Arts and Letters

Roy Harris died on October 1 at the age of eighty-one. He was my teacher during the crucial formative years of my mid-twenties. Although the student days were some forty years ago, the teacher remains as vivid as though the association were today.

Roy Harris was incapable of a view lightly held. Indifference was a state of mind wholly foreign to his nature. He was a man of deep commitment and he applied it to everything. He could speak of the merits of barley with the same passion and conviction he would bring to a major work. And if you used a harmony foreign to his lexicon of approved sounds the fall from grace could be equated with blasphemy from the mouth of a bishop.

So much has been written about Roy, the rough-hewn character out of Oklahoma, born there in Lincoln County on Lincoln's birthday. He was indigenous, however, over and above these extramusical circumstances. His concepts were grand, his sentiments both direct and complex and his nationalism in music wholly misunderstood. Roy was, above everything, a classicist. He was a student of music. It was he, in our first meetings together, who introduced me to the music of the Renaissance, he who so carefully and lovingly analyzed the string quartets of Beethoven, the Rite of Spring of Stravinsky and countless works of other composers, both new and ancient. His views were didactic, hardly an unknown quality among artists.

He was convinced, for example, that Americans had a more highly developed sense of rhythm than Europeans. He felt that American musicians understood smaller rhythmic music units better than others. He was also passionate about what he termed "blood rhythms" as distinguished from "art rhythms." The former he believed related to the pulse of the human body and other forces of nature while art rhythms were concocted and did not have the ring of truth. He brought all these concepts forcefully to the attention of his students. In at least one or two instances these views, misconstrued as arising from a racial basis, were mistaken for a kind of pseudo-Nietzscheism, if not outright fascism. Harris was absolutely bewildered with such misrepresentation of his theories. In any event, the depth of his own convictions did not preclude a genuine interest in the views of others. With his scholarly attainments it could hardly have been otherwise. All these qualities, together with an outgoing, lively and wholly exuberant nature, made for a fascinating student-teacher relationship.

When I sought Harris as a teacher I did so because I had heard his Symphony 1933. It is difficult in the extreme, after the passage of so much time and the revolution in the vocabulary of music that has taken place in the intervening years, to describe with any accuracy the effect that the music had on a young man. For me the sounds were like no others I had ever heard, his wholly original "autogenetic" concept of form, the orchestration so free and strong, the extraordinary beauty and sweep of the melodic material. And now, hearing the work, I believe that my reactions as a young man were amply justified. His was a new voice and between that time and now that voice, as it matured, underwent enormous change and growth—yet all discernibly evolving from the youthful kernel.

Among the major works stemming from those years is the Symphony No. 3. Curiously, this work was originally conceived as a violin concerto. I can never hear the work played, with the magnificent entrance of the first violins, without hearing in my ear Roy saying, "That was the spot where Heifitz was supposed to come in." After forty years the symphony has lost none of its power and remains the composer's best known and most frequently performed work. But Harris was hardly a one-symphony composer. The time has now come to re-examine the total output of this prolific creator.

Among the sixteen symphonies the first sensible move is to perform the Fifth and the Seventh. Of the fourteen chamber music works surely the magnificent Quintet for Piano and Strings should be heard. Among dozens of choral works are his famous settings of Walt Whitman, including A Song for Occupations and Symphony for Voices, each of which treats the chorus in such a wholly individualistic manner. Both should be revived. However, this is not the place to attempt a comprehensive list but rather to remind ourselves of the scope of the catalogue: virtually every realm of music has been enhanced.

By any measure Roy Harris stands as a major figure in the history of art in the United States. In recent years he has not been looked upon by the young with any special interest or, perhaps, any interest. Roy would have understood that, for in his early years he was, as is the case with many composers, less than intrigued with the immediate past. But, in an age where increasing emphasis is given to what is perceived as intellectual quality in music, a narrowness has set in. Intellectuality is often confused with complexity. Yet it is process and only process that can be described. Over a long time all music is judged by the degree to which listeners respond. The future of Roy Harris is assured because listeners respond when they are stirred in heart and engaged in mind by inner meanings and mysteries which, unlike process, need not and indeed cannot be analyzed.