nicolas slonimsky nicolas slonimsky writings on music music of the modern era 2004

NICOLAS SLONIMSKYWritings on Music

V O L U M E T H RE E

New York and London

NICOLAS SLONIMSKYWritings on Music

V O L U M E T H RE EMusic of the Modern Era

Edited by Electra Slonimsky Yourke

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Slonimsky, Nicolas, 1894–1995[Selections. 2003]Nicolas Slonimsky : writings on music.

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The Schoenberg Idea

People talk glibly of the 12-tone system“Take all twelve notes, shake them well, and then list ’em.”

But Arnold Schoenberg, the originator,Called it a method: the system came later.

Working away from abstruse atonality,Towards progressive artistic reality.

He made each individual tone a tonic,And music became do-dec-a-phonic

The 12-tone melody, not bound to any key,Strode, in wide intervals, magnificently free.

Then, by a deft maneuver of tergiversation,It rolled off in reverse, in true reciprocation.

Melodic intervals then pointed in an opposite direction,High notes becoming low, in mirror-like reflection.

When this inverted tune performed a backward run,There was still more dodecaphonic fun.

In being divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6,The twelve-tone counterpoint yielded lots of tricks.

Though dissonant, the harmony was magically clear,Its intertwining chords a fillip to the ear.

“Excruciatingly cacophonous,” the old-guard critics cried.“Say, this stuff’s hep,” opined the younger side.

From (the) Verklarte Nacht to (the) Pierrot Lunaire,The style of Schoenberg bore a supra-tonal air.

And finally, the Serenade, in 1924,(Marked opus 24) revealed the 12-tone lore.

(In fact, the opus numbers corresponded to the yearLike symbols of the fruitful years in Schoenberg’s rich career.)

And soon the 12-tone speech, intuitive and young,Evolved into a vital and organic tongue.

Not brain alone, but also heart and soul,In Arnold Schoenberg’s music play a role.

From California, where Schoenberg lives, this method spreadaround,

Like some new form of radiant energy transmuted into sound.

In Scandinavia, in Italy, in France (frons)It stirred the waves of music: tonal Renaissance.

As the new century of tones pursues its course,The global 12-tone movement gathers greater force.

And on the musical horizon, not too far,The Schoenberg light shines blazingly, a do-de-cu-ple star!

NS 1939

Preface ix

A Note from the Editor xiii

PART 1. GENERAL ARTICLES

1. Modern Music: An Airplane View (1926) 3

2. Music in Cuba (1933) 6

3. Four Modernist Composers [Harris, Varèse, Cowell, 12Antheil] (1934)

4. Modern Italian Music (1937– 38) 17

5. The Status of the Latin American Composer (1942) 23

6. The New World of Dodecaphonic Music (1950) 50

7. Introductory Essay (1959) 56

8. The Marvelous Season 1912–1913 (1963) 66

9. New Music in Greece (1965) 73

10. Music for a Twentieth-Century Violinist (1974) 85

11. Introduction [to Twentieth Century Music] (1984) 99

PART II. INDIVIDUAL COMPOSERS

12. Modern Immortals [Bartok & Schoenberg] (1950) 129

13. Cartula of Cuba [Alejandro Caturla] (1940) 134

CONTENTS

vii

14. Chou Wen-chung (1961) 138

15. Henry Cowell (1933) 148

16. Howard Hanson: The “American Sibelius” (1944) 153

17. Charles Ives

1. Musical Rebel (1953) 157

2. Musical Prophet (1954) 165

18. Ulysses Kay (date unknown) 170

19. Benjamin Lees in Excelsis (1975) 180

20. Conlon Nancarrow: Complicated Problem— 190Drastic Solution (1962)

21. Walter Piston (1933) 194

22. Wallingford Riegger (date unknown) 196

23. Roger Sessions (1933) 199

24. Géométrie Sonore: Edgar Varèse (1983) 204

25. Heitor Villa-Lobos

1. A Visit (1941) 217

2. The Flamboyant Chanticleer (1962) 221

PART III. MONOGRAPH

26. Roy Harris: Cimarron Composer (1952)

1. His Life 231

2. His Music 287

3. Catalogue of Works by Harris 324

Index 335

viii

You would not expect a person of my father’s cultural heritage—steepedin the Russian musical tradition, trained in its premier conservatory—tobe attracted to “modern” music. He had everything to gain from the oldmusical regime: he was educated in it, he performed it brilliantly, and itwas prevalent, offering the opportunity for a successful career. Piano washis instrument, taught by his formidable Aunt Isabelle Vengerova fromchildhood. His rich education in the theory and practice of music couldalso have suited him for composing or conducting, a purveyor of the clas-sical tradition at its highest level.

But that’s not what happened. He was interested in the modern seem-ingly from the moment of expulsion from his pre-Revolutionary culturalcocoon and continued to be so for the following 80 years—during which,of course, the definition of modern evolved and twisted and morphed andturned inside out, and even reverted to “classical.” Why did he choose tobe a proponent of the modern? Surely it had to do with his intellectualcuriosity, impatience with repetition, and rebellious spirit, but furtherpsychologizing is pointless.

This volume opens with a short article written in 1926, when he hadbarely mastered English. He takes on the definition of modern music—by suggesting what it isn’t. In those days, perhaps, definitions seemednecessary but the time had also come to accept the new era in its manymanifestations. Acceptance of the unfamiliar was a personal characteris-tic and a recurrent theme in his writings. While the traditionalistsbemoaned deviations from the mandates of history, he applauded inno-vation—adding new elements, smashing and reassembling the oldones—but only if intellectually valid and esthetically driven. Also,throughout his life, he could not resist an idea if it was fun—dropping a

PREFACE

ix

piano from a helicopter, playing the cello topless (female only), titling asymphony Penis Dimension.

In his twenties and thirties, he dedicated a burgeoning conductingcareer to the works of modern composers. His concerts in Paris, Berlin,and Budapest in 1931–32 brought to Europe for the first time works ofthe American modern sensibility: Riegger, Ives, Cowell, Ruggles, Weiss,Roldan, Varèse. The concerts created a sensation, provoking vehementcriticism and equally vehement support. During the summer of 1933, ina series of concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, he conducted these com-posers’ works and others, but this esthetic was simply not acceptable tothe general audience or the sponsors. It was essentially the end of his con-ducting career.

Thereafter, his support for modern music was confined to writing andlecturing, but he continued to be influential even when not participatingdirectly. His personal experience with rejection of the modern found star-tling resonance as he researched composers’ lives for the dictionaries hewas editing. He found that the very titans worshipped by the conservativeestablishment were themselves often savagely criticized in their owntimes. Burrowing through contemporary newspapers at the library, hesaw that Beethoven’s Second Symphony was “hideously writhing,” Fideliosuffered from “atrocious harmony,” and the Ninth “outrageous clamor.”Brahms’s Second Symphony was termed “ugly and ungenial,” hisSerenade, op. 11 contained an excess of “this ultra-modern kind of writ-ing,” and anyone who could swallow his Piano Concerto in B-flat major“enjoys an enviable digestion.” One critic opined that Sibelius was evenworse than Debussy. Another observed that Verdi’s opera Macbeth con-tained melodies “such as a man born deaf would compose.”

All this was irresistible. His Lexicon of Musical Invective was broughtout in 1953. In his introduction, he gives a name to the phenomenon:Non-Acceptance of the Unfamiliar, and calls it a “psychological inhibi-tion.” There is a prognosis for this condition: “it takes approximatelytwenty years to make an artistic curiosity out of a modernistic monstros-ity; and another twenty to elevate it to a masterpiece.” The Lexicon pro-vides solace to practitioners in all the arts. It has been in print for fiftyyears, and was reissued recently with an introduction by Peter Schickele,who called it “a festival of dyspepsia.”

Much of my father’s time and energy was devoted to researching andupdating Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, which he took

Prefacex

over in the early 50s, and writing other books, notably Music Since 1900.In this work, he followed contemporary creators in detail, diligentlyupdating their progress and products, but he never wrote a book on mod-ern music per se and he only wrote articles when requested. Accordingly,this volume cannot be a complete or consistent series of writings.Nevertheless, the general articles, in conjunction with the articles on indi-vidual composers, cover most major “modern” composers, explaining howtheir disparate concepts and innovations overturned traditional thinkingand created the modern era.

The history of the monograph on Roy Harris is unknown. He and myfather had a warm personal relationship; perhaps there was some projectafoot when it was written in 1952–53, but it is one of the very few selec-tions in these volumes that was never published.

The remaining items are the most enduring of a large number ofpieces created for different outlets, including musical journals, as intro-ductions to others’ works, and in magazines and newspapers. Other arti-cles on music of the modern era—those that were written for the BostonEvening Transcript and those about modern Russian music and com-posers—are found in the first two volumes of this series.

Electra Slonimsky YourkeNew York, June 2003

Preface xi

Every article in these volumes is presented in full without any editingwhatever. I have also preserved the orthography and other stylistic ele-ments as they appeared in the original publications or manuscripts.Changes were made only in the rare instance of errors or misprints obvi-ous to me. Accordingly, readers will encounter a wide variety of spellings,especially of Russian names, and the disparate punctuation policies ofdozens of different publications. I believe that fidelity to the originalshelps highlight the historic nature of these documents, and preservationof the record, warts and all, was of great importance to my father, a loverof language in all its flowerings.

—E.S.Y.

A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

xiii

P a r t I

GENERAL ART ICLES

If there has ever been a subject, widely discussed and learnedly analyzed,with no agreement whatsoever as to its connotations, that subject isundoubtedly Modern Music. In an attempt to seize upon the essentials,what terms have not been used? Modern, contemporary, novel, primitive,brachycephalic, extravagant—the scale of definitions ranges as far as“Bolshevistic” at least for those who are innocent of the problems involvedtherein. In fact, the definitions given by professional and non-professionalcritics differ almost as widely as their respective constitutions.

But what do the modernists themselves say about their work? Surelythose who bear the elusive halo or curse of modernism should be able tolet us know precisely what it is all about. But the facts are otherwise. Themodernists themselves seem as incapable of agreement as the critics.

If we asked of any average musical audience whom they consideredthe apostle of modern music, ninety out of a hundred would, without theslightest hesitation, confer the honor upon Stravinsky. Yet the composer ofLe Sacre du Printemps emphatically refuses the title and states that he isnot a modernist. On the other hand another conspicuous Russian, SergeProkofieff, admitted without any reservations, that he does trade inmodern music. But that was all. Prokofieff refrained from givingparticulars as to his meaning of the disputed term.

Thus we see that the composers themselves do not agree. But the factis that both Stravinsky and Prokofieff are modernists. And not only they,but also men whose methods of composition are at times diametricallyopposite, such as Strauss, Schonberg, Ravel, Honegger and, in more recentdays, Hindemith and Copland. These are all undoubtedly modernists. Old,

1. MODERN MUSIC :AN A IRPLANE V IEW

3

Ch. 1: originally published in The Critic, Boston, March 4, 1926.

middle-aged, young, from different countries and living under differentcircumstances, yet modern composers, all of them. What is the explanationof this phenomenon?

Looking down, taking an airplane view of the thickly-dotted scores, wecan hardly form a clear idea of modern music in general. But at least weshall be enabled to see plainly what modern music is not. Far from theinfernal din of orchestral orgies, even the most exasperated minds—withthe powerful aid of the rarefied atmosphere—can recover their soundjudgment, thus enabling them to dismiss some of the general beliefs whichsubsist despite their patent absurdity.

Modern music is not a Brobdignagian contrivance dedicated to erecta musical tower of Babel. Prokofieff has written a scherzo for fourbassoons. This does seem rather arrogant. Yet a peaceful composer ofyore—John Ernest Galliard, who died in 1749—composed a piece for fourand twenty of these ungodly instruments and seasoned it with four doublebasses.

Neither is the introduction of a new instrument—however clumsyand unbecoming it may appear—an unmistakable sign of modernity. Asarrusophone or even a gramaphone record of a bird’s trilling (as inRespighi’s “Pini di Roma” of recent fame) does not necessarily spread themodern unction upon the composition by virtue of its presence in thescore.

Cacophony is not inseparable from the spirit of modern music.Neither does the much-discussed polytonality make up a modern score.Let me relate an anecdote which may help to illustrate the point. Aphilosopher of renown, residing in Paris, was standing on the Place deBeaugrenelle while waiting for a bus. From two opposite points of thesquare two hand-organs were simultaneously grinding out music inmanifestly unrelated keys. The philosopher, being thus placed in thedefenseless position of an involuntary listener, delivered himself of thefollowing remark: “Now I understand Darius Milhaud’s music.” Let usgrant that the remark was witty, and let us also grant it was much to thepoint as far as Milhaud is concerned. Yet it is not applicable to the wholegeneration of moderns.

One who plays on the piano with his elbows or performs pizzicato ona baby grand is not always a wild modernist. In his music a demure lambmay be bleating.

Nicolas Slonimsky4

Employment of jazz-tunes does not introduce a stale musicalconcoction into the hall of modernistic fame or notoriety.

The tuning up of the orchestra does not produce the effect of amodern transcription of oriental music, even though it seemed to do soon the Shah of Persia some years ago.

If we can agree on these six clauses we have accomplished a necessarycleansing, preparatory to some sort of solution. The airplane view hashelped us to eliminate some prejudices. Now we are ready to take a closerview and even to venture on a landing place. After some waddling on theground we shall have a fair chance to give a plausible answer to thequestion: what, in the name of all the musical saints, is modern music?

Modern Music 5

The first realization that there is original music in Cuba came to the out-side world with the sudden popularity of the Rumba some two years ago.Not only in the States but in Europe as well the Rumba superseded thefading fascination of common jazz. With the Rumba came a demand forCuban instruments: the maracas, which is a gourd filled with dried seeds;claves, or wooden sticks with a metallic timbre; guiros, or gourd-shellsserrated on one side, producing the effect of a cheese-grater whenstroked down with a stick; bonges, parchment-covered twin-drums;cencerros, pieces of rough iron. Only very few Cuban ensembles abroadcould boast of having rare Afro-Cuban instruments, connected with thenanigo ritual of the Negroes of the Cuban interior—the repicadores, orsmall Afro-Cuban drums, and the tall drums, llamadores (call-drums)made out of a whole piece of a tree with the core burned out by a specialprocess. And finally, there is the quijada del burro, or simply a jawboneof an ass, lacquered and mounted with bells, shaking its loose molars witha macabre rattling sound!

Such is the Cuban orchestra. But even in Cuba, this orchestra is notself-sufficient—a trumpet and a double-bass, and a human voice supplythe element of “definite pitch” (the Cuban percussion instruments servingrhythm only). True, the double-bass is often strung with plain rope insteadof the catgut, and the player strikes the strings with the palm of his hand.The trumpet player experiments with the pistons and the embouchure, thevocalist hardly bothers with the problems of vocal training—but this lackof conservatory education adds to the primitive charm of Cuban folkmusic. Like the bourgeois gentleman of Moliere who didn’t realize he

2. MUSIC IN CUBA

6

Ch. 2: originally published in The Musical Record, August 1933.

spoke in prose, the creators of the Cuban son do not realize that theycontribute to the thesaurus of musical folk-lore.

However, it would be a mistake to think that the Cubans, like theinhabitants of another enchanted isle, Bali, have contributed only rawmatter of music. Attentive observers of musical evolution have known ofthe existence of these Cuban instruments long before the Rumba set theworld a-dancing. The illuminating fact is that Cuba has produced its owncomposers that can stand comparison with the best of Europe and America.And it is with great wonder that we find in the music of Cuban composersof today a highly seasoned, individual and mature style. This styleelaborates on native rhythms and melodies, not as mere quotation, but asa creative evolution of a certain pattern. This style, moreover is presentedin an exquisite modernistic attire. Cuban music was born in the twentiethcentury, and it assumes the quality of the twentieth century—harmonicfreedom, rhythmic independence and richness of orchestral palette.

Amadeo Roldan, born on July 12, 1900, has achieved for Cuban musicwhat Stravinsky has done for music of Russia—he has expressedmasterfully and imaginatively the soul of his country, he has translatedinto the modem idiom the themes and moods of the folk song. He hasremained a musician, that is, a craftsman of his art, never yielding to thetemptation of portraying the musical landscape of this country in a jumbleof disorganised sonorous elements. He studied to be a violinist and,graduating from the Real Conservatorio de Musica of Madrid, Spain, heobtained the First Prize and the special “Sarasate Prize” in violin. Heappeared in several violin recitals throughout Spain, but soon was wonover to the study of musical composition, in Spain, and later Havana. Oncesettled definitely, he founded in Havana a Society of Chamber Music,presenting over sixty concerts of important works in smaller forms. In1924, when the Philharmonic Orchestra of Havana was founded, hebecame its concertmaster, and in 1932 its permanent conductor. He waselected Director of the West Indies Section of the Pan AmericanAssociation of Composers in 1930, and has been an active member of thisorganization fostering performances of modern American music in Cuba.

All of Roldan’s works have some reference to his Cuban origin—theearly Overture on Cuban themes, the Three Short Poems for orchestra, theAfro-Cuban ballet, La Rebambaramba, A Miracle of Anaquille, NegroDance and a Negro poem, Chango. His exciting Ritimicas for percussioninstruments (including jawbone) are probably the first examples of music

Music in Cuba 7

written exclusively for a percussion ensemble. Three Calls for chamberorchestra and Motives of “Son” for voice and nine instruments completethe list of his most important compositions, embracing the period from1925 to 1931. Of all these, La Rebambaramba is the most perfectexpression of the spirit of Afro-Cuban dance, with the maracas, claves,guiros and Cuban drums forming the fascinating background for theorchestral dance, driving on in 6/8-3/4 time, which is Cuban time. Atconcerts of Pan-American music which I conducted in Paris, Berlin andBudapest, the audiences were so taken by this unfamiliar but bewitchingmusic that, despite the preconceived opposition to all that is transatlanticand modern, a repetition was demanded of one of the movements. Thechief thrill was provided by a solo of maracas, flourished in the air like twococktail-shakers at a wild party.

Alejandro Garcia Caturla was born in the town of Remedios, some200 miles East of Havana, on the Northern shore of Cuba, on March 7,1906. He studied piano with a local teacher, then went to Havana forinstruction in harmony, composition and orchestration with PedroSanjuan, then conductor of the Havana Philharmonic. He subsequentlywent to Paris, where he studied with Nadia Boulanger, the famous “foster-mother” of a generation of American composers. Once in Europe, Caturlaplunged directly into the atmosphere of ultra-modern music. Curiouslyenough, he did not make use of the native instruments in his earlycompositions, but preferred to convey the feeling of Afro-Cuban musicthrough the medium of “civilized” orchestra. Without restraint, andutterly unconcerned about the niceties of harmony or counterpoint, hewrites music of the Cuban interior, negroid, contorted, fanatical. Whilewe may be overwhelmed by the avalanche of sharps and flats thrown intothe score with a generous disdain of conventional scales, there is no doubtthat Caturla’s music is an unadulterated product of native genius. So oftendo we find “exotic” music emasculated through European influences, thatwe are almost glad that Caturla’s French schooling did not affect hisgenuine flair for dissonance. His Bembe, an Afro-Cuban dance, hasenjoyed a certain vogue, having been performed here and abroad byseveral conductors (a rare distinction for a modern composer in search ofperformers). Overburdened as this Bembe is with accidentals andforbidding as it may sound (the score is written for wind-instruments andthe piano), such an outburst of modernity is healthier than many a morbidpage of atonal elucubration.

Nicolas Slonimsky8

This authenticity of production was the quality that moved the astuteEmile Vuillermoz to write, in connection with presentations of Americanmusic in Paris, that there is more sincere modernity in the Americanneighborhood than in the capitals of Europe. The Three Dances ofCaturla are of a more subdued pattern—and by the same token, they areless arresting . . . But even these respectable dances proved too much tothe provincial New York critics when Stokowski presented them inCarnegie Hall.

Caturla’s latest orchestral work, Yamba-O (so named after a ceremonyof initiation of the Negro sect, naniga) employs for the first time the entiregalaxy of the Cuban percussion. Again, there are groups of notes that arelike blocks thrown bodily into the harmonic scheme, and again there is anirresistible fascination of this extraordinary talent. The First Cuban Suitefor a small orchestra is perhaps the better balanced score, and shows morecare in design. The blatant, brassy quality of Caturla’s other scores is heresubdued, while the native atmosphere fortunately remains vivid andstimulating.

Caturla does not limit himself to composition alone. As a member ofthe Pan American Association of Composers, he has the blood of apropagandist in him. In his Cuban hinterland he has formed an orchestra,which actually gives performances of modern music in towns of not morethan a few hundred inhabitants! True, there are no string players in hisorchestra, but the saxophones replace them rather advantageously, andwith several double-basses (plenty of them in Cuba), a full array of brassand some wood-wind, Caturla presents works by Ravel, Debussy, De Falla,Stravinsky, and even Cowell! The inevitable Rhapsody in Blue of Gershwinis also featured in his concerts. There is something inexpressablyadmirable in such activity, particularly when we realize how backwardAmerican communities are in fostering any music beyond the conventionalstuff daily warmed over in the women’s clubs.

An account of Cuban music would be incomplete if the contributionto it by temporary residents were not taken into consideration. PedroSanjuan was born in Northern Spain, of Basque parents, but he spentenough years in Havana to be included among active forces of Cubanmusic. For one thing, he taught composition to both Roldan and Caturla,for another he was the first conductor of the Philharmonic Orchestra andwas responsible for many a brilliant achievement of that organization.Furthermore, he was influenced by Cuban music, and himself wrote

Music in Cuba 9

several compositions of distinctly Cuban character—Afro-Cuban, weshould rather say, for all Cuban music, as far as it is distinguished fromSpanish music, is derived from the rhythms and melodies (Sons) of CubanNegroes. As a Spaniard, Sanjuan wrote a number of works worthy of anyorchestra’s repertory, among them, the admirable Castilian Motives forthe chamber orchestra. Sanjuan left Havana in 1932, leaving thePhilharmonic Orchestra to his successor, Roldan.

The youthful composer, Jose Ardevol, born in Barcelona on March 13,1911 has now more or less permanently established himself in Havana.He studied with his father, who is leader of a chamber orchestra inBarcelona. As pianist he has had many notable appearances; as composerhe astonishes by his fearless spirit of modernity. His Six Synthetic Poemsfor chamber orchestra, by the title alone, imply an aversion to all programmusic, to all music, in fact, which is not music for music’s sake. His scoringis clear, and his command is as firm as could possibly be expected froman out-and-out modernist, i.e., an honest craftsman pursuing his own aimsin his own way. Ardevol is not dogmatic enough to follow a definite brandof musical religion, but he leans rather heavily towards atonality. Hislatest symphonic work, full of strident minor seconds in the brass, isremarkable in its mastery. There is no occasion to discuss whetheratonality will “last,” whether it goes against the established verities ofmusic. Music is an art in motion, thank Heavens, and no amount ofretrograde suppression will stop it—at least not in parts where musicalfreedom exists . . . And, then, who knows, New York may yet take valuabletips from the town of Vedado . . .

Musical activity in Cuba finds its expression in orchestral and choralorganizations. The Philharmonic Orchestra, under the enlighteneddirection of Dr. Baralt and Mr. Augustin Batista, has for ten years, inmonthly concerts, in winter and summer alike, furnished music, ancientand modern, to the music-lovers of Havana. The orchestra, now conductedby Amadeo Roldan, is alive to every important phase of musical activityabroad, and has had presentations of the very latest works, such asStravinsky’s Violin Concerto and Ravel’s Piano Concerto. The SymphonyOrchestra of Havana, under the direction of maestro Roig, has contributedmore orchestral music to concert-goers. The Pro Arte Association hassponsored many a famous soloist in recitals and chamber music. Lastly, theChorale of Havana, numbering seventy singers, under the energetic andintelligent direction of Maria Munoz de Quevedo, is responsible for many

Nicolas Slonimsky10

performances of choral works, a capella, and with the orchestra. Maria deQuevedo—with her husband, Antonio de Quevedo, are publishers andeditors of an artistically printed bi-monthly, Musicalia, of which seventeennumbers have appeared to date. The Quevedos are also founders of theSociedad de Musica Contemporanea, which spreads intelligentinformation concerning the latest tendencies in contemporary music. Thesame omnificent Quevedos are Directors of Conservatorio Bach, teachingthe young of Cuba the art and science of music.

