Roy Harris's Third Symphony came into being in 1939. That might have been Hollywood's bonanza year, but for everybody else, times were tough. Hitler's murderous tentacles were stretching across Europe, Italy had gone Fascist, everybody was rightfully nervous about Stalin. The United States still suffered from the Depression; after a partial recovery, Roosevelt's ill-timed decision to roll back government stimuli had set off a new recession that threatened the stability of the hard-won and still fragile economy. All through the 1930s the struggling US citizens had gotten by on a combination of government programs, hard work, and a faith that good times would come, if they just tried hard enough or believed enough or were just worthy enough.
That sense of striving informed American music of the 1930s. It was relentlessly gung-ho in its earnest exhortations of American virtue. It offered vast prairies mingled with evocations of big-city jazziness, the whole wrapped up in economically effective orchestration and subsequently heaped with uncritical fawning from the commentarial classes. It was the time for Americana in music. The Pulitzer Prizes weren't awarded in music until 1943, but during their first decade they reflected the staunch nationalism that had informed American music up to that time. Howard Hanson's Fourth Symphony, Copland's Appalachian Spring, Leo Sowerby's almost-forgotten but effective Canticle of the Sun, the Ives Third Symphony, Menotti's The Saint of Bleeker Street. The mantra in American arts was "The Great American ____" with your favorite artistic medium to fill in the blank. Everybody talked about the Great American Novel: would it come from Hemingway? Fitzgerald? Faulkner? Dos Passos? (Don't laugh; he was considered a contender in his day.) The Great American Play? The Great American Painting?
And then there was the Great American Symphony. As a concept it made no more sense than those trite and silly 20-best lists put together by the various record-review mags. As a PR tool, it had its uses, especially for those whose beat was promoting American concert music amongst a nation of listeners who, for the most part, couldn't have given a rat's ass. Audiences wanted their symphonists trans-national. They wanted Mozart and Haydn and Beethoven and Schubert and Schumann and Mendelssohn and Brahms and maybe just a little Bruckner and, by the 1960s, perhaps even some Mahler. The 20th century symphonists who found friends in the concert hall weren't Americans; they were Russians (Shostakovich, Prokofiev), Brits (Elgar, Vaughan Williams), Bohemian (Dvorak), and especially a Finn (Sibelius).
Few beyond the academy or critical circles cared whether there was an American symphony, Great or not. But the commentarial class cared mightily, and set about to make it so.
There was no point in seeking salvation in old-timey stuff: the "Indianist" composers of the 19th century such as Chadwick, the Eurocentric academics such as Parker, the fey pictorialists such as Carpenter or MacDowell. In the 1930s the guys with all the street cred were soaked in WPA ideals. They wrote brittle stuff brimming with presumably authentic American grit and backbone. Virgil Thomson incorporated hymn tunes and hillbilly rhythms into his faux-Stravinskian textures and, for a while, garnered respectful hearings. Midwesterner Leo Sowerby brought excellent training and an ear honed as a church organist to his Romanticized but unmistakably modern canvases. And then there was Copland, leader of the Boulangerie, who mingled his shiny Stravinskian modernism in the Piano Variations with cowboy songs and visions of the prairie in Billy the Kid. It could be argued that if anybody was going to write The Great American Symphony, it would be Copland.
But just as Hemingway didn't write the Great American Novel (my vote goes to Harper Lee for To Kill a Mockingbird), Copland didn't write the Great American Symphony. That honor went to Roy Harris, at least amongst the intelligentsia.
The funny thing about the Harris Third is that it's "American" in only the most fleeting and marginal sense. Some commentators start by fussing over Harris being a product of good Oklahoma soil and thus sainted by his firm grounding on that most American of American icons, the sweeping prairies west of the Mississippi. The facts speak otherwise. Roy didn't trod sacred ground for long. When he was five years old his parents moved to metro Los Angeles (Covina), and although in those days the still-rural San Gabriel Valley afforded Roy an outdoorsie childhood, he went on to UC Berkeley, worked with British composer Arthur Bliss, and eventually traipsed across the Pond for his Copland-approved christening by Nadia Boulanger. Unlike Copland, Harris was not enthusiastic about the Boulangerie's Stravinskian worship, but nonetheless that's where he discovered early music, particularly medieval plainsong and organum. To that end Boulanger was a good influence. He rejected the rest.
