably no high brow U. S. music that can be identified as such in a blindfold test.

If any U. S. composer can attain an authentically U. S. symphonic style, a spare, gangling, twangy Oklahoman named Roy Harris may well be the man. Born in a log cabin, Roy Harris is as independent as a Panhandle cowhand, as dryly American as the Dust Bowl where he spent his early childhood. When, in 1926, he ap peared in Eastern concert halls with an awkward, homemade symphonic piece un der his arm, critics took one look and de cided that here was music's own Joaquin Miller. Sent to Paris to study with famed Teacher Nadia Boulanger (TIME, Feb.28, 1938), Composer Harris showed for a time the influences of the French modernists who sat at Mile Boulanger's feet. But Harris soon got over these pretty Parisian tricks, and went on composing in his own way.

Most of Harris' music has been experimental, patchy and gaunt. But unlike many a contemporary composer, he has gone on correcting his past mistakes, improving his tools, getting his music clearer & clearer. Last year, after groping steadily upward on a rickety ladder of complex, dry, carpentered scores (Symphony 1933, When Johnny Comes Marching Home, Song for Occupations, etc.), Harris really hit his stride with a Third Symphony. No sooner was it finished than Boston's pompous Sergei Koussevitzky rushed to give it a premiere. No sooner had Koussevitzky played it than excitable Maestro Arturo Toscanini (who conducts few U. S. compositions) asked a chance to broadcast it with his NBC Orchestra. Last month (TIME, April 1) Victor recorded it.

By last week, when solemn, plodding Hans Lange gave Chicagoans a chance to hear it with the Chicago Symphony, Harris' Third Symphony had become the most talked-about U. S. composition in a decade. Said Koussevitzky: "This is the first truly great symphonic work to be written in America." Chicago critics, admiring its lean economy, lack of bombast and its forthright poetic atmosphere, wrote that "something of the crudeness and strength of pioneer America has crept into this new symphony,'' found it "as completely outside European experience as the prairie morning itself." To more cautious listeners it was not so much pure U. S. music as pure Harris.

Secret of Roy Harris' long pull to success is his uncompromising individualism. He was 25 before he ever got a lesson in musical composition. Like Abraham Lincoln, on whose birthday he was born, he got his education the hard way, all by himself. In 1918, when he was mustered out of the Army, he drove a truck for a living, delivering 3,000 lb. of butter and 300 dozen eggs a day around Los Angeles.

Says Roy Harris: "If we create an indigenous music worthy of our people, it will make its way swiftly and unfalteringly. . . . Whether it be a little more or less 'dissonant' or 'original' is of small import--but it must have the pulsing life stuff in it--creative urge and necessity of continuity. It cannot be a scholarly mosaic of all the materials and forms of the last 200 European years. . . ."

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