Music in Cuba 11

3. FOUR MODERNIST COMPOSERS

12

Roy Harris drove me to New York. He had been to town on the occasionof a performance of his Trio at Cambridge. The Trio was written speciallyfor Casella’s Italian group; the performance was given under the auspicesof the inexhaustible Mrs. Elisabeth Sprague Coolidge, sponsor ofCasella’s American tour.

Roy Harris and Hilde, his wife and his musical amanuensis (whocopies his music in the magnificent style of medieval manuscripts, only farmore legibly) have a dinner appointment in New York at 7:30. We startedfrom Boston at 12:30, but Roy is a self-confident driver, and the new roadto Providence is marvelous. I sit with Roy in front, Hilde is semi-recumbent in the back seat trying to catch lost sleep. Roy and I are busyconversing about his music, Bach’s Kunst der Fuge, and plurality ofplausible tone-progressions—in common language, the possibility of newscales that would make sense—which latter subject is my latest obsession.We discuss Roy’s double fugue of the Trio. We are at musicologicalloggerheads: the third entry of the first subject comes a fifth above thesecond, i.e., it is on the supertonic, a most dangerous procedure, doingaway as it does with the sacrosanct alternation of the tonic and thedominant. What is worse, it suggests a canon rather than a fugue. Highlyperturbing! Roy says it’s perfectly all right, and that he can cite chapter andverse from the Kunst der Fuge to that effect. I say: “No, you cannot!”

We shout so loud that poor Hilde begs for mercy: “Stop talking aboutmusic, enjoy the scenery.” The New England foliage is really beautiful inits autumnal colors, and the leaves fall so Schumann-like, but myperception of nature is spoiled by a sudden etymological thought—the

Ch. 3: originally published in Panorama, November 1934.

American word, “Fall” for autumn, refers to this fall of leaves. I can seepoetry in etymology only.

At Hartford we call a halt. Half-an-hour for lunch. We must get theBoston Herald. What does Teddy Chanler, the new composer-critic, writeabout the Malipiero Symphony? Both Roy and I cheerfully agree that thesymphony is not good. Where is the review? We search in vain. There isno review. Chanler must have been fired. Also, we must find Scribner’s forOctober—where there is Roy’s article about music in general andparticular; but the October issue is off the stands, and we don’t want theNovember issue, little suspecting that there is a three-column review ofVarèse’s Ionisation, which I, as conductor of a percussion ensemble, hadjust recorded for the Columbia Phonograph Company.

Roy is at the wheel once more. We are now discussing the first subjectof his Fugue from the viewpoint of my theoretical scales. There are ninenotes, none repeated—an atonal principle, tonally applied—for thecadence is anything if not a Si mineur. We use French names; Roy is apupil of Nadia Boulanger, French nurse of many an American composer.Nine notes? But we forgot the Mi! Or was it eight, in the first place? NowI cannot remember at all; I cannot remember things which I have heard,but have not seen. And Roy himself is all balled up. Hilde is asleep in theback seat. 212th Street. Roy steps on the gas, and arrives at his dinnerparty ten minutes late.

How can people live in New York? I should say that its hecticatmosphere makes it impossible to work, if I didn’t know from Fowler thatthe word hectic is badly misapplied in such contexts. I parted with RoyHarris, and sped to Edgar Varèse, the formidable French-American ofCorsican blood, who composes the kind of music that tears asunder theorchestral heavens, to the horror of most, and fanatical exultation of a few.He lives in Greenwich Village, and his work-room is strewn with unrelatedobjects, in the midst of which stands a steamer trunk. Varèse plays therecord of Ionisation, sirens and all, the entire percussion world that wasstirred by Varèse with such weird magic. Gongs, bells, Chinese blocks (sosweet and high-pitched, and so rhythmical—no less a person than CarlosSalzedo played the part for our recording!), anvils, drums big and small,maracas, güiros, all came out awfully well. The only disappointment is inthe coda: not a sound can be heard of the tone clusters in the piano part—the bells kill everything. We mourn this for just a moment, and then giveway to the joy of the achievement, and sing sincere praises to the Columbia

Four Modernist Composers 13

people who let us record this unique piece of composition. Maybe this willstart something. Maybe.

After the many years of battle that we waged together against thecritics, managers and orchestra musicians in both hemispheres, I feel Iought to know more about Varèse. I demand that he tell me the story ofhis life, and his studies. “What is this doing here, and why?” I ask, openingthe Twenty-Second Volume of Palestrina’s collected works. I wish toprovoke him. “What was it that Vincent d’Indy declared that you, as astudent of the Paris Schola Cantorum, wrote, or intended to write—amotet for 36 voices, or something equally unfeasible?” Varèse made a slyface. “I answered his attempt to ridicule me in a letter to the editor, whichwas never published, and in which I stated, ‘I am glad that at least once inhis writings d’Indy showed imagination by inventing this whole story.’ ”

Louise—Varèse’s alert wife—came in, and together we assailedVarèse. I took notes:

1907. Tended horse Paris Halles, 2 Frs a night Father engineer, lockedpiano; boy Varèse learned cntrp. from Père Martini’s textbook, purchs, for3 sous. Wrote 1896–7 opera Martin Paz, Jules Verne’s book, mandoline,violin, trmpt, pno. (when in Italy). Listened to noises in the street tryingto arrange them for instr. Had mania for harmony exercises. Age 15–16interest in chemistry and physics. Wrote song to Tennyson’s Enoch Arden.Was impressed by photo of Zambeze, decided music must flow likeZambeze. His uncle Josef a blacksmith. In Bourgogne until age 5. Oedipuscomplex. Father, vieux salaud. Love for grandfather, who, although simplepeasant, gave him Gédalge’s treatise. 1902 in Paris. 1903, ScholaCantorum. Vincent d’Indy. Trois pièces d’orchestre (1904). RhapsodieRomaine (1905). 1907, Le choeur de l’Université Populaire. (Choeurd’ouvriers et ouvrières). Rue Descartes, refuge of Russian revolutionaries.Meeting with Lenin. Bourgogne (1907–8), first symphonic poem.Orchestration for music-halls. 1908, Germany. Encouragement fromStrauss. Romain-Rolland. Letters from him after the perform. ofBourgogne, addressed: “Mon pauvre garçon” (NOTE. Louise promised tocopy these letters for me—very indicative of trends). Gargantua (1909)Mehr Licht (1911–12). Les Cycles du Nord (1914). Oedipus und dieSphynx (incompl.). Other comp. see “Am. Comp.” Published—Offrandes,Hyperprisms, Intégrales, Octandre, Amériques, Arcana, Ionisation.

No end of discussion of future plans: U.S.S.R. and . . . Chile. There aredefinite prospects for concerts of American music in the former, vague but

Nicolas Slonimsky14

Four Modernist Composers 15

exciting hopes for the latter. Who knows? Of course, Varèse has friends inChile: here are the addresses: Vincente Huidobro, 1511 Alameda, Santiagode Chile; Eduardo Lira Espejo, Farina 4864, Santiago . . .

Henry Cowell has an office in the New School for Social Research. Ifind him engaged in pleasant conversation with Mademoiselle Yakount-chikova, a musicologist from Leningrad, now settled in America. When did I see Henry last? In California, or in New York? Certainly, not inEurope. I love the international aspect of Henry Cowell’s morning mail.To impress him, I tell him that I have just received two issues of theSerbian bimonthly publication, Zvuk. He admits he hasn’t seen it yet: “Yousee,” he adds serenely, “the assassination of King Alexander has upsetmy plans.”

I am puzzled: “What’s the joke?” “There isn’t any joke,” he says, “I wassupposed to go to Macedonia to collect native tunes; the Yugoslaviangovernment invited me over and promised to pay my expenses, I receiveda large parchment in Serbian, but I sent it to California. Now I am afraidthat the new government will cancel the invitation.” It develops, during thecourse of conversation, that the consul of Yugoslavia has madearrangements for Henry Cowell’s trip after his lecture on Yugoslavian folk-music at the New School. Henry tells me also that his article on Americanmusic has appeared in the July issue of Sovietskaya Moosyka, but thetranslator has apparently edited the article rather heavily, and he wouldlike to know just what was left in and what was taken out. Also, his namewas transliterated, Caw-ul. He sent that to California, too—his archivesare all in California, where he owns a shack worth 150 dollars, with land.

At 3:00 p.m. Cowell must play on Broadway—for the Irish film, Manof Aran. The actors—a man, a woman, a boy—have been imported toNew York in person, and they perform a sort of prologue before thepicture, while Cowell plays his goosefleshy Banshee on the barepianostrings. Very impressive.

From Broadway I walk towards Central Park. Somebody stops me:George Antheil, minus his 1933 moustache! We go to a place which wouldbe called a café if we were in Paris. Sipping our tea, we indulge in partisanconversation. Antheil is full of fire, a fine comrade-in-arms, not at all theglorified individualist of Ezra Pound’s chaotic treatise on him andharmony. Antheil speaks of the necessity of forming not a mere bohemiangroup, but a company of “cut-throats”—he repeats the word several times.Yes, that’s what we need. To hell with gentility! Comradely feeling fills me,

too. I suppose this is the feeling of one Communist meeting another insome unexpected respectable place. There is a feeling of strength andcommon purpose. We can criticize ourselves all we want, but—against theworld of reactionary musicians and critics we must form a united front.Yes, Antheil hit it exactly right. What a fine chap he is, anyway! I go to hisplace, he shows me his scores—he has a fine Capriccio, although headmits, it isn’t a Capriccio at all—rather an Overture. I look over the scoreof his opera, Transatlantic. He has also written a Jazz Symphony. What acheerful talent!

The next morning—a telephone call rather early, probably before nineo’clock. It’s Roy. His telephone voice is so well-modulated and gentle. “Youare all wrong about my third entry on the supertonic,” are his first words,“It’s in the dominant.” “In the dominant?! But why didn’t you tell me thatit wasn’t supertonic at all?!”

“Well, I forgot myself. I remember Bach, but I don’t remember myown music so very well.”

Nicolas Slonimsky16

In speaking about modern music, we still naturally revert to the namesand reputations established before the war. The latest dictionaries andencyclopedias of modern music rarely mention composers born after1900. In other words, composers now in their middle thirties, composingin a new modern idiom (which is, by the way, much less modern than thepre-war brand of modern music) are not yet taken cognizance of in theavailable source books. At the slow rate at which modern compositions arepublished, it is difficult to make acquaintance with these new forces, evenfor the student acutely interested in the development of modern music.

Specifically, when Italian modern music is discussed, the names ofRespighi, Casella, Pizzetti and Malipiero are taken as representative of thenew modern school. It is little realized that Casella, Pizzeti, and Malipiero,now in their fifties, and Respighi, who has passed on, are really fathers ofthe new movement in Italian music, established masters, teachers of a newgeneration of Italian musicians.

Roughly, Respighi and Pizzetti represent the romantic, pictorial schoolof composition, magnificent in execution, but less potent in musicalcontent because of the literary program and external effects necessitatedby that program. Casella and Malipiero represent the neo-classicaltendencies in the musical art of new Italy, and their neo-classicism is mademusically, and even politically, more significant because it takes root in thenational music of the early centuries. Taken in conjunction with the factthat both Casella and Malipiero started as extreme modernists, and haveretained the new modernist technique in their works of a later date, the

4. MODERN ITAL IAN MUSIC

17

Ch. 4: originally published in The Christian Science Monitor, September 21 andOctober 5, 1937, and February 1, 1938.

new development assumes the significance of a synthesis, a compromisebetween the imperishable values of the classical past, and the survivingfeatures of the modern present.

Thus, while atonality, rampant in post-war modernism, now has falleninto disrepute nearly everywhere, the building of melodic and harmonicpatterns by fourths, characteristic of atonality, has been retained as apowerful means of new musical expression. A modified twelve-tone systemappears in new Italian music in the form of a method of non-repetition ofmelodically important notes. Polytonality has been saved in the reducedform of bitonality, and the diatonic system has been expanded into a pan-diatonic usage, which freely combines all seven degrees of the diatonicscale, with the bass retaining its determining function, and strong pedalpoints, emphasizing the tonality.

Among young Italians writing in this new idiom, who were born in thefirst decade of the present century, the following are already fairly wellknown in Italy, and are beginning to be known throughout Europe byperformances of their works at the festivals of modern music: LuigiDallapiccola, born in Pisino, Istria, on Feb. 3, 1904; Goffredo Petrassi,born in Zagarolo, Rome, on July 16, 1904; Giovanni Salviucci, born inRome on Oct. 26, 1907; Gianandrea Gavazzeni, born in Bergamo on July25, 1909; Gianluca Tocchi, born in Perugia on Jan. 10, 1901; RiccardoNielsen, born in Bologna on March 3, 1908; Adone Zecchi, born inBologna on July 23, 1904; and Franco Margola, born in Brescia on Oct.30, 1908.

Their younger colleagues are Ennio Porrino, born in Cagliari, on Jan.20, 1910; Nino Rota, born in Milan, on Dec. 3, 1911, and the youngest,Gino Gorini born in Venice, June 22, 1914.

An examination of their orchestral and instrumental works presentsgreat interest to the student of modern music, for here we find the modernidiom tested by a quarter of a century of conscious development, notmerely experimental, but also educational—a test conducted bymodernists of the older generation who are now educators and masters ofnew modernists.

Among young masters of modern Italian music, the names ofGoffredo Petrassi and Luigi Dallapiccola stand high. Born within monthsof each other in 1904, they are now close to the age which Dantedescribed as the middle of life’s road, the period of ripe maturity andcreative felicity.

Nicolas Slonimsky18

Goffredo Petrassi studied at the Royal Conservatory of Santa Ceciliaand received his diploma in composition in 1932, and in organ playing in1933. His Partita for orchestra won the national contest in 1933, and wasperformed at the Amsterdam Festival of the International Society forContemporary Music in the same year. His Introduction and Allegro forviolin with orchestra was presented at the Prague Festival in 1935, and hisConcerto for orchestra at the Venice Festival in 1936.

Even from the titles of these works, it immediately appears thatPetrassi has chosen the way of a neo-classicist. His early works are stillunder the influence of Casella and Hindemith, but soon Petrassi adds anelement of characteristic “objective lyricism,” or lyricism without subjectmatter. Petrassi never felt the urge to hook his musical imagination to aliterary subject, or to paint human emotions with a tonal brush. His musicis anti–nineteenth-century music, and strongly pro–eighteenth-century.But the two centuries since the period of hallowed classicism have notpassed for nothing, Petrassi uses the eighteenth-century scheme ofcomposition as a form for his twentieth-century ideas.

Technically speaking, he uses quartal melody and harmony, buildingin horizontal and vertical fourths. But his quartal constructions are a farcry from the 12-tone brand of atonality, which implies a flight from thekeynote by means of a complete cycle of fourths. Petrassi’s melodies maygo up two or three fourths, but no farther, and his chords do likewise. Hisinstrumentation is pure and entirely devoid of post-impressionisticfulsomeness, and he conscientiously avoids over-individualizedinstrumentation, so typical of both the French and the Viennese schoolsof composition. When he wants an instrument to stand out, he writes“concertando” in the good classical eighteenth-century Concerto manner.

Luigi Dallapiccola has had great variety in musical experience. Hestudied at the Florence Conservatory, being graduated in piano in 1924and in composition in 1931. Since 1934, he has been professor at his almamater. In his creative work, he has tried every mode of composition,including the integral 12-tone system, so unpopular now among musicianswho lack the genius of Schonberg or Berg to put it to service for musicalbeauty. Dallapiccola’s excursions into the 12-tone system were singularlysuccessful, and he abandoned it all too early.

Dallapiccola’s inspiration goes further into the ages than that of hisneo-classical contemporaries. But he likes to write for large vocalensembles, and he is fascinated by the Palestrinian greatness of the late

Modern Italian Music 19

Renaissance. He affects the archaic polyphonic and instrumentaltechnique, and the occasional chromaticism here reflects the modalfreedom of the great contrapuntists rather than the atonal refinement ofmodern innovators. His Kalevala Songs were presented in Florence onJune 12, 1931, for the first time; his Partita—a debt paid to fashionableneo-classicism—was given in Florence on Jan. 22, 1933; his Rhapsody forvoice and chamber orchestra was given at the Third International Festivalat Venice, Sept. 8, 1934; and his Music for Three Pianos was performed forthe first time in Geneva on March 30, 1936.

With the passage of time Dallapiccola’s music grows more nationallyItalian in spirit, and the elements of his early modernism tend todisappear. Dallapiccola has found his way. His music is a Renaissance ofRenaissance.

Among modernists belonging entirely in the twentieth century, GianLuca Tocchi is a paradoxical musical phenomenon. Born in Perugia on Jan.10, 1901, he was sufficiently mature at the time when program music wasstill fashionable. A pupil of Respighi, he was graduated from Santa Ceciliain 1926, and won a prize in 1931 with his Three Songs in the popularItalian manner. Italian folk music has remained for him the chief sourceof inspiration. At the same time he went heart and soul into theesthetically opposite movement, and applied his knack for representationalmusic to the mechanized poetry of urbanist machine music with a would-be American tinge. To this period belongs the orchestral suite, entitledRecord (1933), Concerto for a Jazz Orchestra (1933) and the suite, Film(1936).

Lino Liviabella was born in Macerata, on April 7, 1902. A pupil ofRespighi, he was graduated from the Academy of Santa Cecilia in 1927.He cultivates the pictorial and lyrico-romantic genre in his chamber musicand reserves the grand “imperialist” style for his orchestral works. Duringthe 1936 Olympiad in Berlin, his bombastic work, Il Vincitore carried aprize.

Continuing in the order of seniority, we come to Adone Zecchi, bornin Bologna on July 23, 1904. He studied under Franco Alfano. A pure neo-classicist, he has written some excellent chamber music. His Violin Sonatain F (1934) exhibits the best features of “tonality plus,” or, as I should liketo call it, pan-diatonic harmony. As a performing conductor, he has a senseof practical virtuoso playing, and his music is never “paper music.” Of hispublished orchestral works, the Two Preludes, subtitled respectively,

Nicolas Slonimsky20

“dramatic,” and “gay,” are very effective, although musically inferior to hischamber music.

Riccardo Castagnone was born at Como, on Sept. 10, 1906. He studiedat the Verdi Conservatory in Milan, took lessons in conducting fromHerman Scherchen, and organized a small orchestra, which he conductedin various cities in Northern Italy. As a composer, he is chiefly known forhis unpretentious but always effective orchestral pieces, stylizations andarrangements of old dance tunes.

Giulio Cesare Sonzogno was born in Milan Dec. 24, 1906. His musicis romantic, emotional, pictorial. His Four Country Melodies for smallorchestra (1932) won a prize for best “radiogenic” music—that is, bestadapted for radiocasting. His practical sense of musical values makes hismusic palatable fodder for any symphony audience.

Renzo Rosselini was born in Rome, on Feb. 2, 1908. He is one of thefew Italian modernists who have attempted what is now the leastpracticable type of composition—the opera. Between 1928 and 1930 hewrote a four-act opera, Alcassino and Nicoletta, which was never producednor published. His less ambitious efforts for orchestra, and his chambermusic, fared much better. He is a prolific composer, and something of aWunderkind. His first published work was composed in 1924, when he wasonly 16.

Riccardo Nielsen, born in Bologna on March 3, 1908, managed to getout of his indentures very early in life. His works, molded in a determinedneo-classical shape and idiom, have been given at International MusicFestivals, and thus attracted attention of the music world at large. In 1932he won the prize of the Royal Philharmonic Society in Rome with hisViolin Concerto, and in 1934 his Capriccio for piano and orchestra wasselected in a contest of young Italian composers for presentation at theSecond International Festival at Venice. After Petrassi and Dallapiccola, heis one of the most conspicuous composers of modern Italy.

Franco Margola was born in Brescia on Oct. 30, 1908. Influenced atfirst by the rarefied lyricism of Pizzettii, he made a sudden turn towardthe neo-Italian modernism of Cassella’s style, with “tonality plus” as thechief medium. Possessing a melodic gift combined with rhythmicinvention, he excels most in chamber music.

Gianandrea Gavazzeni was born in Bergamo on July 25, 1909. LikeDallapiccola, he started as an out-and-out “internationalist,” explored theutmost recesses of chromaticism, and tried the fragmentary succinctness

Modern Italian Music 21

of extreme modernism, à la Viennese. Even more determinedly thanDallapiccola, he threw off the temptation of modernism, and turned toItalianate lyricism in the style of Pizzetti. Soon, however, he found whathe himself considers the right way: music, polyphonically constructed,whose melodic inspiration lies in the simple tunes of the Italiancountryside. Gavazzeni is an industrious worker, and since 1928 haswritten 28 compositions in various forms, including a one-act opera, Pauland Virginia, produced in 1935. Besides, he is a gifted litterateur, authorof a biography of Donizetti, and music critic and commentator.

Nicolas Slonimsky22

In relation to society in general, the status of the Latin American com-poser is superior to that of his North American comrade. This superiorposition is contingent on the active participation of Latin American gov-ernments in music education. In each country there is a Department ofFine Arts, with special appropriations for the propagation of musical cul-ture, publication of musical compositions, and research work, perfor-mances of native works, stipends for travel abroad, etc. Furthermore,Latin American governments distribute special prizes for musical compo-sitions, along with similar prizes for literary works, paintings, and sculp-ture. Such prizes possess the compound significance of a Pulitzer Prize, aGuggenheim Fellowship, and a music critics’ award. The composerreceives both money and glory. Even if, from the outside, some awardsseem futile, in view of the lack of musical culture in the country in ques-tion, from the inside the award has considerable specific weight. Let ustake the example of Nicaragua, a country that possesses only one realcomposer, Luis A. Delgadillo. His recent oriental ballet, La cabeza delRawi, was awarded the Rubén Darío Prize of 500 córdobas. Because ofthe absence of a European tradition in Nicaragua, this prize could not bemore than a gesture of recognition.

The monetary value of the prizes is at times considerable. Here, forinstance, is the list of prizes distributed by the Comisión Nacional deCultura in Buenos Aires on October 15, 1941:

5. THE STATUS OF THE LAT IN AMERICAN COMPOSER

23

Ch. 5: NS’s typewritten manuscript pages, apparently unpublished, dated 1942.

Pesos7,000 opera2,500 ballet or operetta4,500 symphonic poem, symphony, suite or overture (minimum

duration of ten minutes)2,500 quartet or trio or sonata2,000 three songs, three piano pieces, or other instrumental pieces1,500 suite of six pieces of genuine folklore

The prizes awarded for compositions by Chilean composers on theoccasion of the Quadricentenary of the foundation of Santiago inNovember 1941 were also high, the first prize being 25,000 Chilean pesos.Because of a great number of prizes, virtually every participant receivedan award. This contest was marked by a very unusual occurrence when theComisión del Cuarto Centanario voided the first prize awarded toDomingo Santa Cruz for his choral work Madrigales, on the ground thatSanta Cruz, as Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Chile,should not have submitted his work. A bitter exchange of argumentsfollowed in the press, during which Domingo Santa Cruz declared that hewould ask personal satisfaction from the members of the Committee as“caballeros.” The insinuation that Domingo Santa Cruz had invitedpersonal friends as jury members was belied by the fact that Santa Cruzhad never met one of the three judges, the Argentinian Honorio Siccardi,and had to look up one of my articles on South American composers inorder to be able to recognize him at the airport. On the other hand, AaronCopland, a jury member, and a friend of Santa Cruz, voted againstawarding the first prize to anybody.

The contest was anonymous, but it is possible that the jury membershad tentatively identified the composers. Objectively speaking, there wasno question that Santa Cruz’s work was superior to others mentioned, bothin conception and technique.

Often the prize award takes the form of helping the composer toproduce his theatrical works. The Brazilian opera Malazarte by OscarLorenzo Fernândez was produced at the Opera House in Rio de Janeiroon September 30, 1941, with the money furnished by the Braziliangovernment. The expenses amounted to $3,000 in American currency.

While the amount of money and glory bestowed upon the LatinAmerican composer is considerably larger than in Europe and in NorthAmerica, the economic status of the Latin American composer in relation

Nicolas Slonimsky24

to the general standard of living in his own country is no higher than inthe rest of the world. The Latin American composer earns his living chieflyby teaching, or by serving on executive boards of commercial enterprises.Thus, two Argentinian composers, Floro M. Ugarte and Raúl H. Espoile,are members of the Administrative Council of the Teatro Colón in BuenosAires. Many Latin American composers have permanent jobs. JaimeOvalle, the Brazilian composer, is a Customs officer. José Castañeda,conductor and writer on music, is the chief of the passport division at theMinistry of Foreign Affairs of Guatemala, an appointment which he owesto his uncle, the President of the Republic. He helped me out of anembarrassing situation at the airport of Guatemala City, where I landedwithout the necessary transit visa. I appreciated Castañeda’s powers offixing the incident then and there. Afterwards, he wrote some very nastythings about me in his column in El Liberal Progresista, but my gratitudeto him remains undiminished.