That fascination with medievalism fuels the Third Symphony. One can make a plausible case—and I'm about to do just that—of the opening of the Third as recapitulating in brief the developmental history of Western music, at least that history viewed through an extremely wide-angle and selective lens. Here's how it works. My timings come from Leonard Bernstein's magisterial performance with the New York Philharmonic, captured in exquisite audio by Deutsche Grammophon in 1985.
0:00 – 0:42 Early plainchant; single-line melody in mostly pentatonic mode
0:43 – 1:20 Later plainchant; the single-line melody becomes diatonic, even chromatic, hinting at major mode
1:21 – 2:09 Parallel organum; the melody acquires voices at the octave and fifth, in strict parallel motion
2:10 – 2:54 The first actual modern chord appears; free and imitative counterpoint mostly in two voices, with the occasional third in parallel fifths
2:54 – 4:10 Brass instruments heard for the first time; homophony established with mirror parallel chords
4:11 – Decorative counterpoint enhances the overall homophonic texture
Whether or not my analysis reflects anything Harris actually had in mind, it highlights the seriousness, the loftiness of the symphony's audible purpose. There's nothing remotely trivial about the Harris Third. It takes itself very seriously and all but demands that we take it with all due seriousness as well. Hoedowns, hootenannies, cowboys, and town bands are banished from the precincts. If there is a specifically American quality to this symphony, it is the sense of foreboding that hovers over all that muscular Rooseveltian confidence. There was nothing funny about the world of 1939; catastrophe was coming. Even amidst the sharply rhythmic and energized theme that fills the second half of the work, lowering clouds and darkness continue to threaten. It's impressive as hell, albeit dour, and sincerely beautiful.
I suspect it was the Harris Third—or at least its portentiousness—that ushered in the post-War era of serious, weighty American symphonies. There was to be no lightness or whimsy in American music starting in the 1940s and extending until the minimalists came along and blew a collective raspberry at all that pomposity. Those composers who shied away from the prevailing academic serialist lockstep tended to write big and heavy, Harris himself included. William Schuman's numerous symphonies are broad-shouldered, often downright grim affairs, matched in iron-jawed determination by his fellow Juilliard administrator Peter Mennin. Vincent Persechetti and David Diamond produced a number of symphonies that, while initially attractive, are capable of wearing down even the sunniest disposition into a glint-eyed sense of duty. Howard Hanson was at least a bit more of a Romantic than his fellows and was capable of the occasional fleeting smile. Samuel Barber's two symphonies are early efforts, but as in so much of his work, humor and lightness just weren't in the cards. Leonard Bernstein's three symphonies all bristle with Message, from the Hebraic "Jeremiah" first symphony, through the glinty "Age of Anxiety" second, to the icky mishmosh of his "Kaddish" third.
American Music as So Very Important, So Very Consequential, So Very Don't-You-Dare-Hint-We're-Inferior-To-Europe. American composers had spawned an eloquently substantial (so they said) school of American composition, one freighted with conviction and grandeur. Sheesh, were they ever serious about it, all those big-boned Americans writing big-boned American music.
Nevertheless, they kept trotting off to France. Result: cultural schizophrenia, nasty cases of Stravinsky-envy and routine infections of the copycat blues. Only deeply insecure composers can write such puffed-up and self-important music.
It might be argued—and I just might some day—that American music didn't really have the chance of a snowball in hell until a generation arose that spurned the trip across the Atlantic, taking its ethos from Charles Ives's grumpy prosperity instead of Stravinsky's (and hence Boulanger's) Gallic sophistication.