Alfonso Leng, the Chilean composer of romantically inspiredsymphonic poems and songs, is a prominent dentist of Santiago. I had theoccasion to profit by his professional skill, when he put a temporary fillingin one of my bad molars.

Alejandro García Caturla, the greatest talent in the modern school ofCuban composers, was a judge in the town of Remedios. His life endedtragically when a criminal, whom he had sentenced to prison, shot andkilled him on November 12, 1940.

Guillermo Uribe Holguín, Colombia’s No. 1 composer, is a richplantation owner. He grows coffee.

Composers who play an instrument usually earn a living by playing inan orchestra. Pablo Moncayo plays percussion in the Orquesta Sinfónicade México. Rodolfo Holzmann, the German composer who settled in Peru,plays the violin in the Orquesta Nacional de Lima, and Rodolfo Barbacci,the musicologist, plays the harp in the same orchestra.

Sometimes signal success obtained in the field of creative compositionprevents the composer, for reasons of prestige, from playing in cabarets ornight clubs, though this may result in grave economic loss. Thus, JacoboFicher had to abandon his engagements as a violinist in various Jewishtheatrical shows in Buenos Aires after he became known as a composerand a conductor.

As in the rest of the world, the publication of serious music brings noappreciable returns to the Latin American composer, if he is lucky enoughto find a publisher at all.

The Status of the Latin American Composer 25

Until recently, Latin American published music was rarelycopyrighted. As a consequence, North American publishers are reluctantto distribute Latin American music, feeling that should a piece becommercially successful, any other publisher would be free to reissue it,as is commonly done with Russian music.

Music lovers who put in an individual order for a piece by a LatinAmerican composer often have to pay many times the original price. Asong by Villa-Lobos, which costs 5 milreis (25 cents) in Rio de Janeiro ispriced $1.50 in New York.

Even when a copyright is legally taken out, the composer is sometimesrobbed of the proceeds. Consider, for instance, the strange case of“Estrellita” by Manuel Ponce, the Mexican composer. Ponce wrote thesong in his youth. It was published by the Mexican firm of Wagner &Levien, but the copyright was taken by the printers in Germany. Throughsome legalistic loophole, possibly a lapse of a few days between thepublication and the issuance of the copyright in Washington, it becamepossible for other publishers to pirate the song without paying royalties tothe composer. The song, in numerous arrangements, became enormouslypopular, but the composer failed to receive any returns from it.

Composers of popular songs and dances can easily amass a fortune inLatin America, particularly in large countries, such as Argentina or Brazil.The popular Argentinian composer, Francisco Canaro, though he may beas deficient in musical knowledge as Irving Berlin, is a millionaire. He isnow President of the Sociedad Argentina de Autores y Compositores deMúsica. Incidentally, the list of members of this society includes, as perJune 30, 1941, sixty-six pages of names, with an average of 50 composers’names on a page.

Many Latin American composers are engaged professionally as musiccritics. But while musical journalism in this country leaves outpersonalities, in Latin America the tempers are hotter, and musicalfactionalism finds its expression in violent and personal attacks. Even whenthe musical community is limited to but a few professionals, theinternecine strife reaches an extraordinary degree of vehemence. Thereare only four professional musicians in Ecuador, and the atmosphericpressure in Quito is very low, the capital being situated at an altitude of9500 feet. Yet musical animosity is tense. Here, for instance, is an excerptfrom an otherwise scholarly treatise by Segundo Luis Moreno, “La Músicaen el Ecuador,” published in the collection, El Ecuador en Cien Años de

Nicolas Slonimsky26

Independencia (1930) in which the author passes judgment on Pedro P.Traversari, former director of the Quito Conservatory: “Señor Traversari,possessed by an itch to appear in public and to pass for a person wellversed in the arts, has never feared the ridiculous.”

The highest degree of musical violence is reached in the Argentinianmagazine La Silurante Musicale, which adopted in 1940 the meaningfulsubtitle El Torpedero Musical. Invariably, musical criticism is supple-mented by an argumentum ad hominem. Thus, in a review of the piecesfor children composed by the Argentinian educator, Raúl H. Espoile,the writer, having condemned the music, reminds the reader that Espoiledraws, presumably without justification or merit, 800 pesos each monthas Music Inspector in Secondary Schools, and 500 pesos as a member ofthe Council.

In the February 1940 issue of El Torpedero Musical, the editor assailsJuan Carlos Paz, the Argentinian modernist, for writing an unfavorablereview of a book by one Héctor Gallac, Ensayos musicólogicos. Now, thesame Gallac had contributed a detailed study of Paz’ music in Vol. I of theBoletín Latinoamericano de Música. Why, then, should Paz be prejudicedagainst Gallac? El Torpedero Musical explains that (1) the article on Pazwas ghost-written by Paz himself, and only signed by Gallac; (2) Paz wasdisgruntled by the fact that the article in question was not included inGallac’s book; inde ira.

The particular bête noire of the “Musical Torpedo” is the Con-servatorio Nacional de Buenos Aires, whose very name is always precededby the qualifying epithet, llamado. In the August 1938 number of LaSilurante Musicale, the Conservatory is lampooned in a story entitled“Sonatina monotonal en 3 tiempos.” It quotes an advertisement in LaPrensa, and supplements it with scurrilous parenthetical remarks: “Prof.Cons. Nacional desde 5, solfeo, armonía, contrap. (contrapel si espeluquero, podra enseñarlo . . . ), instrumentación, fuga, compos.(compostura de zapatos?) pistón clarinete, piano, etc. . . .”

Quoting a letter from Juan José Castro to the superintendent of theOrquesta Popular Municipal de Arte Folklórico (a letter which in itself isvery unusual, for in it Castro urges the dismissal of the then conductor ofthe said orchestra “por higiene artistíca y por el decoro de la ciudad querepresenta”) the editor comments, “Pregunto: porqué el Sr. Castro noescribió algo en otra ocasión más grave, o sea cuando fue nombradodirector de la Banda Municipal de Buenos Aires un simple violoncelista


que nada sabía, y, naturalemente, nada sabe tampoco ahora, de bandamusical. Contesto: porque ese nombramiento recayó sobre un hermanodel Sr. Castro, y cuando la chirola queda en familia, todo está bien. . . .”

The magazine has this to say about Juan José Castro himself: “El Sr.Castro que pretende ser compositor y director de orquesta, no es ni lo unoni lo otro: sus composiciones hacen simplemente dormir.”

Unfortunately for its self-righteous attitude, La Silurante Musicaleextols members of the editor’s own group in a rather ostentatious manner.Rodolfo Barbacci, himself a master of invective, in the August 20, 1937issue of his magazine America Musical (since defunct) expresses thesuspicion that the editor of La Silurante was motivated in his attacks onother conservatories by the circumstance that the editor’s textbook onharmony was not used in these conservatories. Barbacci adds sarcastically,“Nosotros naturalmente!!! no podemos creer que el honestísimo directorde esta publicación utilice su revista como espada de Damocles contra lostemerarios que se atreven a preferir otra Teoría a la suya . . .”

Some American critics spare no epithets when reviewing concerts ofmodernistic music. On one occasion, when Olin Downes threw a particu-larly large bomb on a group of American modernists, the composers firedsome shots of their own in a letter to the editor of the New York Times.But even in this rather strong exchange of blows, the gentleman-like tonewas always preserved.

After the concert of Latin American music at the New York PublicLibrary on March 9, 1942, Francisco Mignone, the Brazilian composer whoplayed the piano in his works, wrote me with some bitterness: “Os criticosnos ‘meteram o pau’ achando a música fraca e inconsistente. Ficaram‘astonished’ por terem escluido do programa musicas do Villa-Lobos que,dijem, tem muito mais cabeça e hombos de todos os sulamericanos juntos.Averam que nos compomos a manera de vinte anos atraz. A minha ‘Sonata’para piano foi criticada por ser muito . . . ‘hespanhola’! A de violino e pianodo Camargo Guarnieri muito prolixa e . . . antiga. Sera que eles tem razac?O que the disse e a pure titulo informativo.”

American critics may be impolite to guests, as the above lettersuggests. They may also be impolite to ladies. The late great H. T. Parkerdid write once, in reference to a society singer who appeared as soloistwith Ravel: “It would be informing to know how Monsieur Ravel becamesaddled with this Mme. . . .” But nowhere does musical journalism reachthe thermometer-breaking temperature of Latin America. Passions rage.

Nicolas Slonimsky28

Often a maltreated composer cries that in his person the course of nationalmusic has been insulted, while his opponents accuse him of purveyingersatz nationalism and thus doing disservice to his country. The divisionbetween the Indigenistas and Universalistas, which exists in literature, hasbeen projected into music. Indigenistas identify themselves as Indianistasbecause the resources of indigenous music obviously come from theaborigines, i.e., Indians. But many musicians, while claiming forthemselves the title of national composers, refuse to be set down as merestylizers of folklore, and assert that the folkloristic element is incidental inthe creation of permanent values.

In some Latin American music both the elements of Universalism andIndigenism are present, as, for instance, in Villa-Lobos’ famous BachianasBrasileiras, which purport to express the spirit of Bach in the terms ofBrazil. Thus Villa-Lobos explains a superior pedal in one of his “Bachianas”as the cry of the Brazilian bird, araponga.

Carlos Chávez, in reply to a yes-or-no question, has declared positivelythat he is a Universalist, and that he has never quoted folk tunes in any ofhis works, but believes that his music is expressive of the spirit of Mexico,and that he is a true Mexicanista.

Many composers claim priority in the use of the native folksongelement in their music. One morning in Rio, I had successive appointmentswith four Brazilian composers, each one of whom told me that he had usednative melodies and native rhythms for the first time among nationalcomposers. Similar claims as pioneers in folklore were presented to me inLima by several Peruvians, Walter Stubbs, Daniel Alomía Robles, andRoberto Carpio.

Conversely, composers working in an international idiom dislike beingidentified as Brazilian, Mexican, or other national composers. JuliánCarrillo, protagonist of microtonal music, feels that the title of a Mexicancomposer limits his significance. A man of great culture and orthodoxacademic training (he studied in Germany), in addition to being a practicalbusiness man, he is unrealistic enough to call his experiments with quarter-tones, eighth-tones, sixteenth-tones, etc. a crusade, and even puts the wordon his stationery: “Cruzada Pro-Sonido 13.” (The 13th sound is, of course,the sound beyond the familiar twelve of the chromatic scale, andsymbolizes the plurality of fractional tones.)

In a letter to me dated May 20, 1942, Carrillo suggests that a chamberorchestra should be organized in this country to play the music of the 13th


sound in various cities of the United States, to demonstrate that “hay enMéxico algo mejor de lo que los mexicanos han presentado por allá.”Concerning the business aspect of the proposition he writes: “Creo que elasunto no será muy difícil, pues hace algún tiempo que estuvo en Méxicouna señora de las patrocinadoras de la Sinfónica de Stokowski, y me dijoque si yo hubiera solicitado dinero para mi obra cuando se tocó miConcertino en la Cacademy of Music, la habría tenido.” Cacademy is amisprint for Academy.

An interesting light on the anti-folkloristic attitude of the musicalvanguard in Latin America is shed by a collective letter addressed to mein connection with the competition for a violin concerto and signed by thebrothers Castro, Honorio Siccardi, and Jacobo Ficher:

Enterados por su amable carta que proximamente se anunciará un con-curso para un Concierto para Violín y orquesta dedicado a los composi-tores latinoamericanos bajo el auspicio de un grupo de mecenas de esepaís, nos es grato dirigimos a Ud. para rogarle de tener en cuenta la sug-estión de modificar dicho llamado en lo que se refiere a su aspecto folk-lórico. Entendemos que, de mantenerse ese criterio, se restringiríanotablemente la concurrencia de los compositores representativos deAmérica, ya que un gran número de ellos no cultivan preferentementeesa tendencia. Estamos convencidos que la modificación propuestatraería como consecuencia inmediata un mayor interés entre los com-positores, ya que las posibilidade alcanzarían a la totalidad de ellos.

In the fine art of self-appreciation, Latin American musicians followthe laws and aberrations of human nature. Some are violently self-assertiveand would go the whole hog to impress outsiders. Others are exaggeratedlyhumble. Some few are intelligent and factual in their statements. JulioMato of Costa Rica states his position as follows: “I must say that I standamong the best composers of my country, also the first cellist of CostaRica.” But M. L. Aguirre of Peru humbly declines to give his biographicaldata because he considers himself a mere amateur. The young Braziliancomposer, Eleazar de Carvalho, author of an interesting national opera,Tiradentes, stubbornly refused to have his name included, on the groundthat he was too young and did not measure up to requirements.

Ignacio Villanueva Galeano of Honduras is candid to an embarrassingdegree. Writing in the third person, he communicates the following:

Nicolas Slonimsky30

“Como consecuencia de las ejecuciones de instrumentos de viento fuesintiendo decaimiento de fuerzas, más aniquiladas aún por laalcoholomania que estaba haciendo su segura destrucción y consiguientedegeneración; de todo lo cual, felizmente, se ha liberado por su poderosafuerza de voluntad que domina.”

The strangest case of all is that of Carlos Valderrama, who is,incidentally, the only Peruvian composer whose name was included inEuropean dictionaries. In response to my request for biographical data, Ireceived a letter signed by the head of the publishing house GuillermoBrandes & Co. of Lima, and Valderrama himself. He was characterized inthe letter as “the most known composer-pianist of his land Peru, also in theUnited States and Europe.” A photostatic copy of Valderrama’s programgiven in New York was enclosed, with signatures of Paderewsky, JosefHofmann, Pablo Casals, Walter Damrosh, and, unexpectedly, Charles E.Hughes. These signatures purported to endorse Valderrama’s art, butCasals wrote only “del gran admirador del Peru,” which could be interpretedas an endorsement only by force of the syllogism: I admire all thingsPeruvian,Valderrama is a Peruvian, ergo, I admire Valderrama. It developedlater that Guillermo Brandes, the supposed signatory of the letter, had beendead for some years, and that the whole self-endorsing letter was composedby Valderrama himself on a piece of purloined stationery.

One of my most gratifying experiences was the discovery of Gomesde Araújo. I came across his name in a dictionary, which indicated that hewas born in Brazil in 1846. In my desire to complete the entry, I wrote tothe Conservatory of São Paulo, where he had been inspector, and inquiredof the administration as to the exact date of Araujo’s death. In reply, Ireceived a letter from Araujo himself, in which he said, in his curious brandof English: “In fact, I was born on the 5th of August, 1846, and in spite ofthis being a long existence, I should say I am still healthy and fit foranything.” When I met him in São Paulo in September 1941, he was astrapping 95-year-old. He was still Inspector of the Conservatory in SãoPaulo, and visited it regularly and unaccompanied. He never wore glasses,and had all his teeth. But his music showed his age. The little piece whichhe wrote for me as a souvenir of our meeting was decidedly dated.

In my desire to get as much information as possible about LatinAmerican composers, whether good or bad, considering only theirprofessional status as musicians who set down notes on paper and havethese notes played by local musical organizations, and who have further


published their products, I have met with many violent objections on thepart of my Latin American friends and enemies. In vain did I argue thatI am preoccupied with a sort of geo-music, that the question of evaluationwould come later, after I have gathered my materials. There may be noflora or fauna on the Antarctic continent, but if there are some rock lizardsthe fact has to be stated. The South American Handbook for 1941describes the desert of Chile in the following words: “The North, fromArica to Copiapó, is a sandy desert, utterly rainless, a land of mercilesssunshine and forbidding mountains devoid of vegetation. Livingconditions in the mining towns and the ports are artificial. Most ofthe necessities of existence must be imported from the South or fromabroad. Today many settlements have been abandoned. The towns bear anair of tragedy and decay. But a determined struggle is in progress andthe work goes on. The desert conceals vast mineral wealth and promisesbetter days.”

Mutatis mutandis, this description applies to music conditions incertain Latin American countries. Many of the musical necessities mustbe imported from abroad, but there is “vast mineral wealth,” whichpromises better days.

In an article, entitled “La pesca panamericanista,” and published in theGuatemala City daily, El Liberal Progresista, of January 17, 1942, on theoccasion of my visit in Guatemala, José Castañeda, a brilliant writerexcelling in fiery journalism, served me a warning. “Inquieto tempera-mento, explorador por naturaleza,” he wrote about me,

se ha acercado, siempre, a las fuentes de lo inédito musical. Es lógico,por lo misme, que ambule por nuestras tierras en una aventura pan-americanista. Slonimsky sabe que no se trata de acumular, ain discrimi-nación, música de todo el continente. Que no se trata de cantidades sinode valores. Es posible que, atacado por la plaga de los compositores conhambre de noteriedad, haya cedido, por cortesía, y lleve consigo unacolección demasiado numerosa de obras musicales o que pretendenserlo. El peligro en Slonimsky es su trato amable. Su incapacidad de rechazar, de plano, al impostor que le lleva, sin pudor, obras para que lasincluya en sus programas o en el libro que prepara. Pero, esperamos, seaun peligro transitorio. Cuando regrese a Boston, el clima ponderado, enlo cultural, de la docta ciudad norteña, le devolverá todas sus faculdadescríticas. Volverá a ser el Slonimsky que conocemos. Crítico de fina sen-

Nicolas Slonimsky32

sibilidad, de juicio alerto, sin contemplaciones para la mediocridad.Porque su libro ha de ser algo más que un catálogo congelado. Algo másque una estadística. Debe representar el juicio sincero, audaz, de quienha podido contemplarnos de cerca. Debe ser un reflejo, sin sombras, denuestra realidad, sin concesiones, totalizante.

In Guatemala, as in other Latin American countries on my itinerary,I presented a lecture-recital, in which I included piano pieces by localcomposers. This recital, broadcast by the government station, La Voz deGuatemala, stirred Castañeda to fury. He reported the occasion in a front-page article, under the title, “La Flauta de Slonimsky,” in which he likenedme to a Hindu fakir, and suggested that I was capable of selling theBrooklyn bridge to the hoi-polloi. As to the poor guatemaltecos, he forborefrom mentioning their modest names, and remarked only that they shouldhave buried their faces in their hands in shame when they heard theirmusic performed after that of Villa-Lobos, and others included in myprogram. He dubbed one of them, whose innocent little Berceuse I playedas an encore, “composer of radio schedules,” for indeed the man was themusic director of the station. When, a few days later, I conducted theOrquesta Progresista of Guatemala City, featuring a Guatemalan work,Castañeda’s paper carried no review, an eloquent abstention, seeing thatit had given me an enormous build-up, with daily news stories, and front-page pictures.

Now that I am back in Boston, enjoying the “temperate clime and theculture of the learned northern city,” and have presumably “recovered mycritical faculties,” I still find myself unable to agree with José Castañeda’sfundamental premises. I still believe that as a musical geographer (andCastañeda himself praises me for my spirit of exploration of the musicalunknown), I should accumulate quantities of material before charting atable of values. “The Pan American Fishing Trip,” to use Castañeda’s title,cannot be undertaken in the spirit of skeptical discrimination. I was onlytoo glad to take in whatever I found in my net, and to spread the net as farand wide as possible. I had no objection whatever to “the plague ofcomposers hungry for notoriety,” and my welcome to them had nothing todo with my traits of amiability with which Castañeda had endowed me, ormy incapacity to reject “the impostor who shamelessly brings his works sothat I should include them in my programs or in my book.” My book wasto be a musical Baedecker, a tourist guide, and, as such, should by right


have included, at least in its dictionary section, every one who cancharitably be called a Latin American composer.

Other critics in Latin America were more kindly disposed towards myintentions. Leopoldo Hurtado, the Argentinian writer, in presenting apreview of my book in Argentina Libre of November 6, 1941, expressedbewilderment as to how I was going to complete my task. “Como puedehacerse un libro orgánico con ese maremagnum, es un secreto profesionalsuyo,” but wished me good luck. Pablo Garrido, the Chilean musician andwriter, in his interview in Las Últimas Noticias of December 11, 1941, wasunreservedly appreciative of my desire to include all of his Chileanconfrères in my book, and concludes his article on a hopeful note: “Que lapalabra de Slonimsky sea voz de aliento para los compositores nacionalesque, a pesar de tantas incomprensiones, han logrado colocar la música desu patria a la cabeza de las naciones sudamericanas. Y que Slonimsky, deregreso en su gran tierra de la libertad, declare que no sólo salitre y cobreproduce este lejano rincón de América.”

My excellent friend, the German-Spanish-Mexican musicologist, OttoMayer-Serra, had an expressive word for some of the music I collected:“basura,” garbage, and for the lower category, “basura de la basura.”

However, only contemporary fresh basura offended his sensitivenostrils. Shopping in the Mexican flea-market, I had chanced upon a pileof manuscripts by a deceased German-Mexican composer, one HermannRoesler, and had acquired the collection for a few Mexican pesos. Themusic was grade-A “basura,” but it fascinated my critical friend. It had“historical value.” It was “important.” It proved something or other. . . .Cannot some of the “basura” I have gathered prove as fascinating when ithas acquired the smell-killing perspective?

Latin American musicians are no more objective in their judgment ofvalues than their colleagues anywhere else in the world. They are affectedby considerations of friendship or antagonism, and they are apt to be morecritical of their musical neighbors than of strangers. The following formulaexpresses the appreciation by a musician of another musician, withreference to time, distance, group cohesion, number of musicians perpopulation, style similarity, and extraterritoriality.

Nicolas Slonimsky34

GcA = Q . T a logD + E

Ss × NP

Appreciation (A) is directly proportional to Group Cohesion (Gc), butit is in inverse ratio to Style Similarity (Ss), and to the number ofcolleagues per population (N per P). It rises slowly in proportion toDistance (D), and to express this slowness, appreciation is shown in theformula as proportional to the logarithm of distance (log D). Thus theappreciation for a compatriot living in a foreign country is generallygreater than that of a compatriot living in the same town, but quite anumber of kilometers have to be put in to allow the rise of appreciationto a perceptible degree. On the other hand, time elapsed after a colleague’sdeath quickly obliterates prejudice and is apt to inspire generosity farabove the objective value. To show this rapid rise, T for time is elevatedto the power a (for annum). Q stands for an individual coefficient. It is highin good-natured composers, low among embittered characters. The lateSilvestre Revueltas never spoke badly of his colleagues. If he could not beconscientiously enthusiastic over their music, he would say, “Well, after all,they are ‘buena gente’,” nice people. His Q value was very great.

E in the formula, stands for Extraterritoriality, and is a constant to beadded to the value of appreciation.

Gc is highest in Chile, where virtually all contemporary composers aregrouped around the faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Chile, and itsdean, Domingo Santa Cruz. Even such musicians as Juan Casanova andPablo Garrido who write in the semi-classical idiom are in friendlyrelations with the University of Chile group. That is why, when theCommittee for the Quadricentennial of Santiago voided the award of thefirst prize to Domingo Santa Cruz, his colleagues, who were also hiscompetitors in the contest, protested against the committee’s decision withgreat sincerity and conviction. The only Chilean musician who standsoutside the circle is Enrique Soro, of an older generation, and perhaps themost successful of the Chileans in matters of publications, teachingpositions, etc.

Group cohesion may be strong enough to bind musicians ofdiametrically opposite techniques and artistic aims. Thus the GrupoRenovación in Buenos Aires at one time included José María Castro, amusician of neo-classical and neo-romantic tendencies; Juan Carlos Paz,the only South American who writes in a consistent atonal idiom; andAlfredo Pinto, who writes nondescript music in a “Teatro Colón” style,effective in a theatrical way, but musically empty. Alberto Ginastera enjoysa unique position among Argentine composers, in that he is the secretary


of the conservative Society of Authors and Composers, and yet in hismusical tendencies steers close to the vanguard.

The case of the three brothers Castro—Juan José, José María, whohave already attained great renown, and Washington Castro, the youngestof the three—shows how little Group Cohesion may exist even within thesame family. Juan José Castro has never placed on his programs inArgentina or in the United States any works by José María, and the latterresented the exclusion. In this case, Style Similarity, supplemented byconfusing similarity of names, may have caused the difficulty in theinterfraternal relations of the Castro family. Before leaving Buenos Aires,I intended to take a picture of the three brothers Castro together. JacoboFicher, a long-time friend of the Castros, assured me that I would neverbe able to get the picture taken, and he was right. At first Juan José Castrosaid he could not get the Teatro Colón photographer, but when I got aphotographer on the side, Juan José had already telephoned to José Maríaand Washington that the thing was off. I was unable to countermand thecancellation, because José María had, in the meantime, left his apartment.On the following day I was leaving with Juan José for Santiago by plane,but only Washington Castro came to the airport to see his brother off.

Latin American composers are anything but shy in expressing theiropinions with complete candor. Before taking the plane from Santiago toLima, I wrote to Andrés Sas, asking his confidential opinion of Peruvianmusicians. He sent me a very compendious list of Peruvian musicians withhis comments about each. From this list it appears that the best Peruviancomposer is Rodolfo Holzmann, a refugee from Germany, which is indeeda remarkable conclusion. I transcribe this letter in the original French.

ROSA MERCEDES AYARZA de MORALES DEL SOLAR: un nomtrès long pour une personne très courte; type parfait du dandisme criolloprétentieux, de Lima. A eu un instinct musical evident, mais l’a perdudepuis pas mal d’années.

ROBERTO CARPIO: compositeur discret, comme musician et commehomme. Ne parle presque pas, mais est très attentif et désireux de savoir.Il donne toujours l’impression de se cacher.

CARLOS SÁNCHEZ MÁLAGA: a mon point de vue, musicien sansgrande valeur, qui cherche ses melodies et ses accords au piano, pour

Nicolas Slonimsky36

entendre si cela sonne a peu près. Consideré par Carlos Raygada commeun presque genie. Vous verrez cela de près.

TEODORO VALCÁRCEL: la fatuité indienne dans toute sa splendeur.La liste de ses oeuvres ferait palir Clementi ou Bach! Demandez a lesvoir! A eu de l’instinct musical, mais n’a su qu’en faire. Selon lui, les édi-teurs se disputeraient ses oeuvres. Cela doit être vrai, mais ils ne sontpas encore decidés a les lui demander. Sa musique d’orchestre a etéorchestrée par R. Holzmann.

DANIEL ALOMÍA ROBLES: Jusqu’à present, j’ignore absolument s’ilconnait vraiment la musique; on pretend que si. Il parait que c’est lui quia découvert que la musique pentatonique se compose de cinq notes! Samusique d’orchestre a eté orchestrée par V. Stea et R. Holzmann.

PABLO CHÁVEZ AGUILAR: Monseñor. Au fond un très brave homme,comme sa musique qui a eté benie, sans doute, mais que Dieu ne sem-ble pas avoir pris sous son patronage.

ERNESTO LÓPEZ MINDREAU: un fou. Appreciation (au moinsçelle-là) admise par tout le monde. Aurait peut-être fait quelque choses’il avait appris a lire et a écrire (la musique).

VICENTE STEA: musicien italien, établi ici depuis très longtemps; j’ig-nore s’il est naturalisé. Connait son metier; on sent de suite qu’il a apprisla musique. Gout douteux.

RODOLFO HOLZMANN: musicien refugie. Excellent; moderne, cul-tivé. Quelqu’un avec qui on peut parler, le seul a mon égard.

THEO BUCHWALD: A du être un bon éleve. Type dangereux; moralitédouteuse. Sa presse, qui au début (en tant que chef d’orchestre) étaitbonne, bien qu’usurpée, a perdu enormement de consistence.

CÉSAR ARRÓSPIDE: critique; prof. d’Histoire de la Musique àl’Académie Nationale, et d’Histoire de l’Art, a l’Université Catholique.Aucune personnalité. Formé sur place, malgré quelques voyages a l’étranger. Très honnête, belle conscience; connait la realité musicale


du pays, mais sa profonde religiosité l’empêche de combattre et de par-ler. Laisser faire sur terre; Dieu est maître partout!

CARLOS RAYGADA: l’opposé de Arróspide. Vivacité spirituelle in-tense, au service d’une ignorance militante, formée par des lectures maldigerées, des auditions de concert mal entendues; des expositions detableaux mal vus. Est cause, en grande partie des malheurs qui affligentles musiciens natifs. Il les a presentés tous, au moins une fois, commegrand talent. Est critique d’art, en general: musique, peinture, sculp-ture, etc. Affecte le modeste et étouffé d’orgueil. Dangereux, parce quecritique à titre du journal le plus important du pays: ‘El Comercio’. Ilaurait pu faire quelque chose.

RAOUL DE VERNEUIL: (j’aurais du le faire passer avant les critiques).Un autre fou, mais tranquille; il ne mord pas, vit dans la stratosphere. Safemme est tout l’opposé; intrigante, bavarde, fatigante. Elle voudrait quetout le monde rende justice à son mari, qui, m’a-t-elle confessé, est ungenie. Tout cela dénote chez elle de grande qualités domestiques.

EN GENERAL: aucun des natifs a etudié, même ceux qui ont veçu enEurope pendant un certain temps. Tous sont assez prétentieux; peu ontécrit quelque chose. Á cote deux, je me sens vraiment un pauvre type,plein de défauts, particulièrement celui d’être gené par un franchise delangage vraiment peu recommendable; J’ai déjà pas mal souffert desavantages d’être pourvu d’un semblable défaut, dont je n’arrive pas à mecorriger, malgré les tendances calmantes de ma femme, qui sembledevoir être tout l’opposé de Mme. de Verneuil.

Raoul de Verneuil had a higher opinion of himself than Sas. In a letterdated September 10, 1941, he wrote me: “Je dois vous dire en passant, trèshumblement, que je me considére être le seul compositeur peruvien ayantune preparation serieuse. J’espère que cela ne vous choque pas; it estévident que n’aurais pas dit cela dans un autre pays.”

A thorough job of demolishing the Peruvians was made by RodolfoBarbacci in his letter to me dated October 6, 1940. He writes: “El ambientemusical de un país no se puede conocer a través de libros o artículos oviviendo en él algunas semanas, por eso las noticias que pueda Ud. tomarpor viajeros (por ej. Carleton Sprague Smith) son necesariamente en parte

Nicolas Slonimsky38

falsas, porque el que llega ve solamente lo que le hacen ver.” He also hasmuch to tell about the private lives of Peruvian musicians:

Sánchez Málaga es íntimo amigo de Carlos Raygada, que es el críticomusical de ‘El Comercio,’ o sea el diario más importante y antiguo deLima, al cual Raygada no pierde oportunidad de elogiarlo y lo coloca ala cabeza de los músicos peruanos, como a Carpio que también es amigosuyo; muy confidencialmente, le informo que estos señores tienes amis-tades acusadas de pederastismo, morfinómanos, etc. y Ud. sabe lo queson estas ‘congregaciones’ entre sí, y cómo se defienden y apoyan. TantoAlomía Robles como Valcárcel se hacen instrumentar sus obras porqueellos no saben, además Alomía Robles no compone ni siquiera la obrapara piano, escribe unas páginas de temas lo más sencillamente posibley el instrumentador (Stea o Holzmann) realizan todo el trabajo, desar-rollo, armonización, instrumentación, etc. . . .

The notorious Carlos Valderrama is summed up by Barbacci in thesewords: “Carlos Valderrama es solamente autor de tangos, otras obritaspopulares, no se conoce de él nada serio, NO CONOCE MÚSICA,compone de oído y se hace pasar al papel sus producciones; tiene peromucha fantasía y disposición; es un audaz y hay que cuidarse de él.”

No doubt these letters were colored by partisan feelings; but I wasglad to get them. In fact I was glad to get any South American mail atall. Latin Americans are extremely bad correspondents, and I had thehardest time in the world trying to secure information needed for myarticles.

The graphophobia of my Latin American friends was not due to thelack of civility on their part or anything as reprehensible as that. As I hadoccasion to find out ex post facto, my letters were regarded by some, withthe usual generalization common to all men, as marks of appreciation oftheir works. On one occasion, the questionnaire I sent to a Hondurancomposer was published in a local paper under the heading “Honor forlocal composer.” The unfortunate part was that the addressee, after aperiod of excitement over that honor, did not consider it essential toanswer the letter and supply the information required. His emotion wasspent, and that was the end, as far as he was concerned.

On several exasperating occasions, a long-expected letter would arrivecovered with pretty airmail stamps, and full of exuberant protestations of


friendship and promises that information solicited would come with thenext mail. Then nothing.

Before I went to South America I was dependent entirely on mypowers of epistolary suasion. Fortunately, I was usually able to find aperson in each country who was a good correspondent. It is interesting tonote that most of these men of good will were of foreign birth. The mostprodigious letter writer is undoubtedly Dr. Francisco Curt Lange ofMontevideo. He numbers all of his outgoing mail; the last letter I hadfrom him was in the 10,000’s. In Argentina I have been able to carry mycorrespondence through Jacobo Ficher, a naturalized Russian. In Peru mybest correspondent was Andrés Sas, who was born in Paris.

I never succeeded in eliciting a reply from a Paraguayan. I must havewritten half a dozen letters to the only Paraguayan musician whose nameand picture I found in Lange’s Boletín Latinoamericano de Música. I wroteto the Paraguayan legation in Washington, but received no reply.

Unfortunately I had to omit Paraguay from my itinerary on my SouthAmerican tour because of the difficulties of getting air transportation;besides, I was not at all sure that I would be able to find any musicians inParaguay, and could not afford to take a chance of getting stuck inAsunción.

I asked so many musicians in different countries to help me inrounding up a few Paraguayans that the subject became a standard jokeamong my Latin American friends. Chávez told me tauntingly: “I can tellyou exactly what kind of music Paraguayan composers write without goingto Paraguay. It is gallops and polkas with an accompaniment in the tonicand dominant.” He could not understand why I had to have a Paraguayanon my list. But would not a stamp collector exchange any number ofgorgeous pictorial stamps for one drab-looking 1856 British Guiana?Paraguayan harmonies may be full of false relations and other harmonicfaults, but, to pursue the philatelic simile, the inverted swan in the famousWestern Australia error makes the stamp all the more desirable.

To add insult to injury, Gilbert Chase, commenting in “Latin AmericanMusic in 1940” on my article on South American composers in theFebruary 1940 issue of Musical America says: “The omission of Paraguayis strange.”

The lack of response on the part of Latin American musicians ingeneral is astonishing. My appeals offered them free publicity, theimmortalization of their features on the pages of an American magazine,

Nicolas Slonimsky40

the inclusion of their names in a music dictionary. When I went to SouthAmerica, I had more to offer: to have their orchestral scores copied andpreserved in the Fleisher Collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia,with the prospect of future performances in the United States. I expectedto be mobbed by ambitious musicians, eager to make their productsknown. In fact this was the picture painted by José Castañeda in his article“La pesca panamericanista.” But nothing of the sort happened. It musthave been easier to extract gold from the fabulous El Dorado than to geta questionable masterpiece from an obscure Argentinian. As a rule I hadless difficulty with successful and established composers than with poorfourth-raters. For instance, Alberto Williams, who wields enormousinfluence in the Argentinian musical world, agreed at once to lend hismanuscript for copying and even helped me to secure manuscripts byother Argentinian composers. At the banquet of the Society of ArgentinianComposers in Buenos Aires, he voiced his appreciation of the offer of theFleisher Collection. Then I was asked to speak, and I did not mince mySpanish words, as far as they went, in expressing my amazement at theindolence of Argentinian composers. Constantino Gaito, the president ofthe Society, kept making a curious spanking movement with his handsthroughout my talk, to show that the castigation was fully merited.

To a certain extent, the composers were justified in their reluctance topart with their only manuscripts. Some of them had had unpleasantexperiences with American celebrities. Stokowski took a number of SouthAmerican orchestral manuscripts, which the composer has never beenable to get back. Another offender is Iturbi. Sometimes the manuscriptswere not returned because of a misunderstanding. Espoile of Argentinatold me that he never received the score of his symphonic poem Frenos,which he said he had sent to the Fleisher Collection. But he did not know,and neither did I at the time, that the score was returned to the PanAmerican Union. Constantino Gaito made a similar complaint in regardto the score of his El Ombú. I straightened out the situation upon myreturn to the United States and notified both Espoile and Gaito of thedisposition of their manuscripts.

Other composers have lost their manuscripts through accidents. Anorchestral score by the Chilean composer Próspero Bisquertt was lostwhen the Transandine train burned up on June 7, 1927. José María Castrosent the score and parts of his Concerto Grosso to Prague in 1936, by thenewly established transatlantic airmail. The plane fell into the ocean and


burned up with the crew and the mail. José María Castro did not recoverthe $40 he paid for transportation by air.

A number of musical manuscripts by the Chilean composer UrrutiaBlondel were mislaid and could not be found in the offices of theGuggenheim Fellowship in New York. The manuscript of EscenasCampesinas by Humberto Allende of Chile was lent by the composer tothe Chilean ambassador in Washington, and could not be found in theEmbassy when Allende wrote for it. Allende had no duplicate of the score,and had to rewrite the work all over again; he recognized, however, thatthe second version was considerably superior to the first, and so the losswas not without compensation.

Francisco Mignone lent the score of his Suite Brasileira to AlfredCortot, and gave it up for lost after the fall of France. But by a luckyaccident, a set of parts of this score was kept in the Brazilian Pavilion atthe World’s Fair in New York, and the score was integrated from theseparts in the Fleisher Collection at the Free Library of Philadelphia.Mignone discovered this cheerful fact when he visited the library in March1942.

The Argentinian composer Felipe Boero told me insolently that hewould not lend his manuscripts to an American institution, unlessguaranteed by the American Embassy. He added that the United Statesshould follow the example of Germany in keeping faith with SouthAmerican musicians. His orchestral manuscripts, which had beenperformed in Berlin, were returned to him, he said, “in plena guerra” bythe German Embassy with great promptness.

In several cases the composer refused to lend his manuscripts forcopying because he considered them weak or unrepresentative, andhonestly did not care to have them preserved permanently in a librarywhere musicians could examine the music. Thus, Juan José Castro wasvery unwilling to let me have five of his early symphonic works, one ofwhich had been performed at the International Music Festival in London.Only after I wrote him a semi-humorous letter in which I dilated upon thevirtues of the compositions (and they were all good), and assured him thatthe manuscripts would be closed to the public eye until 1995, a hundredyears from his birthday, did he relent. But I must thank Mrs. Castro forher part in persuading him to let me have these manuscripts.

Composers’ wives were on many occasions my valiant helpers inlocating scores and in forcing their husbands to lend them for the Fleisher

Nicolas Slonimsky42

Collection. Where the composers themselves were too indolent or over-fastidious about their compositions, their wives were ambitious andappreciative of the purpose. They were also much more dependable thantheir husbands in arranging and keeping appointments. I doubt whetherI would have been able to break down the resistance of several importantcomposers without this domestic fifth-column.

It is a curious psychological phenomenon that creative musicians whohave enough energy to write a million notes on music paper lack the willpower to pack up their music and deliver it at the post office. José MaríaCastro, who has published at his own expense the score and parts of hisConcerto Grosso, received a courteous request from the Free Library ofPhiladelphia to send a copy for the Fleisher Collection. Although he keptthe letter on his desk for over a year, he never got around to sending thescore. But he was willing to give me as many copies as I cared to take (hehad hundreds of them piled up in the back room). Foolishly, I took onlythree.

In extenuation, it must be said that post offices in Latin America arespecially designed to discourage parcel-post. In Chile, the postalauthorities issued an order which forbade sending more than one piece toany one addressee at one time. But it was perfectly all right to space theseshippings through the day, to mail one package to the same addressee inthe morning, and another in the afternoon, or simply to place two packagesat two different windows in the same post office. In the palatial centralpost office in Mexico, the weighing had to be done at the “ventanilla” No.2, the stamps were to be purchased at another “ventanilla,” and the actualmailing was to be done at No. 34, marked “exterior,” for foreign registeredmail, at which a long line of people waited with innumerable packages,mostly foodstuffs, hopefully addressed to Spain. The clerks, generallyseñoritas of varying ages and weights, were utterly unmoved by thespectacle of the waiting populace.

When, on my last day in Mexico I came to the post office laden withthe collected works of Arnulfo Miramontes, half an hour before thescheduled departure of the bus for the airport, I found the señorita at theventanilla No. 2 doing the hair of another señorita, and not at all in a hurryto attend to my packages. When I finally got them weighed and franked,I discovered that the foreign registry window was, for no apparent reason,closed. I then decided to ship the packages by ordinary mail, in preferenceto taking the music with me on the plane and paying excess weight. But it


was not as simple as I thought. The senorita at ventanilla 2 declared thatit was against the postal regulations to mail packages by ordinary mailwhen they were franked for registry. This was the last straw. I tore offseveral stamps to reduce the postage, but could not arrive at the rightamount, because some of the stamps were of high denomination, andcould not be split. I rushed to the stamp window, but there was a line, andthe señorita in charge was arithmetically so apathetic that it raised myblood pressure. I summoned the chief of the service, and explained myplight to him, whereupon he accepted the packages.

I made my bus, but was put off the plane because my Americanpassport lacked a consular validation stamp, which was a wartime regu-lation. I finally flew off the next day.

There was more trouble with my Mexican packages, when they wereall held at Laredo, Texas, for evaluation. The customs authorities could notaccept the view that the music was either invaluable or worthless,depending on the esthetic criterion of the examiner. The packages finallygot through without duty.

Judge, then, my grief, on reading, in the Revista Musical Mexicana ofJune 7, 1942, these observations by my excellent friend, Otto Mayer-Serra,the one person on whose sympathy I had a right to count, for he witnessedall my trials and tribulations in and around the composers’ homes, and inand around the Mexican Central Post Office:

Cuando Nicolas Slonimsky se fue de México, se llevó algo más de uncentenar de partituras orquestales (entre ellas no figuraban las obras deCarlos Chávez). Desde su punto de vista lexicográfico y de bibliotecario,tal cantidad constituye un verdadero triunfo. Pero cuando examinamoslas obras desde un punto de vista estético, no vacilamos en afirmar queun 40% de ellas puede clasificarse bajo la categoría de ‘trabajos de con-servatorio’; otro 40% no ofrece mayor interés por tratarse de obrasescritas con suficiente dominio técnico, aunque en forma totalmenteconvencionales. Un 20—tal vez sólo un 10%—de ellas se debe a com-positores auténticos, o sea a músicos que algo tienen que decir.

I will not quarrel with his estimate of esthetic values of my Mexicanhaul; 20%, or even 10%, of worthwhile music is not a bad proportion forany country. As to the absence of any Chávez orchestral scores among themanuscripts, well, all of his music is available through his American

Nicolas Slonimsky44

publishers. I already had the score of Chávez’ Energía, which I conductedin Paris in 1931, and I did try hard to get the manuscript of his earlysymphony, but, out of modesty, he would not let me have it. As for the restof the argument, I stick to my previously expressed position: one must firstcollect and then discriminate. Were I to give a program of Mexican music,featuring second-raters and leaving out the good 10%, I certainly wouldbe open to censure, but my task was different: I was to get the total outputof Mexican orchestral music, and came pretty near to achieving mypurpose. Otto Mayer-Serra himself recognized that, from my lexicographicand bibliographic viewpoint, it is a veritable triumph. After all, hardly 10%of all music (or books, for that matter) in the libraries of the world is worthkeeping. Is this a reason for purging the dead matter from the libraryshelves? How many of the amusing, naive, but historically interestingsimpletons among composers would perish in such a purge? It is againstour moral principles to eliminate the unfit and the hopelessly insane, sowhy apply euthanasia to composers whose only fault is that they were notborn geniuses?

A particularly difficult task was to secure manuscripts by dead LatinAmerican composers. Most of these manuscripts remained in thepossession of the families, and others were buried in the archives ofconservatories and other musical institutions. Often the members of thefamily were ignorant of the whereabouts or even of the existence of thesemanuscripts. Mrs. Juan José Castro, daughter of the late Argentiniancomposer Julián Aguirre, assured me that her father never wrote for theorchestra, but when I confronted her with an old program featuringAguirre’s orchestral dances, she investigated, and presently sent me themanuscripts which she found in her mother’s house. I obtained theorchestral works of the late Argentinian composer Ernesto Drangosh fromhis son. I traced the manuscripts of the Italian-Ecuadorian composer,Domingo Brescia to his daughter, who lives in the United States. Thedaughter of the Brazilian composer, Barroso Neto, who died in September1941, lent me all of his manuscripts for copying.

Suite Brasileira, by the late Brazilian composer Alberto Nepomuceno,turned up unexpectedly in the suitcase of Oscar Lorenzo Fernândez, inSantiago, where he was conducting a program of Brazilian music. Alongwith the Nepomuceno score, he had two orchestral manuscripts by othernineteenth-century Brazilians, Henrique Oswald and Leopoldo Miguez.The problem was to get the music copied or photographed in a hurry.


There was only one microfilming apparatus in Santiago, shipped by BrownUniversity to the National Library in Santiago for the purpose ofphotographing early colonial manuscripts. It would have taken only anhour to microfilm all three manuscripts, but restrictions of use wereabsolute: the machine and the film could not be lent to anyone. I made atour of printers and photographers, and found a shop that had a very goodGerman-made machine called “rectograph,” which reproduces themanuscripts by contact. But half-way through the Nepomuceno score, theshop ran out of sensitized paper, and the remaining pages were finishedon blueprint sheets, just legible enough to be copied.

The orchestral scores of the two most interesting composers of Cuba,Alejandro Caturla and Amadeo Roldán, both of whom have died anuntimely death, have been partly published, and there is a reasonable hopethat all of them will become available.

The circumstances of preservation of the manuscripts of the lateSilvestre Revueltas are interesting. It is not true, as Paul Bowles declaredin an article in Modern Music, that Revueltas’ manuscripts weremysteriously barred from view. They are all preserved by Revueltas’ sister.One of the orchestral works, the remarkable Homenaje a García Lorca,was published by her in a lithographed edition. This edition will now beissued over the imprint of “New Music” in New York.

I was fortunate to obtain a copy of the manuscript of “8 x Radio” (Ochopor Radio, i.e., 8 instruments playing over the radio). The originalmanuscript was supposed to have been sent to me some years ago byRevueltas himself, but it wasn’t. Perhaps it was confused with Colorines,which I had conducted in New York in 1932. Incidentally, thatperformance was the first of any of Revueltas’ music in the United States.

The manuscript of Revueltas’ ballet, Coronela, was not finished whenhe died, and the composition was completed by Blas Galindo andorchestrated by Candelario Huízar. Neither of the two knew what hadhappened to the score. Otto Mayer-Serra, Revueltas’ friend and bio-grapher, pointed an accusing finger at an American dancer who had usedsome Revueltas music for her productions; others suggested that theformer director of the Palacio de Bellas Artes had absconded with themanuscripts when he left the post. But, like the purloined letter of EdgarAllan Poe, the manuscript was in the most logical place, viz: the briefcaseof Hernández Moncada, assistant conductor of the Orquesta Sinfónica deMéxico, who first performed the work. As luck would have it, Moncada had

Nicolas Slonimsky46

turned it over to the administration of the Palacio de Bellas Artes a fewdays before I had the inspiration to ask him about the score. I addressedan impassioned appeal to the new director, a well-known Mexican poetand a friend of Revueltas, asking him to let me have the music forphotostating. He stopped me short and said, “Señor, it is all very well, butwe do not have the manuscripts.” “Yes, you do,” I insisted. The manuscriptwas finally located in the director’s office, but could not be lent to mebefore I left Mexico.

As my education in the art of detection of missing manuscriptsprogressed, I realized that the only sure way to get the music I wanted wasto get it. Solemn promises, personal friendship, self-interest, all that wasworth nothing. When an impending performance prevented theimmediate dispatching of the manuscript, I used to leave self-addressedmanila envelopes of the right size, to be mailed directly after theperformance. The device worked only once, when the wife of theArgentinian composer Athos Palma mailed his manuscript to me in theenvelope I left on the piano in his studio on the eve of my departure fromBuenos Aires.

I was fortunate in establishing friendly relations with most LatinAmerican composers, which circumstance enabled me to examine theirmanuscripts in their own homes. I spent many a fascinating hour goingover the manuscripts of Villa-Lobos in his home in Rio de Janeiro, and inhis office in one of the modern Rio skyscrapers. I did not quite solve themystery of the official catalogue of Villa-Lobos’ works, which containeditems whose physical existence is not demonstrable. Thus of the fourteenChoros listed in the catalogue, only eleven were completed up to 1942.Choros No. 14 was to be an enormous affair for a huge orchestra withchorus. There was to be a quodlibet in 14 languages, and Villa-Lobosdemonstrated to me in vivid accents how the guttural German wouldsound in counterpoint with hard Russian, sing-song Chinese, and otherlanguages.

There were also several items that have been lost. Villa-Lobos told mea moving story about the manuscript of his symphonic poem Centauro doOuro, which was appropriated by a friend. After the death of that friendhis son found the manuscript and told Villa-Lobos about it, but asked toretain the music as a memento. The story sounded fantastic, but somefantastic stories about Villa-Lobos are true. For instance, the report thathe has set the New York skyline to music is correct. After the performance


of this musical skyline on an international radio hook-up on April 7, 1940,a woman sent him the x-ray picture of her heart, asking him to set it tomusic, too. But Villa-Lobos rejected the invitation because the melodicoutline of the lady’s ventricles was not sufficiently varied.

The most exasperating experience I went through in Latin Americawas the inability to purchase published music. The Brazilian governmentprinted a very valuable collection of Brazilian pieces under the generaltitle Musique Bresilienne Moderne, and copies of this collection weredistributed gratis at the Brazilian Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair.But the collection was not on sale in Rio de Janeiro, and music storeproprietors did not even know that such a collection existed. Finally I cameacross a pile of copies in the office of Antonio Sa Pereira, director of theEscola Nacional de Música. Villa-Lobos told me that he had never seenthis collection, although four of his pieces are included in it. Of these, hisfamous Choros No. 5, Alma Brasileira, begins with a dreadful misprint, theG clef instead of the bass clef in the opening measures of the right hand.

A large number of copies of the score and parts of Nepomuceno’sSymphony turned up in the office of Revista Brasileira de Música. Butother numbers of the same series were not to be had. Yet, I am convincedthat piles of them repose in some dark corner in Rio de Janeiro.

I had similar trouble in obtaining musical publications of theComisión Nacional de Cultura in Buenos Aires. Copies were not on sale,and were not listed in music catalogues. Even Alberto Williams, whoedited an anthology of early Argentinian composers, published under thesame government auspices, did not know that an Overture by his latepupil, Celestino Piaggio, was available in print. In Peru, it was by sheeraccident that I discovered two orchestral scores by the late José MaríaValle Riestra, published by the Department of Education.

It is in order to say a few words about the political complexion of LatinAmerican composers. For years, Berlin and Rome had led an intelligentand well-calculated program of propaganda among South Americanmusicians. They arranged concerts of South American orchestral andchamber music, and broadcast them via short wave to Latin America.

On several occasions, the German and Italian Governments invitedSouth American composers to conduct concerts in Berlin and Rome, andpaid all their expenses. The Bolivian composer Velasco Maidana was givenan opportunity to produce his opera in Berlin, and his name is mentionedin the new Nazified edition of Riemann’s Dictionary. Francisco Mignone

Nicolas Slonimsky48

conducted concerts of Brazilian music in Berlin and in Rome during histour in 1937. When he returned to Brazil, some of his colleagues accusedhim of fascist sympathies (Mignone is of Italian origin), but the implicationis unfair. In 1937, appeasement, cultural and other, was a policy, not onlyin South America, and Mignone was merely human in accepting theinvitations and enjoying the excellent orchestras he was given to conduct.He told me that he was not exceptionally favored in Berlin, where aspokesman of the Ministry of Propaganda bluntly expressed his misgivingsconcerning the semitic shape of Mignone’s nose.

One might detect neo-fascistic ideas in Villa-Lobos’ little booklet onmusical education in the “Vargas State,” but Villa-Lobos was stoutlyantifascist when I saw him in September 1941. He said Mussolini inpolitics is like rubato in music, and he hated both.


Whenever and wherever sophisticated musicians gather, there is likely tobe a discussion, pro and con, of twelve-tone music. Even in darkestHollywood, the uncanny potentialities of this new technique of composi-tion are beginning to be exploited to create an atmosphere of mystery andsuspense on the sound track.

What is so startling about twelve-tone music? We have had the twelvedifferent notes of the chromatic scale with us for centuries. What is thenthe difference between old-fashioned chromaticism and new-fangledtwelve-tone music? The difference lies in a new organization. In classicalmusic, chromatics are used as passing tones from one diatonic degree toanother. In twelve-tone music, all twelve notes of the chromatic scale areequally important. Perhaps it is a good idea to use a special word,Dodecaphonic, for this new music of twelve different notes. Dodecameans twelve in Greek, and dodecaphonic means pertaining to twelvesounds. This term is adopted in France, where it is called MusiqueDodecaphonique, and in Italy, Musica Dodecafonica.

The creator of dodecaphonic music is Arnold Schoenberg, the greatAustrian composer who came to America in 1934, and settled in California.He prefers to call his invention “a method of composing with twelve tones,”and objects to such terms as “the twelve-tone system” or “twelve-tonetechnique.” The idea of composing music based on twelve different notesoccurred to Schoenberg in December 1914. His intention was, as heexplains it himself, “to base the structure of my music consciously on aunifying idea, which produces not only the other ideas but regulates alsotheir accompaniment and the chords.” This “unifying idea” is a basic tone-row of twelve different notes, or “twelve-tone series.”

6. THE NEW WORLD OFDODECAPHONIC MUSIC

50

Ch. 6: originally published in The Etude, September 1950.

How many twelve-tone rows is it possible to arrange? The answer is:479,001,600, obtained by multiplying 12 by 11 by 10 by 9 and so forth.An ambitious dodecaphonist who should attempt to write down allpossible combinations of twelve-tone rows, a note every second, day andnight, would have to spend fifteen years, two months and nine days tofinish his task.

The tone-row constitutes the sole foundation of the entirecomposition. In a dodecaphonic piece of music, this tone-row usuallyappears in four transformations: (1) original; (2) intervallic melodicinversion; (3) retrograde or reverse motion, also called “crab”—eventhough real crabs walk sideways and not backwards; (4) melodic inversionof the crab.

All these forms can be transposed beginning on any note of thechromatic scale, adding up to forty-eight transformations in all.

Schoenberg used a tone-row of twelve different notes for the first timein the Waltz from his Piano Suite, op. 23. But he dates the real beginningof his method from the Serenade, op. 24, for voice, clarinet, bass-clarinet,mandolin, guitar, violin, viola, and violoncello, composed in 1924. “Here Ibecame suddenly conscious of the real meaning of my aim,” he writes:“Unity and regularity, which unconsciously had led me this way.”

To illustrate the method of twelve-tone composition, let us take thebasic tone-row of Schoenberg’s Quintet for wood-winds, op. 26. Its originalform has these twelve notes: E flat, G, A, B, C sharp, C, B flat, D, E, Fsharp, A flat, and F. In its melodic inversion, the intervals change theirdirection. Instead of E flat going down to G, four whole tones down, itmoves four whole tones up to B natural. The next step in the original tone-row is a whole tone up; in the inversion it will be one whole tone down,and so on.

In the crab, the notes will be F, A flat, F sharp, etc., reading the basictone-row backwards. In the crab of the inversion, the notes of the invertedtone-row are read backwards.

The peculiarity of dodecaphonic music is that harmony as well asmelody is derived from the basic tone-row. A twelve-tone series may beginas an unaccompanied melody, horizontally, then continue vertically intoharmony, or it may pick up a contrapuntal lead on a diagonal. Twelve beingdivisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6, it is very convenient to write dodecaphonic musicin two, three, four, or six parts. In orchestral writing, a twelve-tone seriesmay begin in one instrumental part, then skip to another. Or else, two or

The New World of Dodecaphonic Music 51

more notes of the series are used together in different instruments. Undersuch circumstances, a dodecaphonic orchestral piece becomes a veritablecross-note puzzle. Analyzing an intricate twelve-tone piece provides afascinating pastime to sharpen one’s musical wits.

In dodecaphonic notation, there is no difference between enharmon-ically equal notes—one may write A flat or G sharp according toconvenience. Remote sharps and flats, such as B sharp, or C flat, occur veryrarely, and double flats or double sharps are never used. For safety’s sake,naturals are written in whether a cancellation of a previous accidental isneeded or not.

There is, of course, no key signature, because there is no tonality indodecaphonic music. It is atonal. Atonality was the predecessor ofdodecaphonic music, but it does not tell the whole story of twelve-tonecomposition. Dodecaphony is atonality in an orderly arrangement of theemancipated twelve notes.

When the astronomer Huygens first observed the rings of Saturn, heannounced his discovery in the form of a Latin anagram to insure prioritypending publication of his paper. Something of a similar mysterysurrounds the origin of twelve-tone music. Early in 1921, Schoenbergcalled in one of his pupils, Erwin Stein, and told him about the new“method of composing with twelve tones.” “I then asked him to keep it asecret,” Schoenberg recalls, “and to consider it as my private method.”Schoenberg knew that another Viennese theorist and composer, JosefMatthias Hauer, was working on a method of composition based on six-note tropes, and making use of all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. “IfI were to escape the danger of being his imitator,” Schoenberg writes, “Ihad to unveil my secret. I called a meeting of friends and pupils, to whichI also invited Hauer, and gave a lecture on this new method, illustrating itby examples of some finished compositions of mine. Everybodyrecognized that my method was quite different from that of others.”

Josef Matthias Hauer is a picturesque personality. He spends hiswhole day in a Vienna cafe near his house, and has a special woodenarmchair reserved for him there, with his name carved on its back. Herefuses to surrender his priority claim on twelve-tone writing. He even hada rubber stamp made with the inscription: “Josef Matthias Hauer, dergeistiger Urhaber und trotz vielen schlechten Nachahmern immer nochder einziger Kenner und Könner der Zwölftonmusik.” (Josef MatthiasHauer, the spiritual protagonist of twelve-tone music, and, despite manybad imitators, still the only one who knows and understands it.)

Nicolas Slonimsky52

Still another Viennese musician, Fritz Klein, was working on theproblem of twelve-tone composition at the time. Schoenberg has this tosay regarding Klein’s experiments: “Although I saw Klein’s twelve-tonecompositions about 1919, 1920, or 1921, I am not an imitator of him. Iwrote a melody for a Scherzo, composed of twelve tones, in 1915. In thefirst edition of my ‘Harmonielehre’ (1911), there is a description of thenew harmonies and their application which has probably influenced allthese men who now want to become my models.”

Of course, the point in dodecaphonic music is not just using twelvedifferent notes for a melody, but unifying a complete composition bymeans of a single twelve-tone series. A melody of twelve different notesis found in Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss, which was writtenin 1896. It occurs in the section “Of Science.” The notes are C, B, F sharp,D, E flat, G, B flat, A, E, C sharp, F, and A flat. But it certainly is not atone-row in the Schoenbergian, dodecaphonic sense.

Liszt used a theme consisting of twelve different notes in his FaustSymphony, in the form of four consecutive augmented triads, chromat-ically descending, in broken chords.

In the concluding section of L’Après-midi d’un Faune, Debussy usedfour triads, two major and two minor, adding up to twelve different notes.Needless to say that his procedure, as that of Liszt, was a result ofenharmonic progressions, having nothing to do with the dodecaphonicmethod.

In its full development, the twelve-tone method is very elastic andadmits many liberties. For instance, a note may be repeated several timeswithout disrupting the essential regularity of the tone-row. The tone-rowmay be chopped up, and used in a variety of combinations in part writing.The notes of the row may skip freely from one octave to another, a practicethat makes a typical dodecaphonic melody rather difficult to sing.

There is no discrimination in dodecaphonic music between dis-sonances and consonances. In fact, dissonances are preferred, if for noother reason, than the fact that common triads and perfect cadences havebeen used and abused to death in classical and romantic music.

This dodecaphonic predilection for dissonances naturally createsconsternation whenever Schoenberg’s music is performed. A piece bySchoenberg was described by a critic as combining “the best soundeffects of a hen yard at feeding time, a brisk morning in Chinatown, andpractice hour at a busy conservatory.” Expressions like “the last word incacophony and musical anarchy,”“bogey noises,”“avalanche of dissonance,”


“geometrical music important only on paper,”“the nadir of decadence,” arejust a few of the invectives in Schoenberg’s scrap-book. But the samewords were once hurled against Wagner and Liszt. Nowadays, Wagner andLiszt are classics. Maybe people will some day get accustomed even tododecaphonic music.

Schoenberg’s disciples developed his method each in a highly personalmanner. The most famous of them, Alban Berg (1885–1935) used a typeof twelve-tone writing which came close to tonal music. The basic seriesin his Violin Concerto is built on triads, and is quite easy on the ear.

Another great Schoenbergian, Anton von Webern (1881–1945),extends the principle of non-repetition inherent in Schoenberg’s methodto the domain of tone colors. Thus, in von Webern’s Sinfonietta, eachinstrument in the orchestra is allowed to play only one note of the twelve-tone series: the next note must be picked up by some other instrument.The effect of this intermittent melodic writing is unique.

Among composers in the United States who have adopted the twelve-tone method, the most prominent is Vienna-born Ernst Krenek,who settled in America in 1938. He is also the author of the first manualof twelve-tone composition. The young dodecaphonic school in Americais represented by George Perle. The foremost American womandodecaphonist is Dika Newlin. The Englishwoman Elizabeth Lutyenswrites successful works in the strict dodecaphonic style. Juan Carlos Pazof Argentina and Claudio Santoro of Brazil are outstanding Latin-American dodecaphonists.

The leader of the “Ecole de douze tons” in France is Polish-born RenéLeibowitz, author of several books dealing with the subject. In Italy, themost talented adept is Luigi Dallapiccola. His opera, The Prisoner, pro-duced at the May 1950 Festival in Florence, is written in the dodecaphonicidiom. Yet, it was quite a success with the public, and Dallapiccola receivedfour curtain calls.

In Schoenberg’s native Vienna, Hanns Jelinek is the most conspicuouspractitioner of the twelve-tone method. Hanns Eisler, a pupil of Schoen-berg, who for a time wrote music for Hollywood films, now also lives inVienna. Egon Wellesz, a Schoenberg disciple and a learned theorist in hisown right, now makes his home in England, as does one of Schoenberg’searly adherents, Erwin Stein.

The German twelve-tone composer, Hans-Joachim Koellreutter, nowlives in Brazil. Vladimir Vogel, Russian-born composer, resident in

Nicolas Slonimsky54

Switzerland, has fashioned a modified dodecaphonic system of his own.Frank Martin, a Swiss composer, uses twelve-tone rows without completedodecaphonic development.

In Norway, Fartein Valen has developed an atonal style in which thetwelve-tone method is applied in a free manner. There are no twelve-tonecomposers in Russia, where Schoenberg’s method is regarded as a productof bourgeois decadence.

Let us now analyze Schoenberg’s Klavierstück, for piano, op. 33a. Thetwelve-tone series in this piece appears in the form of three chords of fournotes each. The first chord includes B, C, F and B flat; the second, A,C sharp, D sharp, and F sharp; the third, A flat, D, E, and G. Then thechords are inverted, and these inversions are run in crab motion. Theresulting progression of six chords constitutes the kernel of the entirepiece.

Later on, these six chords appear in a canon, the right hand playingthe original progression, and the left hand going in reverse. In chord No.4 in the left hand two notes change places, a frequent practice in thetwelve-tone method. The last chord in the left hand is broken up, whichis also common practice in twelve-tone music.

In the middle section of Schoenberg’s Klavierstück, the twelve notesof the series are criss-crossed in a variety of ways. The cross-note puzzlebecomes labyrinthine when inversions, crab forms, and transpositions areall applied simultaneously. It takes a sharp dodecaphonic ear to detect theoriginal tone-row in the integrated maze of melody, harmony, andcounterpoint.

The coda of Schoenberg’s Klavierstück contains the principal sixchords. Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic cadence is stridently dissonant, thefinal chord bristling with minor seconds where a classical ending would bea reposeful tonic triad.

Dodecaphonic music is a new language. In order to appreciate poetryin an unfamiliar tongue, one must learn its grammar and idiomatic usage.Dodecaphony will cease to be cacophony even to an untutored ear whenthe listener will take the trouble of learning its laws and customs.


The progress of American music in the twentieth century has been fan-tastically swift, as if American composers made a massive effort to com-pensate for the placid lassitude of creative efforts in the past, whenAmerica was but a musical colony of Germany. A hundred years ago theAmerican composer George Frederick Bristow proudly proclaimed thathis string quartet was adjudged by the French conductor Jullien “a classi-cally constructed work according to the best European model.” The high-est ambition of American composers was to imitate foreign masters. Evenwhen American subject matter was used, the indigenous melodies werewrapped in approved Germanic harmonies.

In the early years of the twentieth century American composers werestill in thrall of German music; abruptly, after World War I, Americancomposers turned to France for their inspiration. But soon, very soon, atruly autonomous American school of composition came into being.Mastery of technique was now taken for granted. Moreover, this masterywas revealed in a variety of styles, from triadic and tonal to atonal anddissonant. Both the quantity and the quality of American musicalproduction increased at an accelerated rate. Statistically, the number ofworks produced by American composers during the two decades from1940 to 1960 may well exceed the total of the preceding half century. Whatwas demanded now from American composers was not merely anaccomplished technique “according to the best European model,” but acreative force with an unmistakably American drive. The search for anAmerican musical soul began.

7. INTRODUCTORY ESSAY

56

Ch. 7: originally published as the introduction to Some Twentieth Century AmericanComposers, A Selective Bibliography, New York Public Library, 1959.

The necessary attribute of a musical soul is mastery of technique.When technique falters, the soul evaporates for lack of material container.Borrowing up-to-date modern techniques from Europe does not solve theproblem of American music; such techniques must be transmuted into apeculiarly American way of composing music.

The simultaneous existence and employment of the romantic,classical, empiric, and abstract styles does not mean that American musiccannot find its own soul. It must be realized that greatly advanced idiomsmay be used in the pursuit of seemingly old-fashioned romantic aims, thatclassical forms do not bind a composer as far as his idiom is concerned.On the other hand, scientific techniques of transforming pitches andtimbres into something new and strange do not necessarily go beyond themost rudimentary musical ideas. Esthetic styles, methods of composition,and individual idioms are overlapping categories. The esthetic effect of anintricate dodecaphonic work may be romantic, whereas the impressioncreated by a rudimentary tonal composition may be that of cerebralaloofness. One cannot judge the degree of modernity by compilingstatistics of dissonance and consonance.

The American composer who combined qualities of nationalism,experimentalism, and romanticism in a distinctly modern style with anardently burning American soul was Charles Ives. The phenomenon ofIves is unique. He stood apart from the American musical movement, andhis prophetic innovations assumed their true significance many years afterhe stopped writing music.

A possible criterion for stylistic classification is traditionalism.Composers who continue an established tradition, even with considerabledeviations, enjoy a greater degree of toleration from the large musicalmasses than those who completely break away from the current. It is ironicthat the ultimate in musical modernism has been achieved by a silent pieceof music by John Cage, who enjoys the reputation of being the mostuntraditional composer in America, if not in the whole world. A criticremarked that it was not possible to render one’s opinion of Cage’s silentpiece because no one knew what was not being played.

The notoriety earned by Cage and his disciples is explained by thefact that the public response to music and performance is more psycho-logical than esthetic. External effects—a triangle in a Liszt concerto, awind machine in a Strauss symphony, a siren in a piece by Varèse—are

Introductory Essay 57

remembered vividly, while the important structural elements in the workare overlooked.

The problem of structure, composition in the literal sense of puttingtogether, gives us a valid criterion of the mastery and importance of themusic. Varèse’s Ionization, scored for percussion instruments withoutdefinite pitch, is a work that is composed, put together in a definite design,organized in complete detail. On the other hand, many other works writtenfor percussion alone are mere displays of color without organization.

Taking as a criterion the varying degrees of traditionalism and the con-comitant public toleration of the music, it is possible to classify Americancomposers according to a musical spectrum, from the infra-red to theultra-violet, or in musical terms, from romanticism through impressionismand neoclassicism towards expressionism and abstraction, finally reachingthe invisible—or inaudible—region of aleatory indeterminacy.

Contrary to Buffon’s saying, the style is not the man, at least not inmusic. Examples are many of sharp stylistic changes in twentieth-centurymusic, with concessions made to traditionalism by former revolutionaries,and to modernism (particularly in its dodecaphonic guise) by infra-mod-ernists. Thus George Antheil, once the enfant terrible of American music,towards the end of his life wrote eminently acceptable music, well withinthe margin of toleration by mass audiences. One of the greatest romanticrhapsodists, Ernest Bloch, used dodecaphonic themes in his last stringquartets. The conversion of the neoclassicist Stravinsky to expressionisticdodecaphony is well known. Of course, a composer’s individuality leavesits imprint on the newly adopted style, which undergoes a subtle, andsometimes distinct, change in the new hands. Buffon’s aphorism may beparaphrased to say that the attitude is the man. It is a composer’s attitudetowards his materials that determines the significance of the music.

As the attitude changes, the stylistic position in the musical spectrumchanges with it. Advanced techniques may be used by proponents of anold-fashioned style, and clichés are often employed by the dadaistic avant-garde in order to tickle the bourgeoisie from the wrong end.

The most outspoken champion of romanticism in American music isHoward Hanson. His romanticism is both lyrical and dramatic; tempestu-ous waves of bitonal harmonies rise in his music, and the tidal rhythmsbreak the bounds of traditional symmetry. The romanticism of SamuelBarber is expressed in terms of impassioned rhapsodism. The harmoniesare definitely of the twentieth century, but the mood is retrospective and

Nicolas Slonimsky58

nostalgic. Roy Harris and Aaron Copland, William Schuman and PaulCreston cannot be placed within a limited section of the stylistic spectrumbecause they use selective techniques for selective purposes. Roy Harrisproclaims strongly and articulately his faith as an American composer andhis intentions of creating music of America in the twentieth-centuryidiom. But he uses a system of modal melody and modal harmony withneo-Platonic connotations, in classical forms, which serves his American-ism successfully only because of his power of expression. Aaron Coplandtransmutes the rhythms and the melodies of the American people withsuch persuasion and descriptive force that his inherent modernism formsno obstacle to mass comprehension. On the other hand, in his instrumen-tal works, he applies a severe style which is the product of almost monasticintrospection. The style of William Schuman makes no concessions to tra-dition in its impetuous rhapsodism; statistically, his music may prove tocontain more dissonances per page than that of the most extreme amongthe ultramoderns. But his writing is so compact and concise that the publicacceptance is in his case greater than expected. The stylistic expanse ofPaul Creston’s music is such that he is able to produce greatly effectivemusic in a relatively simple idiom, and then reach out to the Ultima Thuleof dissonant modernism.

Romanticism is a stepping stone to expressionism; both are rhapsodicin form and inspiration; the evolution can be measured by the strength andfrequency of dissonant harmonies, and by increasingly impassionate andultimately atonal melodies. David Diamond is such a rhapsodicexpressionist. The romantic roots, the subjective projections are inevidence in his symphonic music. He does not adopt a preconceivedmethod of composition, and his range of techniques is wide. However, heknows how to control his passions when writing for a specific purpose, forthe theatre or for the dance.

Among American composers, perhaps the greatest range of variedstyles is achieved by Wallingford Riegger, whose music spans almost theentire spectrum, from traditional harmony through romantic chromaticismto profound and almost esoteric expressionism. The latter reflects his truecreative spirit; but his ability to disengage himself from it to write practicalmusic is an interesting example of American musical utilitarianism.

It would be sheer snobbism to deprecate utilitarian music merelybecause it is written in a traditional style and may have commercial value.If modern music is to succeed in America—or anywhere else—it must


become utilitarian. There is no implication here of reactionary abandon-ment of the struggle for a new American idiom; indeed, the entire courseof modern music in America indicates the growing toleration of previouslyunacceptable music. The ultra-modernism of yesterday is the utilitarian-ism of today.

Henry Cowell, the formidable innovator, writes utilitarian music. Hemakes astute use of folksong materials, of the West as well as of the East,but his stylizations are strikingly novel, equipped with the techniques thathe evolved in the quest for his revolutionary style.

In the preface to my book Lexicon of Musical Invective, I suggested(not altogether facetiously) that it takes twenty years to make an artisticcuriosity out of a modernistic monstrosity, and another twenty to elevateit to a masterpiece. The hostile reception by tradition-bound critics of theearly works of Ives, Varèse, Riegger, Copland, and others, and the sub-sequent acceptance of many of these works in the general repertory, maywell be adduced in support of this notion. American composers of a latergeneration were born into a world of modern music and therefore werenot subjected to a critical condemnation. Still, the struggle for the greatertoleration must go on if American composers are to achieve recognitionand financial equality with modern writers and painters.

By and large, contrapuntal writing of the type that appeals so stronglyto German composers finds few adherents in American music. Even RoyHarris, whose contrapuntal thinking is of such importance to him, does notconcern himself with the academic rules of the fugue and the canon,preferring an individual and free use of such devices. Most Americancomposers write fugues, but these fugues are of a free Beethovenian,rather than a didactic Bachian type.

Besides Roy Harris, some American composers who build theirinstrumental works contrapuntally are Walter Piston, Roger Sessions,Elliott Carter, and Vincent Persichetti.

Walter Piston has said time and again that music written in Americais ipso facto American music, whether indigenous American materials areused or not. Piston’s mastery of technique enables him to create instru-mental works of equilibrated perfection, in an idiom that is basically tonal,but with ramifications reaching far beyond traditional tonality. In anarticle on Walter Piston, published almost thirty years ago, I describedhim as the builder of a future academic style in America. The word “Acad-emy” should not necessarily be equated with a didactic establishment,

Nicolas Slonimsky60

codification and self-containment. Enlightened academism that embodiesthe best elements of the past but responds to the needs of the present, isa natural phase in the evolutionary process, when a temporary halt ismade, and when it becomes necessary to consolidate the innovations.Walter Piston’s music represents this type of enlightened academism, andmarks an important stylistic achievement.

Roger Sessions is, like Piston, a composer of music an und für sich,without programmatic allusions. For many years his works stood like anunscalable rock, imposing to the sight but difficult to approach. Yet hismusic is, in a higher sense, quite utilitarian, for it possesses classicalcohesion of design and logic of cumulative development.

Elliott Carter is also a contrapuntist par excellence. The rhythmicpatterns in his music are determined by preconceived numerical pro-gressions in the component parts, resulting in intense polyrhythmic poly-phony. The texture of his instrumental works is extremely dissonant, butthe mobility of musical action makes the constantly dissolving dissonancesacceptable even to an untutored ear.

The contrapuntal technique of Vincent Persichetti makes use of con-trasting tone-colors that lend to the music an impressionistic glow. In hisadroit use of varied resources, he creates a distinctive personal style ofmodern composition.

Among twentieth-century Americans, polyphonic neoclassicism leadsto the formation of a modern musical constructivism. It may assumeimpressionistic shapes when tone-color is emphasized, or expressionisticmoods when atonal and dodecaphonic structures are employed. The idiomremains abstract, or absolute, as long as there are no literary or visualallusions in the music.

Constructivist composers are naturally drawn to instrumental writingin extensive forms. It is indeed remarkable that so many eminent Americancomposers have never written songs. This anti-vocalism is in directcontrast to American composers of the preceding generations, who usuallybegan their careers by writing songs and piano works, then essayedchamber music, and only much later came to the symphony. Twentieth-century American composers are apt to begin with symphonies, then turnto chamber music, and finally to solo piano works and (rarely) songs.

Opera has never been a strong American genre. The only Americanexamples of grand opera in the European manner are by Deems Taylor,Howard Hanson, and Samuel Barber. Walter Piston and Roy Harris shied


away from opera as a genre; others have developed an indigenous form ofchamber opera, usually of satiric or whimsical content. American subjectsare favored. It is interesting to note that late in his creative life DouglasMoore, a composer of instrumental music par excellence, produced asuccessful folk opera on an American subject, Ballad of Baby Doe, whichbecame the best known of his works.

A surrealistic type of American opera is exemplified by VirgilThomson’s whimsical production, Four Saints in Three Acts, in whichthere are more than three acts and far more than four saints. The idiomis deliberately rudimentary, but the attitude is that of high sophistication,so that the illogic of the text gibes intriguingly with the elementaryharmonies of the music.

Randall Thompson is the most successful composer of choral worksin America. Extreme modern styles do not lend themselves to choralwriting. It suffices to examine choral compositions by ultramodernists tofind that the complexity of the idiom notable in their instrumental worksis greatly reduced in choral writing. Randall Thompson is not an ultra-modernist, and therefore he does not have to compromise with his naturalform of expression.

Norman Dello Joio writes operas, vocal works of various descriptions,chamber music, and instrumental solos, but he has yet to compose a grandsymphony. This abstention is interesting because it corresponds, on theother side of the American musical scene, to the abstention from operaticcomposition by so many American composers. It may also be argued,and perhaps supported by statistical analysis, that composers who selectvocal music and particularly opera and oratorio, have less interest inpolyphony as an end in itself than non-operatic American composers have.At any rate, Norman Dello Joio has created a number of distinctive worksin the vocal and instrumental fields, which have the precious qualityof communicativeness, without surrendering the modernity of his neo-classical idiom.

In the 1930s, world conditions precipitated the development of apeculiar type of short opera, the opera of social consciousness. It firstappeared in Germany and soon crossed the ocean to America. MarcBlitzstein is the most energetic proponent of this genre. While dissonanceand asymmetric rhythms are natural ingredients of Blitzstein’s theatreworks, he is a utilitarian composer, for an opera of social consciousness canhardly afford to be unperformably difficult.

Nicolas Slonimsky62

Short satirical operas with social overtones are on the borderline oftopical musical comedy. That the two genres, satirical music drama andAmericanistic musical comedy, should have such an intimate contact isremarkable. Satire is a product of social frustration, and its appeal islimited to the dissatisfied segment of urban population. Musical comedythrives on mass communication, and appeals to the universal sentiment ofhedonism mixed with amorous nostalgia. By an extraordinary paradox,Kurt Weill, a German refugee in the United States, managed to transplantsatirical melodrama onto the American soil with enormous success.

Coming from the world of jazz, George Gershwin produced a trulygrand opera in the modern manner, Porgy and Bess. Several musicalcomedies written by Americans whose skills lie in popular music, approachthe form and even the dimensions of opera. Perhaps it is this genre ofmodern musical comedy that is America’s chief contribution to the stage.

The most successful American operas are the creations of an Italian-born composer, Gian Carlo Menotti. Although he writes his own librettosin English, his music is Italian in its sources of inspiration. Menotti’ssuccessful operatic formula is beginning to influence some Americancomposers for the stage.

Among foreign-born composers, Lukas Foss has gained an importantposition. His modernism is of a classical brand, which lies exactly on themain line of American stylistic pursuits. He also writes small operas, in awhimsical mid-century style, designed to entertain and to stimulate theimagination rather than to reach the depth of musical expression. Hischoral works, often of a religious content, represent a more profoundcreative impulse.

Then there is Leonard Bernstein. He is so fantastically successful inso many fields, as performer and conductor, that his place as an Americancomposer is difficult to estimate. He unquestionably belongs to the avant-garde; his modernism is nurtured both by European sources and byAmerican popular rhythms. There is an element of popular music in hisoperatic works, and there is a definite modern aura in his highly successfulmusical comedies. But his fame as conductor puts his achievements incomposition in a penumbra.

The number of European composers who have settled in Americawould fill a sizable catalogue: Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Krenek, Hindemith,Toch. And there are also several from other continents. Peggy Glanville-Hicks is an Australian, but she has for a long time been active on the


American scene. Her music is a blend of many styles, neoclassical,folkloric, neo-archaic. Her predilection for vocal forms in a broad melodicoutline is characteristic. Chou Wen-Chung of China has developed aunique idiom by applying advanced techniques to images of Chinesepoetry.

Active American composers whose names are justly known and whoseworks have frequent or occasional performances, range in age, at 1960,from the middle twenties to the middle seventies. Carl Ruggles, whoabandoned composition in favor of painting, holds the seniority; he is over80. John Becker, who wrote challenging music in the 1920s, is still a force,and his music is as vigorous and as unyielding as ever. Wallingford Riegger,after years of neglect and lack of appreciation, emerges as a respectedmaster modernist at the age of seventy-five.

From the ranks of youth, the name of Easley Blackwood asserts itselfpowerfully. A symphonic composer of considerable merit, he writes in aneoromantic manner, tensely dynamic and freely dissonant.

The diversity of styles among American composers is great, and barelydefinable in its main currents. Neoclassical composers are the keepers ofa new tradition, the builders of a new academy. The emerging style of neo-romanticism grows out of American neoclassicism as original romanticismgrew out of the ottocento. Pure impressionism no longer attracts creativetalents, but it has a viable successor, a style which may be defined, byanalogy with painting, as abstract impressionism, emphasizing coloristicelements without the stigma of obvious pictorialism. Abstract musicalexpressionism is the modern form of romanticism, with morbid anxiety,frustration and dejection providing points of inspiration. Expressionisticeffects are achieved by means of tense and spasmodic dodecaphony, whilethe abstract quality is secured by a careful avoidance of emotionalphraseology. The intangibility of expressiveness and the abstraction fromassociative images are the formative qualities of this style.

A few brief characterizations may be offered to define the styles ofsome American composers whose names are increasingly imposing on theAmerican scene: Harold Shapero, a composer of enormously compact eco-nomical neoclassical music, mostly for instrumental combinations and forthe orchestra; Quincy Porter, a prolific writer of symphonic and chambermusic in a rich polyphonic vein; Louise Talma, whose neo-baroque musicis stirred by the controlled emotional strain; Alexei Haieff, a classicist in aneo-Stravinskian manner who does not scorn the American rhythmic ver-

Nicolas Slonimsky64

nacular; Ingolf Dahl, the composer of formally organized music with finelycalculated modern polyphony; Arthur Berger, the builder of well-balancedand astutely designed neoclassical structures with asymmetrical details;William Bergsma, the modern contrapuntist who never abandons the stan-dard of practicality; Andrew Imbrie, who adopts an expressionistic stylewithin the framework of classical forms of an almost Italian lucidity; PeterMennin, who revives the spirit of the rococo period, with an elegant designof formal eloquence; Burrill Phillips, who employs a basically classicalidiom to write expressive music with hedonistic overtones; Ernst Bacon,composer of works in all genres designed for practical use, in a fine modernistic vein; Theodore Chanler, who excels in sophisticated but melo-dious vocal writing; Irving Fine, who applies modern idioms, includingdodecaphony, with a romantic effect; Ulysses Kay, whose evocative vocaland instrumental music is suffused with modern Americanism; LeonKirchner, whose bold expressionistic tone-painting is adroitly combinedwith formal classical methods of composition; Gunther Schuller, an exper-imentalist who has brought abstract expressionism to a pointillistic acuity;George Rochberg, who writes symphonic and other music of romanticintensity in the dodecaphonic technique; Henry Brant, an empiricistexploring the outermost regions of music in massed sonorities direction-ally applied; and, at the end of the line, the inscrutable John Cage and hisdisciples.

Between the extremes of neoclassicism and neo-nihilism, the teleo-logical essence of American music is perceived intuitively as well asthrough esthetic analysis. The importance of an autonomous Americanschool of composition in all its multiple forms of expression is no longerin question.


In Clarens, Switzerland, a Russian composer wrote down on a page ofmusic, in euphoric Cyrillic script: “Today, on Sunday, 4/17 November1912, suffering from an intolerable toothache, I completed the music ofLe Sacre. I. Stravinsky.” This was certainly the most fruitful toothache ofmodern music.

The fateful words were written on a multistaved piano score, whichcarried the music of Le Sacre to the final Danse Sacrale. The outline ofthe arrangement was very much like the four-hand piano edition of LeSacre which was eventually published by the Editions Russes de Musique.

In his extraordinary Memories and Commentaries, published in theform of Platonic dialogues with his Boswellian associate, Robert Craft,Stravinsky declared: “The richest musical years in this century do nowseem to have been those immediately before the 1914 war, and specifically,1912, for to that date belong Pierrot Lunaire, Jeux, the Altenberg Lieder,and Le Sacre du Printemps.”

No one would quarrel with the inclusion of Le Sacre and PierrotLunaire among the earthshaking works of the century, but was Debussy’sJeux that seismic? Furthermore, how many readers of the Stravinsky-Craftvolume could identify the Altenberg Lieder without some clue, forinstance, that the author was the second syllable of the composer ofPierrot Lunaire?

One wonders whether Schönberg, who had a mystique of numberswas conscious of the numerical correspondence of the opus number ofPierrot Lunaire (21), the number of songs in it (21), and the year ofcomposition (’12, Krebsgang of 21). Fortunately for historians, Schönberg

8. THE MARVELOUS SEASON1912 – 1913

66

Ch. 8: originally published in The Juilliard Review Annual, 1962–1963.

marked the exact day of the inception and completion of each one of these21 melodramas, in which the Sprechstimme was used for the first time asan integrated technique of vocalization. Humperdinck, of all people, mustbe credited with the absolute priority of inflected rhythmic speech, theSprechnoten, as he called it, which he applied in a score of incidentalmusic for a play produced in Munich in 1897. Of course, it was not theSprechstimme alone that made Pierrot Lunaire an epoch-making work,but the novel treatment of the instruments, the extraordinaryimpressionistic sound with expressionistic connotations, the enhancementof dynamic values and the elevation of rhythmic patterns to thematicsignificance.

The tremors were far-reaching. More civilized critics spoke of“metamathematical” music at its first performance in Berlin on October16, 1912; correspondents of American music journals used cruderlanguage describing the Schönberg masterpiece as “the most ear-splittingcombinations of tones that ever desecrated the walls of a Berlin musichall.” The performance of Pierrot Lunaire in New York in 1923 evoked thepredictable invectives from Henry T. Finck (“tomfoolery . . . an unutterablysilly thing . . . emitting strange noises . . . ”), from Richard Aldrich (“avariedly rhythmical and dynamic succession of disagreeable noises”) andfrom H. E. Krehbiel (“a wearisome and futile experiment . . . striving tobring on the millennium in which cacophony shall reign . . .”).

On the third of September 1912 Schönberg’s formidable FiveOrchestral Pieces were performed for the first time anywhere in Londonunder the direction of Henry Wood. This Farbenmusik must have comeas a shock to insular British music lovers peacefully assembled in QueensHall at a Tuesday Promenade Concert. Ernest Newman constituted theminority of one among English critics, when he suggested that Schönberg“is not the mere fool or madman that he is generally supposed to be,” andso vindicated his chosen patronymic (his real name was William Roberts;he selected the pseudonym Ernest Newman to emphasize the importanceof being Earnest New Man among the troglodytes).

According to the Slonimsky Law, promulgated in the prefatory essay,Non-Acceptance of the Unfamiliar, in my Lexicon of Musical Invective, ittakes twenty years to make an artistic curiosity out of a modernisticmonstrosity, and another twenty to elevate it to a masterpiece. The FiveOrchestral Pieces were still a monstrosity to Richard Aldrich of The NewYork Times at their first New York performance in November 1921, when

The Marvelous Season 1912–1913 67

he said that they were even “worse than the reputation that precededthem.” He then put himself on record that “there is not the slightest reasonto believe that their squeaks, groans and caterwaulings represent in anyway the musical idiom of today or tomorrow or of any other future time.”

The Altenberg Lieder of Alban Berg, which Stravinsky classified asone of the four great works composed in 1912, were performed in Viennaunder the auspices of the Academic League for Literature and Music, onMarch 31, 1913, in a program that included Six Orchestral Pieces by Antonvon Webern, Schönberg’s already old Chamber Symphony (AugustSpanuth, in the Berlin Signale, suggested that it should be more properlyentitled Chamber-of-Horrors Symphony), and some songs by Schönberg’sold teacher, Alexander Zemlinsky. Peter Altenberg was a Viennese charac-ter, a Socrates of the coffeehouse, whose real name was RichardEnglander. Altenberg enjoyed bourgeois-baiting. He wrote risque versesto picture postcards, and Alban Berg selected some of them for texts of hissongs with orchestra. The unusual assortment of instruments and thenovel vocal effects such as singing with compressed lips and with themouth half open, created a disturbance in the hall. The Vienna correspon-dent of the Musical Courier reported that the composers and performersengaged in a scuffle with the more vocal members of the audience, andthe police were called to disengage them.

The closing event of the 1912–13 season, perhaps the most significantin the history of modern music, was the production by Diaghilev’s BalletRusse in Paris of Le Sacre du Printemps. The date was May 29, 1913,the place the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, the conductor was PierreMonteux, and the chief dancer, Nijinsky.

So many accounts of this famous occasion have been published by eyewitnesses, including those by Stravinsky himself, and so many dis-crepancies are found in these reports, that it is no longer possible toestablish the true sequence of events. Was there a physical battle betweenthe modernists and the passeistes, as anti-modernists were called inFrance? Did a titled French lady rise from her plush-covered fauteuil,muttering: “It is the first time in sixty years that anyone has dared to makea fool of me?” Is it true the venerable Saint-Saëns upon hearing theintroductory bassoon solo left the theater saying “if this is a bassoon, thenI am a baboon,” or words to that effect? All these are parts of a legend,and legends are not amenable to historic research.

After its initial production, Le Sacre began a long career as asymphonic composition. It is remarkable how few ballet performances of

Nicolas Slonimsky68

Le Sacre were given in later years. War was in the air in the spring of 1914,when Le Ménestrel suggested a change of title of Stravinsky’s masterpiecefrom Le Sacre to Massacre du Printemps. After the war America heard thepiece for the first time, with Monteux conducting the Boston SymphonyOrchestra. An outraged Boston music lover sent a poem to the BostonHerald, which still preserves its pristine charm:

Who wrote this fiendish Rite of Spring,What right had he to write the thing,Against our helpless ears to flingIts crash, clash, cling, clang, bing, bang, bing?And then to call it Rite of Spring,The season when on joyous wingThe birds melodious carols singAnd harmony’s in everything!He who could write the Rite of Spring,If I be right, by right should swing!

Fifty years have elapsed since the emergence of Le Sacre, and now itscataclysmic eruptions reverberate harmlessly on the soundtrack of theHollywood films and television spectaculars, garbled and electronicallymutilated, whenever there is need to portray an unnatural phenomenonsuch as an atomic explosion.

While Stravinsky and Schönberg were remaking the musical world,Erik Satie was busy in his sub-Parisian retreat mocking classicism,romanticism and impressionism all at once, and writing short piano pieceswith long nonsensical titles, During the season 1912–13 he composed aseries of Véritables préludes flasques, with a subtitle pour un chien. Theadjective flasque, i.e., flaccid, was apparently a jab at the mollifiedimpressionists, but why “for a dog?” In another piano suite, DesiccatedEmbryos, composed in 1913, Satie inserted gratuitous instructions to theplayer, of which “like a nightingale who has a toothache” is an example.The wit of such remarks stales after fifty years. John Cage’s annotations tothe catalog of his works are infinitely more hilarious. The pricelessdescription of his silent piece for 4’33” as being “tacet, any instrument orcombination of instruments” deserves some kind of Stupefaction Prize.

The unsung pioneers of the period immediately preceding World WarI, were the Italian Futurists. Their animating passion was anarchisticdestruction of the old in order to build the new, as if in obedience to


Bakunin’s 1848 dictum “Die Lust der Zerstörung ist eine schaffende Lust.”The musical leader of the Futurist movement was Balilla Pratella wholaunched a campaign against everything and everybody in his twinmanifestoes as early as 1910 and 1911. He urged young musicians to keepaway from “commercial and academic circles” and to lead “a modest lifeunencumbered by lucrative profits for which art is sold.” As far as specifictechnique of composition is concerned, Pratella preached the adoption ofthe integral enharmony as a “magnificent conquest of Futurism.” Heproclaimed the absolute necessity for opera composers to write their ownlibretti. All this sounded suspiciously like Wagner’s Zukunftsmusik. As forPratella’s own music, it was appallingly close to the Verismo of PietroMascagni, for whom Pratella had words of extravagant praise in hisManifesto dei Musicisti Futuristi. In the same document, Pratella blandlyadmitted that Mascagni was the chairman of the jury which awarded hima prize for his opera, in which the most futuristic feature was an occasionalemployment of the whole-tone scale.

Real Futurism, prophetically directed towards the emancipation ofnoises, was generated in the mind of Luigi Russolo, an Italian painter andmusician. His paintings, the geometric Interpenetration of Houses PlusLight Plus Sky, the palimpsestic Solidity of Fog, the cinematic PlasticSynthesis of the Actions of a Woman, belong to the same years 1912–13when he began to experiment with his tonal noise-makers, theIntonarumori. On March 11, 1913, Russolo issued his Futurist Manifestoin which he expounded his theory of the Arte dei rumori, the art of noises.He gave the first demonstration of a noise instrument, a scoppiatore,which produced noises characteristic of an internal combustion engine, inModena, on June 2, 1913. Soon a whole orchestra of noises proliferated—crepitatori, ronzatori, stropicciatori, ululatori, gorgogliatori, sibilatori,producing, respectively, roars, buzzes, scraping noises, ululations, gurglingsounds and hissing. They were amplified by old-fashioned megaphones.

For his Intonarumori, Russolo composed three pieces mostlyconcerned with urban civilization and the new machines: The Awakeningof a City, A Dinner on a Hotel Terrace, and Convention of Automobilesand Aeroplanes. The scores were written in diagrams, much as electronicpieces are notated nowadays. The meter was indicated; dynamic signswere used in the traditional manner. Some of the instruments of thesame group were of different pitches; thus there was a tenor Ululator anda bass Ululator.

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The sight of Russolo’s megaphones, and his own countenance, with apointed beard and burning black eyes, half-saint, half-madman, inevitablyroused untutored audiences to fury. When the uncouth sounds began toemanate from the megaphones, there was real trouble. In his booklet,L’Arte dei rumori, published in Milan in 1916, now a collector’s item, ofwhich I possess an inscribed copy, Russolo relates with objectivedetachment some of the battles he fought. When he conducted in Milanthe world premiere of his Convention of Automobiles and Aeroplanes, agroup of conservatory professors shouted insults, but the foes wereresolutely met by the “formidable and unfailing” fists of Russolo’s friends,the poet Marinetti and the painter Boccioni. Eleven persons requiredmedical treatment in the ensuing melee. Soon the real war came, in whichBoccioni lost his life.

All these thunders of the future were but minor nuisances to thecomfortable world of 1912–13. Puccini was the most modern composer inthe opera houses. The Metropolitan Opera of New York produced onlyone new work, Cyrano de Bergerac by Walter Damrosch, which passedinstantly into limbo. American orchestral music was faithfully Germanic.The Boston Symphony Orchestra presented on January 25, 1913, twosymphonic poems, Narcissus and Echo, by Gustav Strube, as partinghomage before his leaving the violin desk in the orchestra.

Nobody in the music world was aware that Charles E. Ives, aninsurance man doing successful business in New York, was writing thegreatest American music of the century. During the season 1912–13 Ivescompleted the “Emerson” movement of the Concord Sonata, and wasworking on his fantastically complex Fourth Symphony, which still defiesperformance.

Coloristic music with impressionistic and neoarchaic overtones wasthe modern fashion in Paris, in 1912. Diaghilev produced Ravel’s balletDaphnis et Chloé; two suites were drawn from the music, of which thesecond became a concert favorite. Ravel’s precision of workmanship, hisinfinitesimally accurate weighing of submicrophonic sonorities, his care inthe distribution of instrumental colors, his ability to handle asymmetricrhythms with perfect balance, all these qualities make his music viableeven in our times when programmatic impressionism is no longerfashionable.

Another fine French ballet produced during the 1912–13 season wasLe Festin de l’Araignée by Albert Roussel. There is in this spider’s feast


more than mere onomatopeia (Roussel was inspired in writing this scoreby Fabre’s famous popularizations of insect life). There is a sense oftragedy as the butterfly is enmeshed in the arachnidan web, a primitivisticvitality in the hatching of the ephemerida. Roussel’s melodic and harmonicidiom is derived from prickly tritones and bleak quartal progressions; hisbitonalities were also related by tritones.

What philosophical deductions can be drawn from these semicentennialmusings? Only that strong music, original music, iconoclastic music thatis consistent with itself and is supported by a personal faith in one’s ownart, can and must survive. Charles Ives did not seek recognition—he wascontent to compose for himself and for those few who understood hismusic. But he fought back fiercely in private correspondence, most of itstill unpublishable because of its spitting invectives. (Spitting was animportant function in his life. When I saw Ives for the last time shortlybefore his death and asked him about his health, he said: “Bad, I can’t evenspit from here into the fireplace.”)

After my Paris concerts of American music in 1931, which includedworks by Ives, Ruggles, Cowell, Varèse, Weiss, and others, Philip Halepublished an editorial in the Boston Herald in which he said that I wasdoing a disservice to American music by presenting to Parisianscompositions of “wild-eyed anarchists,” American imitators of Europeancomposers of extreme tendencies. Ives reacted to this editorial in acharacteristic philosophical manner. He wrote to me: “It’s funny how manymen, when they see another man put the ‘breechin’ under a horse’s tail,wrong or right, think that he must be influenced by someone in Siberia orNeurasthenia. No one man invented the barber’s itch.”

The vindication of Schönberg’s music should be a good subject forsocio-historical study. It is particularly striking because of his firmconviction, openly proclaimed, that his music is imperishable, and becauseof his ironic reflections on his own destiny to be recognized only after hisdeath. “Erst nach dem Tode anerkannt werden . . .” he wrote in a letteraddressed to those who greeted him on his seventy-fifth birthday in 1949.

Recently, a dealer’s catalogue listed for sale a two-page letter fromSchönberg, at $200. It was sold within a few days. Schönberg would havebeen pleased by this commercial evaluation of his writings, but he wouldnot have been surprised. He had faith in himself.

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In modern Greece Orpheus tunes his lyre atonally. This scordatura wasinitiated by Nikos Skalkottas, a Greek disciple of Schoenberg, who died in1949, at the age of forty-five. He left a large number of manuscripts, anda special Skalkottas Committee was organized in Athens to prepare hismusic for publication.

Skalkottas makes use of Schoenberg’s method in an almost rhapsodicmanner. His little piece for cello and piano, written shortly before hisdeath and published under the title Tender Melody, is instructive in thisrespect. The cello part consists of fourteen consecutive statements of asongful theme of twelve different notes: F#, E, D, C#, C, B, G#, A, F, G,Eb, and Bb. The rhythm varies radically, and the register shifts freelyfrom one octave to another. Individual notes of the basic series, and evensizable thematic fragments, are repeated, but the denominations of thetone-row never change. There is no transposition, no inversion, noretrograde motion. The piano accompaniment traces a twelve-tone rowof three mutually exclusive diminished seventh chords formed bysymmetrically diverging and converging minor thirds. An incidental tone-row in the piano accompaniment is represented by three arpeggiatedfour-note figurations, and its elements enter an explicit tonal coda with adouble pedalpoint on the tonic and dominant. Tender Melody is anexample of a dodecaphonic way of writing a Romantic piece of music.On its pages Schumann seems to meet Grieg in a fine mist of chromaticvapors. But Schoenberg himself never demanded orthodoxy fromhis students, and he spoke warmly of Skalkottas as one of his mostgifted students.

9. NEW MUSIC IN GREECE

73

Ch. 9: originally published in The Musical Quarterly, January 1965.

The image of Schoenberg is much more clearly visible in anotherscore of Skalkottas, his Little Suite for strings, written in 1942. In it heapplies the method of composition with twelve tones to melodicformations that suggest modern Greek melorhythms, with their serpentinemelismas and angular intervallic structures. Time and again, in the midstof this folksong atmosphere, there suddenly rises a Schoenbergian outcry,an eighth note paired with a quarter note of the same pitch, and followedby a despairing sigh escaping to a high note in decrescendo.

It is only natural that dodecaphony, being a Greek word and a Greeknumerical concept, should have special fascination for modern Greekcomposers. Yet one of the most remarkable composers of modern Greece,Jani Christou, is not a follower of Schoenbergian precepts. He describeshis Metatropes for orchestra (its English title is Patterns and Permutations)as written in a “meta-serial” idiom. “The music expresses the endlessformation of patterns through various levels of experience,” Christouwrites, “while at the same time it reveals the urge to break up thismerciless process.”

Christou submitted Metatropes to the National Radio of Athens for acompetition in 1962. It was selected for the finals, and after elevenrehearsals was recorded on tape. But the work was disqualified when therumor spread that it had already been performed in America, thusbreaking the jus primae noctis for the competition. The rumor was false.There was no American performance, but Christou’s name was in-advertently (or maliciously, as Christou claims) disclosed, and sinceanonymity was essential, the score had to be withdrawn.

Patterns and Permutations finally was performed in Athens on March11, 1963, and created a riot, a rare phenomenon in the annals of musicalevents in modern Greece. The reasons for displeasure on the part of theaudience and some critics were familiar: the harshness of the music andthe annoying abundance of percussive rhythms.

Quite different from Patterns and Permutations is Christou’s set of sixsongs to poems of T. S. Eliot, composed for voice and piano in 1955, andarranged for mezzo-soprano and orchestra in 1957. This is a hauntingscore, partaking of cosmopolitan Romanticism and Viennese Expression-ism, somewhere on the geodesic line between Mahler and Berg.

Christou’s earlier work, a symphony, was first performed in London onApril 29, 1951 under the direction of Alec Sherman, while the rest of the

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program was taken up by Tchaikovsky. One newspaper review washeadlined: “New Greek Work—a Protest against everything Tchaikovskystands for.”

A still earlier work, Phoenix Music for orchestra, should be mentioned.It had a performance in London in 1950, one at the Maggio Fiorentino in1951 conducted by Willy Ferrero, and several performances in Athens.The music is programmatic and “freely atonal,” but lacks discipline.Christou is “no longer fond of it,” and regards it as a “souvenir” of his earlymoods.

Among Christou’s current interests is theater music. His score for thePrometheus Bound of Aeschylus was performed at the Epidaurus Festivalin the spring of 1963. In the same year he wrote background music for atelevision program sponsored by Esso Petroleum Co. and showninternationally on the home screen, with the poet Robert Graves asnarrator. The television scenes were filmed at Delphi, and for its musicChristou went back, as he puts it, to his “ancestral memories.” Some of thismusic is almost operatic in style, for Christou believes that “music anddancing were quite as important as the spoken parts” in ancient Greektragedy. But, he carefully adds, he “did not attempt to imitate what mighthave been valid 2,500 years ago.”

Jani Christou was born in Heliopolis, Egypt, on January 9, 1926. Hisfather was a Greek businessman, who did a lot of traveling with his family.Christou attended a British school in Alexandria. In 1945 he entered King’sCollege in Cambridge, where he studied philosophy. At the same time hetook private music lessons with Hans Redlich in Letchworth. He obtainedhis M.A. Cantabriensis in philosophy (known in Cambridge as Moral Sci-ences). He is convinced that philosophical disciplines, especially logic (notAristotelean logic, but symbolic logic of Bertrand Russell and linguisticlogic of Ludwig Wittgenstein) helped him form his own musical style. Inorder to be “validly non-logical” he had to master the techniques of logic.

For a brief period Christou studied orchestration with Lavagnino inItaly; he also spent some time in Zurich, where he became interested inthe psychological theories of Dr. Jung, mainly through his brother, abrilliant student of Jung, whose book The Logos of the Soul was publishedposthumously, after he was killed in an automobile accident.

Like Ulysses, Christou eventually returned to Greece, married, andsettled on his father’s estate on the island of Chios. It was in Chios,

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Christou says, that he found himself in music, working in his own creativelaboratory “like some medieval alchemist.” He continued to maintain astudio in Athens, and frequently traveled to Italy and Switzerland. “I havenever held an official position in my life,” Christou writes, “and I neverattended a conservatory. I have no degrees in music, never had anyorthodox musical training, and I consider myself mainly self-taught. I didtry to attend music classes in Cambridge, but I could not stand theacademic method of instruction.”

Christou’s personal idiom is unlike any other composer’s even thoughit is not absolutely original. The rhythmic canons, the ingeniousdisplacement of natural accent, the subtle hammering on repeated notes,the fusion of incompatible instrumental colors, the complex but widelydispersed harmonies, the curiously meandering melodies gliding along animaginary tangent, the sudden eruption of fanfare-like proclamations, allthese traits of Christou’s music look and sound familiar, but their ensembleis unique. Perhaps his “medieval alchemy” led him inadvertently to thephilosopher’s stone that transmutes the base metals of common devicesinto musical gold.

The name of Yorgo Sicilianos is known to American audiences througha performance of his First Symphony by Dimitri Mitropoulos with theNew York Philharmonic on March 1, 1958. He was born in Athens onAugust 29, 1922 and studied music at the Athens Conservatory, graduatingin 1951. He subsequently entered the Santa Cecilia Academy in Rome,where he was a student of Pizzetti. In 1955 he received a FulbrightScholarship, which enabled him to study composition with Walter Pistonat Harvard University, with Boris Blacher in Tanglewood, and with VincentPersichetti at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. He then returnedto Athens, where he became active at the Hellenic Broadcasting Institute.There are parallel developments between his early music and that of JaniChristou; both experienced the spell of expansive rhapsodic forms. ButSicilianos adopted a more severe neo-Classical idiom than Christou, andmade a transition to more orthodox serial techniques. Chamber music isa natural form of expression for Sicilianos, but not for Christou. If Christouis the Greek Ives, then Sicilianos is the Greek Bartók. Sicilianos writesmusic of solid substance and polyphonic lucidity. His predilection forworks of limited sonorities with an autonomous percussion section is aBartókian trait. In this respect, his ballet Tanagra, for two pianos andpercussion, is characteristic. After a performance in 1958, he arranged it

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for full orchestra, a version that was first performed in Athens on February5, 1962. This was followed by an extensive work in the same general style,Synthesis, scored for double string orchestra and percussion. It wassuccessfully performed in Athens on November 26, 1962.

The list of works composed by Sicilianos during the fifteen years ofhis creative maturity is impressive. His first significant work, TheRevelation of the Fifth Seal, a symphonic poem in a grand rhetorical,oratorical manner, was brought out in Athens on May 11, 1952. Aperformance of his Concerto for Orchestra took place in Athens in 1954.His three string quartets demonstrate his ability in modern polyphonicwriting.

Sicilianos writes this about himself, using third person singular:“Sicilianos belongs to that group of musicians who believe in a renovationof Greek music and who, having freed themselves from the narrowfolkloric tradition created by the former generation of Greek composers,are following contemporary musical trends with the conviction that themusic of our time, as an artistic manifestation, has abandoned theframework of the so-called national school, and has acquired a moreuniversal and more human character.”

The “former generation of Greek composers,” to which Sicilianosalludes, was bound to the Italian tradition. Its most outspoken representa-tive was Manolis Kalomiris, the grand old man of Greek music, who wroteoperas and symphonies in a fine Italian style. He died in 1962, and withhim died the Greek dependence on Italian operatic models.

If the oldest generation of Greek composers gravitated towards Italy,their immediate successors turned their sights on Paris. Georges Poniridis,who was born in Constantinople in 1892, went to Paris to study withVincent d’Indy, became completely Parisianized, and even published acollection of erotic poems in French. His music presents a fusion of Greekmodalities with Impressionistic harmonies. Particularly interesting are hisworks of the latest period, in which he makes use of dodecaphonicstructures in a tonal or bitonal context.

Petro Petridis, born in Asia Minor in 1892, had a brief moment ofmodified glory in the 1920s when some of his symphonic pieces hadscattered performances in Europe. He studied with Albert Roussel in Parisand adopted a neo-Classical style of strong polyphonic texture. After hereturned to Greece, he wrote a powerful oratorio and pieces in Greek folkmodes. A man of cosmopolitan culture, a linguist (he can recite Homer in


the original for hours), Petridis finds himself unjustly suspended betweentwo musical worlds, that of traditional Classicism and obsolescentmodernism. But with a favorable shift in world esthetics, his music mayyet enjoy a revival. It is good music, and there is no reason why it shouldnot become more widely known.

Dimitri Levidis (1886–1951) lived most of his life in Paris, and wasnaturalized as a French citizen, esthetically as well as legally, for his musicassimilated the technique of French Impressionism to the full. AlsoFrench-oriented was Emil Riadis (1890–1935), who had some lessons withRavel, and wrote a number of pieces reflecting Ravel’s influence.

Greek composers of the middle generation, chronologically encom-passed within the 20th century, should be mentioned. AntiochosEvanghelatos, born in 1904, is a distinguished pedagogue, as well as com-poser of a number of effective works in various genres. TheodoreKaryotakis, born in 1903, was a student of Mitropoulos; he wrote music forthe theater, some symphonic pieces, and choral works. Finally, the nameof Dimitri Mitropoulos himself ought to be included among modernGreek composers, for he wrote a fine Debussyan opera and many sensi-tive songs.

With Skalkottas, the needle of the Hellenic musical compass shiftedto the north, to Vienna. Several Greek composers of his generation expe-rienced a similar change of orientation, starting out with stylized Greekdances and later adopting, integrally or partially, the dodecaphonic credo.Such was the case of Yiannis Papaioannou. He was born in Kavala onJanuary 5, 1910. He studied at the Conservatory of Athens, and subse-quently took lessons with Honegger in Paris. His early programmaticsymphonic works—Poem of the Forest (1942), Pygmalion (1951), Hellas(1956)—followed the golden mean of acceptable modern music, but in hisFourth Symphony, composed in 1962, and in his Quartet for flute, clarinet,guitar, and cello, written in the same year, he asserts himself as a serialcomposer. In this music the intervallic scheme becomes angular, tonal connotations disappear, rhythmic figures branch out in asymmetrical pat-terns, and the instrumentation assumes a spastic character. Indeed,orthodox dodecaphony is here superseded by serialism rooted in the musicof Webern.

A very active group of Greek composers born in the 1930s, to whomdodecaphony is pre-natal, and even obsolescent, is represented by thenames of Yannis Ioannidis, Theodor Antoniou, and Stephanos Gazouleas.

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Yannis Ioannidis was born in Athens on June 8, 1930. He studied organ andcomposition in Vienna. His early works—Piano Sonata (1959), StringQuartet (1961), Triptych for orchestra (1962)—adhere to a greater orlesser extent to Schoenberg’s practices. But his Duo for violin and piano,written in 1962, veers away from strict dodecaphony to free atonality, thusreversing the historical course of modern music. He explains this retreatby his conviction that “atonality, as a system of absolute equality andindependence of all twelve tones, insuring an unlimited number ofharmonic combinations, is self-sufficient.”

Theodor Antoniou was born in Athens in 1935. He studied violin andcomposition there; in 1961 he went to Munich, where he continued hisstudy at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik. His music is serial but notnecessarily atonal. In this respect, his Concertino for piano, strings,marimba, vibraphone, kettledrums, and other percussion instruments, ismost unusual. It starts out with a supremely tonal interplay of the tonic,supertonic, and dominant in unison, in the plainest G major. The basictone-row grows out of this figure by a simple additive process. The rhythmis organized serially at a different rate of distribution of stresses from thatof the cumulative tone-row, so that each individual note of the theme isstressed as the tone-row is gradually integrated. There are three move-ments; in the second movement the process of serialization is intervallic,and in the third movement the rhythmic parameter is the prime thematicimpulse. In his orchestral Antitheses, Antoniou applies a different tech-nique to each of its three movements, and their titles suggest thesecontrasting styles: Pedal-Melos, Lines-Spaces, Planes-Points.

His Epilogue, written in 1963, is serially organized in most of itselements, and the score contains an aleatory episode in which theconductor gives only entrance cues, and the players improvise alongprescribed notes, with the rhythms and octave positions free. The piece,to a text from The Odyssey, is scored for mezzo-soprano, speaker, oboe,horn, guitar, piano, double bass, and percussion.

Stephanos Gazouleas, born in Larissa in 1931, studied with HannsJelinek in Vienna, and acquired from him a thorough technique of twelve-tone composition. Esthetically, his main influence is the music of AntonWebern. His Six Lyric Pieces for flute and piano, written in 1962, arecongenial imitations of Webern’s poetic miniatures. His other works reflectan affinity with Skalkottas; of these, his 11 Aphorisms for piano aremodern evocations of Romantic moods.


An interesting attempt to organize ancient Greek melos according tomodern serial ideas is made by Arghyris Kounadis in his orchestral workChorikon. Kounadis was born of Greek parents in Constantinople onFebruary 14, 1924. Having completed his primary musical education inAthens, he received a fellowship from the Greek government to continuehis studies in Germany, where he became a student of Wolfgang Fortner.It was Fortner who conducted the first performance of Chorikon, with theBerlin Philharmonic Orchestra, on May 15, 1962. The work is in fourmovements, with characteristic titles: Melos, Strophe, Antistrophe, andEpilogue. The thematic elements of the score are derived from adodecaphonic series, which is articulated into two quasi-symmetricaltropes, covering, in its original form, the range of an augmented octave.The inner notes of each trope are permutated, generating two subsidiarytone-rows. The series appears in inversion and retrograde motion, and isintegrated into the harmonic structure. In contrapuntal developmentKounadis applies the principles of heterophony, which, according to hisobservation, underlies the melodic formations of modern Greek folksongs.Furthermore, he distinguishes three types of heterophony: canonic, i.e.,diagonal; monophonic, i.e., linear; and harmonic, i.e., vertical.

Kounadis is a versatile composer. He writes theater music forperformances of ancient Greek tragedies, using archaic modes, andinstrumental works in an ultra-modern idiom. Of the latter, his Triptychonfor flute and chamber orchestra (1964) is of importance. He alsoexperiments in Webern-like instrumental sonorities, as exemplified by atrio for flute, viola, and guitar composed in 1958.

Among Greek modernists, the curious figure of Manos Hadzidakisstands apart. Curious, because he started out as a composer of wittymodernistic piano pieces, but achieved fame as the author of the themesong for the Greek film, The Children of Pireus, released in France underthe title Jamais le dimanche, and in America as Never on Sunday.Hadzidakis was born in Xanthi, Macedonia, on October 23, 1925, receivedacademic education in Greece, and published, as his op. 1, a piano suite,under the title For a Little White Seashell. The second movement of thissuite is named Conversation with Serge Prokofiev, and it catches the spiritof Prokofiev’s polymodality very nicely.

It was inevitable that Greek music should have taken an Icarus-likeflight into the ultimate dimension of space-time, proceeding on astochastic course. Stochastic is the key word in the hyper-sophisticated

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circles of musical innovators of the second half of the century. It denotesa variable function determined by random phenomena in time. In otherwords, stochastic music is aleatory. The prime apostle and protagonist ofstochastic composition is Ianis Xenakis. He was born, of Greek parentage,in Braila, Rumania, on May 22, 1922, and studied engineering in Athens.Upon graduation, he joined the studio of Le Corbusier in Paris, andworked with him on architectural projects for twelve years. It was not untilXenakis was nearly thirty years old that he undertook serious musicalstudies. He enrolled in the class of Messiaen at the Paris Conservatory, andalso took lessons with Honegger and Milhaud. Bypassing Schoenbergiandodecaphony and Webernian serialism, Xenakis began writing musicaccording to the mathematical theories of sets and calculus of probability.The titles of his works indicate his preoccupation with scientific concepts.Thus, Pithoprakta for orchestra connotes the idea of “probable realization”(the first half of the word means probable in modern Greek, and thesecond half is obviously cognate with the word practical). Pithoprakta wasfirst performed in Munich on March 8, 1957, and had an Americanperformance at one of Leonard Bernstein’s avant-garde programs with theNew York Philharmonic. The title of another work by Xenakis, Achorripsis,scored for twenty-one instruments, is derived from the word for sound inmodern Greek and the plural of the word for jet. The music is then,according to Xenakis, a spray of sounds, a sonorous radiation, a stream ofmusical electrons.

In 1962 Xenakis wrote two pieces for the IBM 7090 electroniccomputer. He programmed the music specifying duration and density of“sound events,” leaving the parameters of pitch, velocity, and dynamics tothe computer. The first piece is entitled Morsima-Amorsima, with an affixST/4–1, 030762, which is deciphered as Stochastic Music for 4 Performers,No. 1, completed on the 3rd day of the 7th month of the year No. 62 inthe present century. Its duration is calculated to be in the vicinity of tenminutes, but it can be stochastically expanded or contracted. The secondpiece is Amorsima-Morsima, and its affix is ST/10–2, 080262, whichsignifies Stochastic Music for 10 Performers, No. 2. According to thesymbol, it was completed on the 8th day of the 2nd month of 1962, thatis, earlier than No. 1. Both pieces were played for the first time at a rathermemorable concert given at the Technological Institute of Athens onDecember 16, 1962, sponsored and financed by, of all people, ManosHadzidakis, the composer of Never on Sunday. And it was conducted by


Lukas Foss, no mean aleatorist himself. For future archivists it should benoted that the official Greek program carries the wrong date, December16, 1961, on its title page. Since the program states that the concert tookplace on the Day of the Lord (kyriaki) and since December 16, 1962 wasa Sunday, and since many of the works played at this concert werecomposed in 1962, the error of the date of this computerized concert ispatent.

For the 1963 Festival of Contemporary Music in Venice, Xenakiscontributed a piece for two orchestras and two conductors, entitledStratégie. The strategy consists in antiphonal wrestling. The conductorsare given “parameters” of duration and intensity; strategic meetings areheld at cadential fermatas, at the end of each of the nineteen divisions ofthe piece. The audience decides by acclamation which conductor andwhich orchestra overwhelmed which. The degree of vociferation ofindividual members of the audience enters as a stochastic factor. At its firstperformance on April 23, 1963, Bruno Maderna was an easy winneragainst his less known rival.

Stochastic music requires special symbolic notation, in which curvesof probability point to the occurrence or non-occurrence of a sound event,and the thickness of terraced lines corresponds to the optimum loudness.This type of “optical notation” is now employed by probabilistic composersall over the world.

Several composers of the Greek avant-garde have settled, more or lesspermanently, in Germany. Of these, the name of Nikos Mamangakis isbeginning to be known. He was born in Rethymnon, Crete, on March 3,1929, and studied with Carl Orff and Harald Genzmer. In his music headopts numerical sets as thematic complexes which determine theparameters of the entire composition. Because an arithmetical series canbe infinitely varied, one such composition is unlike any other that has adifferent numerical matrix. Monologue for unaccompanied cello, whichMamangakis wrote in 1962, is based on the set of numbers 7, 5, 8, 9, 2,which determines the principal parameters, making the music unique.

George Tsouyopoulos was born in Athens on October 11, 1930. Hestudied with Hindemith in Zurich. In 1957 he settled in Munich, andjoined the cosmopolitan avant-garde there. He strives to achieve a totalorganization of serializable elements, but he is circumspect about freeimprovisation. His Music for Percussion, composed in 1959, is serializedaccording to seven parameters: 1) spatial placement of sound, that is, pitch;

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2) time structure of sound, that is, rhythm; 3) instrumental timbre;4) dynamics in three levels, corresponding to forte, mezzo-forte, and piano;5) sound density; 6) duration of pauses; 7) dodecaphonic linearity. Theserial rows of these factors are not synchronous, so that multipleinterpenetrations result. Tsouyopoulos emphasizes that the unfolding ofeach row may continue ad infinitum, and that there is therefore noconcrete end of the work; nor, he adds as an afterthought, can there beany beginning, for the whole composition represents an event placedbetween two asymptotes. Music for Percussion contains 95 measures in all,but Tsouyopoulos puts the word “end” in quotation marks over measure 95,thus suggesting an open end and an indefinite continuation.

Music for Percussion represents the latest stage in the developmentof Tsouyopoulos. His earlier works are still safely neo-Classical, accordingto the tenets of Hindemith. In this style he wrote two string quartets, aSinfonietta for eight instruments, and some vocal music. His Sérenata forvoice, flute, viola, and guitar (1957) discloses Webernian traits.

Anestis Logothetis came to music through painting. He was born inBurgas, Bulgaria, of Greek parents, on October 27, 1921. He studied artin Greece and in Vienna, exhibited a series of “polymorphic graphs” in artgalleries, and then used these drawings as symbolic musical notation. Hestates: “As a result of research, I came to the conclusion that appropriategraphic representations of sound can be used as psychological associationsbetween the visual impression and its rendering in sound. Such graphsthen become catalysts that release multiple transformations andcombinations of actual sounds, providing a stimulus to performers toproduce music.” He points out that, given such latitude of interpretationof his polymorphic graphs, there exists an infinity of possible integrationsof the differential points and curves in “graphic music.”

The titles of his graphs are significant: Cycloid, Culmination,Coordination, Expansion-Contraction, Impulse (quantitative), Impulse(qualitative), Interpolation, Catalyzation, Parallax, Texture-Structure,Concatenation, Centrifugal.

George Leotsakos, born in Athens in 1935, studied oriental languages,and became interested in expressing the poetic brevity of Japanese Haikuverses in atonal music. His cycle of songs to the texts of Haiku poems, eachof which has three lines and 17 syllables, is written in dissonantcounterpoint, but the melorhythmic outline is as precise as the Japaneseform itself.


The parallelism between the trends of new Greek music andmodernistic developments elsewhere in the world is obvious, and parallellines do meet in global geometry. But Greek composers strive to relate theabstract concepts of modern music to the modalities and the ethos ofancient Hellas. It is to be hoped that their stochastic asymptotes will leadthem towards a fruitful synthesis of the new and the old, of the nationaland the cosmopolitan.

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My favorite quotation concerning American music as observed from theforeign shores is the one published in Paris in Le Guide du Concert in1948: “America is no longer an un-musical nation; she numbers some 50composers of talent.” Well, by now the number must be multiplied a hun-dredfold, and it is rather difficult to compile a florilegium of contempo-rary composers representing all the most important genera of the modernidiom, from the neo-Baroque to the far-out. The present collection rangesin age categories from those born in 1885 to those born in 1938. Whateveridiom each of these composers employs, whether tonal, atonal, polytonal,diatonic, pandiatonic or dodecaphonic, the music has in each case its ownphysiognomy. Let us examine and analyze the fourteen American com-posers in the order they appear in this album.

Ralph Shapey is a Philadelphian, born on March 12, 1921. Hisprincipal teacher in composition was Stefan Wolpe who instructed him inthe art of modern counterpoint. But Shapey did not become an ivory-tower composer; he is also active as conductor and teacher. His presentpositions include the prestigious post as professor of music at theUniversity of Chicago and Music Director of the Contemporary ChamberPlayers, also in Chicago. Shapey’s list of works includes a variety ofcategories, from solo pieces to full symphony orchestra. His Evocation forviolin with percussion and piano was composed in 1959, and firstperformed in New York City on March 26, 1960. It is a fantastically

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Ch. 10: originally published as liner notes for Music for a Twentieth-Century Violinist,An Anthology of Three Decades of American Music, 1940–1950–1960, issued by CMSRecords, New York, 1974.

involved piece, and the percussion section is treated with the ultra-Bartókian subtlety; it includes a low gong, three tom-toms, bass drum,high and low cymbals, high woodblock, medium gamelan and a snare-drum. The notation used in his work is ultra-modern, but the traditionalpentagram, the five-line staff, is retained in the violin and piano parts. Theidiom is dodecaphonic without a rigid adherence to the Schoenbergiandoctrine. The dodecaphonogenic intervals of the minor second (or minorninth) and the major seventh form the structural skeleton of the violinsolo. A clear thematic statement, mostly in double-stops in the violin solo,takes in all twelve notes of the chromatic scale, and the mood indicationis marked “with intense majesty.” The violin is intermittently accompaniedby drums and cymbals, gongs and tom-toms, to which are added the “whitenoises” in the tone-clusters in the extreme registers of the piano. The violinthus appears as the cybernetic leader, operating within the dodecaphonicenvironment, while the percussion and the piano supply the fluctuatingdynamic elements.

The second section of Shapey’s Evocation is an animated piece ofmusic, marked “with humor.” It is a scherzo, with the lambent violinproviding a series of scintillating figurations across the fingerboard. Thethematic intervals, so acutely dissonant on the previous pages, here arebroken into a series of atonal passages. The attentive listening ear can evenperceive a tonal center on G. The piano maintains a toccata-like movementin sixteenth-notes as a constant stencil for the rhythmically ambulatingviolin. The third section begins in an elegiac mood, marked explicitly “withtenderness.” The violin is instructed to put on a mute and play “pocovibrato.” The melodic line in the violin continues to cultivate the acuteatonal intervals, but there are no double-stops, and the impression is thatof tranquillity. The work concludes with a coda, returning to the openingmood, “with intense majesty.” The violin is left alone to play a cadenzaending on a double stop on the interval of a quarter-tone, the only time afractional interval is used in this work.

Shapey has this to say about the philosophical and technicalantecedents of his Evocation: “In my music, the initial space-time imagegenerates through expansions of itself all textures and a structural totality.Through permutations of this image I continue, rather than destroy, itsstate of being. . . . Within a work the initial image will explode into its ownvarious states of being, juxtaposed against itself in ever new focuses. Thesenew states become the new proportions. By extending, contracting,

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verticalizing, inverting, redeploying, refocusing of the material, the samestate of being and its varied phases can move on diverse time and spacedifferentials.”

Wallingford Riegger commands attention and respect in Americanmusic, not only as a composer, but as a man of courage, a pioneer of theAmerican intellect. He was born in Albany, Georgia, on April 29, 1885. Hismother was a semi-professional pianist; his father played the violin.Riegger studied composition with that formidable pedant PercyGoetschius in New York, and took up cello with Alwin Schroeder. DuringRiegger’s young years, aspiring American musicians gravitated towards thefountainhead of musical culture, imperial Germany. Riegger went toBerlin, where he studied at the renowned Hochschule für Musik; he alsodid some opera conducting in Germany during the early years of WorldWar I. When America entered the war, Riegger returned to the UnitedStates, and became active as an orchestra cellist and teacher. His musicalmind was, to use the title of one of his remarkable compositions, adichotomy. He was equally capable of writing didactic pieces forbeginners, and at the same time composing works of profound musicalsignificance. So prolific was he in his lesser epiphany that he had to devisea number of pseudonyms to keep his publishers busy (among themWilliam Richards, Walter Scotson, Gerald Wilfring Gore, John H.McCurdy, George Northrup, Robert Sedgwick, Leonard Gregg, EdwinFarell, Edgar Long). When the Russian inventor Leon Theremin came toAmerica to demonstrate his electronic instrument, Wallingford Rieggerjoined him in experimental work, and learned to play an electronic cello.He became closely associated with lves, Varèse, Cowell and Ruggles whowere building the new American music of the time. Not as intransigent aslves and Varèse in his musical style, Wallingford Riegger had a number ofperformances of his symphonic works with respectable orchestras whoseconductors did not have to apologize to the critics for playing cacophonousmusic. Then a dark cloud descended on Riegger. The United States HouseCommittee on Un-American Activities summoned Riegger into itspresence to answer charges of having been a recruiting officer for theCommunist Party in the district of Manhattan between 45th and 65thstreets. He refused to answer the questions, invoking not the defensiveFifth Amendment, but the first, guaranteeing the freedom of beliefs. Hechallenged the right of the Committee to question his Americanism,recalling that his ancestors came to Kansas to work on the soil and made

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an allusion to the fact that most of his questioners bore distinctly un-American names, mostly of middle European extraction. The Committeeexpressed shock at Riegger’s lack of proper deference, but decided not tosend him to jail. Riegger was physically safe, but the Regents of BostonUniversity rescinded an honorary degree that was to be conferred on him,citing the “embarrassment” created by his stand.

The circumstances of Riegger’s death were most extraordinary. Takinga walk in New York he became tangled up in the leashes of two dogs takenout by their owners, fell down and sustained a brain concussion. With theaid of his daughter, he managed to make his way to the hospital, but forsome reason had to wait several hours for emergency treatment. When hewas finally examined and treated it was too late. He fell into a coma anddied on April 2, 1961 in New York.

Riegger’s Sonatina, op. 39, was written in 1947 for the League ofComposers in New York. It is a work of modest dimensions, couched in acontrapuntal style, idiomatically lying on the borderline between tonalityand atonality. The thematic emphasis is on major seventh and tritones,those cornerstones of atonal writing, but the form is classical. There aretwo contrasting movements, and the ending is tranquil.

It is difficult to imagine that John Cage is an old bearded man of sixty-two, but enfants terribles never age, and no more terrible an enfant hasbeen known to épater les bourgeois than Cage. He was born in El Pueblode Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles (later abbreviated to theprosaic appellation Los Angeles) on September 5, 1912. He studiedtraditional piano, but was obviously dissatisfied with just tickling theivories. Under the powerful influence of Henry Cowell he begansystematic experimentation in transmogrifying the defenseless pianoforte,culminating in the inauguration of what he called “Prepared Piano.” The“preparation” consisted in placing on the strings of the grand piano suchunpianistic objects as screws, coins, and paperclips. The result of thesesuperimpositions was a change in the timbre of the piano. Piano teachersand music critics were horrified at this outrage, but Cage’s technique wasinsidious enough to prevail. Even the “Sachteil” of Riemann’s MusikLexikon, that dignified repository of musicological data devotes animpressively long paragraph to “Prepared Piano.” Among Cage’s moresensational contributions is a piece of disembodied music, entitled 4´33,”in which the pianist sits down and plays nothing. But Cage is not a musicaljester; if anything, he sins on the side of solemnity. No matter how we

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examine the Cage phenomenon, he exercises mesmeric influence in theworld of music. He rates a column (with a picture) in the Micropaediasection of the 15th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, with sevencross-references to relevant mentions in the Macropaedia, and isdescribed therein as “composer whose work and revolutionary ideasprofoundly influenced mid-20th century music.”

Cage’s Nocturne for violin and piano was written in 1947. He explains:“In Nocturne an attempt is made to dissolve the difference between stringand piano sounds though the convention of melody and accompanimentis maintained. The character of the piece is atmospheric and depends forits performance on a constant rubato and the sustaining of resonances.”

The rise of George Crumb has been meteoric, but unlike ordinarymeteors, his star is a brilliant nova, which bids fair to remain a permanentfixture in the musical firmament. Crumb was born in Charleston, WestVirginia, on October 24, 1929. He went through the regular routines ofacademic studies, and became a professor of music at the University ofPennsylvania. But his music is anything but traditional. He mobilizes in hisworks all possible (and quite a few impossible) resources of ultra-moderntechniques. The scores of his Songs, Drones and Refrains of Death andAncient Voices of Children are a veritable encyclopedia of modernsonorities. It seems to proclaim with apocalyptic power: “I am Alpha andOmega.” The visual aspect of his scores is forbidding to timid souls, butmodern performers approach it fearlessly. Crumb supplies the followinginformation for his Four Nocturnes for Violin and Piano (Night Music II):

Four Nocturnes (Night Music II) was composed in 1964, while I was liv-ing in Boulder, Colorado. The work was first performed on February 3,1965 in Buffalo, by Paul Zukofsky. On this occasion I was the pianist.Four Nocturnes is a further essay in the quiet nocturnal mood of myNight Music I for soprano, keyboard, and percussion (composed in1963); hence the subtitle “Night Music II.” The four pieces constitutingthe work are prefaced with the following indications:

Notturno I: SerenamenteNotturno II: Scorrevole; allegro possibleNotturno III: ContemplativoNotturno IV: Con un sentimento di nostalgia


The music is of the utmost delicacy and the prevailing sense of “sus-pension in time” is only briefly interrupted by the animated and rhyth-mically more forceful second piece. The sustained lyric idea presentedat the beginning of the work, the nervous tremolo effects, and the styl-ized bird songs are all recurrent elements.In composing the Four Nocturnes I had attempted a modification of thetraditional treatment of the violin-piano combination by exploiting vari-ous timbral resources of the instruments. Thus a certain integration insound is achieved by requiring both instruments to produce harmonics,pizzicato effects, rapping sounds (on the wood of the violin; on the metalbeams of the piano). The gentle rustling sounds which conclude thework are produced by the application of a percussionist’s wire brush tothe strings of the piano.

The music of Peter Mennin is made out of solid rock, hewn intomodern shapes without losing its Baroque consistency. He was born inErie, Pennsylvania, on May 17, 1923, of Italian parents. His real name wasMennini; his older brother, Louis Mennini, who kept the final vowel of hisoriginal name, is also a composer. The untroubled progress of PeterMennin in the world of music makes a Horatio Alger type of story. Hismusical talent for composition was nurtured by the excellent teachersHoward Hanson and Bernard Rogers at the Eastman School of Music inRochester, where he received his Ph.D. The Guggenheim Fellowshipbeckoned him. He established himself as an excellent teacher. He holdsthe prestigious post of President of the Juilliard School of Music in NewYork. Despite the abundance of teaching and administrative work, Mennincontinues to compose music prolifically. By 1974 he was the author ofeight symphonies and numerous works of chamber music.

Mennin’s Sonata Concertante for violin and piano is a cheerful work.The first movement opens with a meditative Sostenuto, before plunginginto an Allegro con brio. The action is maintained in pulsating sixteenth-notes, and the ending is in fortissimo. The second movement is Adagiosemplice. After a stately beginning, the rhythmic pulse becomes moreagitated, and the dynamic level rises to fortissimo in high treble beforesubsiding to gentle piano. The third and last movement is Allegro confuoco. It has the character of a syncopated toccata. The “fuoco” continuesburning to the end on unison C. Throughout the Sonata Concertante theharmonic idiom maintains an acrid flair of bitonality, but the idiom is neveropaque, and the fundamental tonal foundation is seldom compromised.

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Morton Feldman is an established avant-gardist, if such a descriptionis not a contradiction in terms. But how else can one characterize acomposer who creates his own establishment out of irreconcilabledisestablishmentarianism? Anyway, Feldman’s brand of Avant-gardism isclearly distinguishable from that of others. Feldman derives his inspirationfrom the abstract expressionism of modern art. In his works he practicesthe paradoxical art of pre-determined indeterminacies—now you see it,now you don’t. His music leaves considerable choice to the performer’sfancy, but it is not grimly aleatory. At least he indicates a fair approximationof the notes he wants to be played, in high, medium or low ranges andfurther specifies the number of notes in a basic time unit. He uses eithertraditional or graphic notation as the spirit moves him.

Feldman was born in New York on January 12, 1926. He studied pianowith the Russian pianist Vera Press whom he venerated. He dedicated awork to her memory in 1970, entitled simply Mme. Press Died Last WeekAt Ninety. His teachers in composition were Wallingford Riegger andStefan Wolpe. The titles of many of Feldman’s compositions reflect hisdedication to the ideals of constructivism and abstract expressionism:Durations, Extensions, Projections, Intermissions, Structures. When indoubt, he resorts to statement of identity: Eleven Instruments, scored for11 instruments; Two Instruments, scored for 2 instruments; or Numbers,scored for several instruments.

While modern music of the bygone era was set to overwhelm theaudience with deafening sound, Morton Feldman incapacitates hislisteners by making music on the threshold of audibility. In his VerticalThoughts 2 for violin and piano, Feldman prescribes “dynamics very lowthroughout.” He also specifies that each instrument should enter when thepreceding sound begins to fade. “Dolce far niente” is the mood of thepiece.

Michael Sahl is an amphibious composer. He works with as muchenthusiasm in serious forms as in popular music, and in all shades inbetween. He was born in Boston, on September 2, 1934. His family movedto New York when he was a child. He studied piano and took lessons incomposition with Israel Citkowitz and Roger Sessions. He soon realizedthat to get performances required a combination of luck, public relations,and pure nerve, the categories in which Michael Sahl found himselfdeficient. By the time he was twenty-eight years old, he decided to recordhis compositions on tape. He also discovered that chamber music, andparticularly string quartets, were being used extensively for “sweetening”


on pop albums. This made him less self-conscious about writing a stringquartet, the type of composition that seemed to him too sacrosanct to betreated lightly. He finally decided that two violins, viola and cello incondominium were just instruments, and you could use them any way youliked.

Sahl admits that his sudden awareness of this freedom of musicalaction made his String Quartet which he wrote in 1969 sound old-fashioned in spots. He also makes a declaration of enlightened eclecticism:“I am very attached to the music of Copland, Shostakovich, Prokofiev,Vaughan Williams, Sibelius, Bartók, as well as to the music of Ives,Stravinsky and Schoenberg.” To this mixed bag he adds: “I have been muchinspired and encouraged by the music of Gershwin and Jerome Kern, andCole Porter as well as by Appalachian folk music and the jazz of the fifties.”To an observer outside of the Sahl orbit, his Quartet reveals few of thesealleged multifaceted influences. In fact, it looks and sounds like an originalwork. The feature that attracts attention in the score is a cornucopia ofdrones, upon which are deployed thematic variants of the principal diatonicsubject. And there is an intriguing transformation of a six-note violin figureby gradual microtone alteration, until, after some 20 variants, it is reducedto another figure without changing its descending design. Curious.

Of all modern composers who populated the area of Manhattanduring the flamboyant 1930’s, there was no spirit more blithe than HenryBrant, who existed in a constant state of seething. He was born in Montrealon September 15, 1913 and received the rudiments of musical theory andpractice from his father. He moved to New York as a youth and took lessonsin composition with Wallingford Riegger and Copland. In time hecorralled in a couple of Guggenheim Fellowships. From his earliest essaysin composition he tried to expand the dimensional continuum of the artof music. Accordingly, Brant made a move into the world of musicalstereometry where the position of performers in space is of thematicimportance. He expounds his ideas in this regard in an article “Space asan Essential Aspect of Musical Composition,” published in the 1967collection, Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music. Heacknowledges his debt to The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives, inwhich the strings, the flutes and the trumpet solo are placed in threedifferent sections of the hall and stage and pursue their own independenttempi. Brant’s brand of space is also peculiarly American; the titles ofsome of his works are indicative of this topical aspect: Whoopee in D

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Major, Downtown Suite, The Marx Brothers, 5 & 10c Store Music, CountyFair, Grand Universal Circus, and a number of pieces of jazz inspiration.In the score of his Kitchen Music he includes bottles and tincans. On theother side of the ledger, Brant picks up scientific subjects, as in hisEncephalograms 2, Galaxy, and Ice Age.

Brant’s Quombex for viola d’amore and music boxes, written in 1960,was inspired by Margaret Stark’s sculpture “Bird with Passenger,” a workwhich is part of Brant’s own art collection. The avian character of thepiece is graphically expressed by soaring passages in alternating tritonesand perfect fourths, making for a nice atonal design, interrupted here andthere by disparate chirps on a stationary note. In fact the dynamic andrhythmic elements in Quombex suggest Schumann’s Der Vogel als Prophet.But what is Quombex? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Superbrant.

Stefan Wolpe belongs in the pantheon of tragic German-Americanphilosophers of music. His life contains the elements of titanic struggleagainst the world of darkness, an escape from the Nazi monster, a refugein America, and a peaceful existence among his friends and loyal disciples.But even in America, tragedy pursued him when his house with his man-uscripts and a cherished art collection burned down. He was left withoutfunds, and once again, had to call on friends for help. Wolpe was born inBerlin on August 25, 1902. He studied with the renowned composer FranzSchreker. When the Nazi goosesteps began making their abominablemusic, Wolpe fled Germany, went to Palestine, and eventually settled inAmerica. He died in New York on April 4, 1972. Wolpe’s works had a hardtime finding sympathetic performers, perhaps because of the uncompro-mising structuralism of his music. In his essay “Thinking Twice,” publishedin the collection Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, heexpounds with considerable persuasive force his tenets in musical compo-sition. He speaks of a “multi-dimensional musical space,” invokes thenecessity of attaining a maximum amount of combinatorial flexibility in aseries, concluding that “the crystallizing and interconnecting of ever-freshly-conceived, generated, released aspects is precisely what keeps itfrom being stagnant and dropping dead. Or, to put it differently. . . .” Butwhy put it differently? The statement is profound enough for thinking notjust twice, but thrice.

Not all of Wolpe’s music sounds as forbidding as his words. His SecondPiece for Violin Alone is quite amiable. Its thematic orbit traverses thechromatic tones of the lowest tetrachord available on the G-string of the


violin before expanding into the outer spaces of major sevenths. The con-trast between these intervallic groupings imparts a musico-philosophicalmeaning to the music, while its rhythmic variety provides a certain vitalityof motion.

In an article which I contributed to Henry Cowell’s collectionAmerican Composers on American Music published in 1933, I said,seeking a summarizing phrase, that Walter Piston is the builder of themodern academic idiom in American music. This glib definition has beenquoted through the years in various reference works and program notes,much to my embarrassment and to Piston’s annoyance. But is academismwrong per se? Not necessarily. If we accept this characterization of Pistonas a working hypothesis, it may even be helpful. For what other Americancomposer of great envergure, to use a convenient French word, can qualifyfor the position of a master-builder of symphonic and chamber music?Piston was born in Rockland, Maine, on January 20, 1894; his grandfatherwas an Italian named Pistone. Piston studied art and violin. He then tookcourses in composition at Harvard University, graduating summa cumlaude. Later he made a ritual pilgrimage to Paris to study with NadiaBoulanger, the nourrice of so many American composers of Piston’sgeneration. Returning to America, Piston became professor of music atHarvard University, a post he retained until 1960. Piston’s idiom ofcomposition may be broadly described as neo-classical, but beginningabout 1965, he evinced an unexpected interest in the 12-tone method ofcomposition. The thematic exposition of Piston’s Eighth Symphony isdefinitely dodecaphonic.

Piston wrote his Sonatina for violin and harpsichord or piano in 1945.It is in three movements, Allegro leggiero, Adagio espressivo, and Allegrovivo. In this work Piston follows the characteristic formula of the Baroqueperiod. Although he had long abandoned explicit key signatures, thetonality here is clearly outlined, the outer movements gravitating towardsB flat major, and the inner slow movement to A minor. The texture iscontrapuntal and transparent; there are some fine canonic passages. Sincethe keyboard part is designed for the harpsichord of the Baroque era, therange is kept rigorously within the limits of classical usage.

Roger Sessions enjoys tremendous respect among American musiciansas a man of great knowledge and culture. Among other accomplishments,he is a linguist, fluent not only in German, French and Italian, but also in

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Russian. But universal respect attached to his name does not, unfortu-nately, guarantee frequent performances of his music. Indeed, it is a rareoccasion when one of his eight symphonies or other major works figureson a concert program. Partial explanation of this deficiency is that hismusic is tremendously difficult to play. His remarkable Violin Concertohad to wait years before it was finally brought to performance, and eventhen there were murmurs of discontent among symphony subscribers whohardly relished the angularities of its idiom.

Roger Sessions was born in Brooklyn on December 28, 1896. He stud-ied at Harvard and Yale, and took lessons in composition with Ernest Blochin Cleveland. As a recipient of various grants he spent several years in Italyand Germany. Returning to America, he became a teacher highly regardedin the institutions of musical learning, from Princeton to Berkeley. In themeantime he composed industriously, each consecutive work being athesis in musical styles and techniques. He found it useful to apply themethod of composition with 12 tones in order to secure a firm organiza-tion of his music. But he never relinquished the tonal foundation, and wasnot even averse to using key signatures when tonality appeared dominant.His Duo for violin and piano, composed in 1942, is set in one continuousmovement. The opening Andante moderato, tranquillo ed espressivo is aprelude to an explosive Allegro impetuoso. The initial Andante returns fora brief reminiscence, and after a moment of hesitant expectancy, the musicrushes into fiery Allegro vivace e con fuoco. The texture throughout thework is robust and dissonant, tonal but constantly in flux. Each principalsection maintains a strong rhythmic pulse, mostly in passages of eighth-notes and in eighth-note triplets, until the finale in which rapid motion insixteenth-notes is prevalent. Considering the uncompromisingly dissonantidiom of the music, it is interesting that Sessions chooses to use definitekey signatures, four flats, followed by five sharps and returning to four flatsagain, even though he is compelled to cancel the prescribed flats andsharps time and again as the musical current departs from the set tonality.The finale bears the key signature of one sharp, and the ending on thedescending fifth in the bass of the piano part seems indeed to suggest thekey of G major. In fact, the interval of a perfect fifth in downward motionis of thematic importance in this Duo. Some Ph.D. aspirant ought to writea thesis entitled, “The role of the descending perfect fifth in the tonalstructure of the music of Roger Sessions.”


Milton Babbitt was born in Philadelphia, on May 10, 1916. He studiedconcurrently mathematics and music. He is the grand prêtre of integralserialism. In fact, it can be chronologically demonstrated that he was thefirst to “organize” serially all parameters of musical composition, includingpitches, note values, intervals, rhythms, instrumental timbres and dynam-ics. Being a mathematician, he tackled the problem of serialism using thetheory of sets. He adopted Schoenberg’s method of composition with 12-tones as part of the set theory. The development of the electronicsynthesizer at the Princeton Research Center gave Babbitt an opportunityto connect the procedures of musical composition with mathematical sets.He was appointed consultant in the building of a new advanced synthe-sizer and finally became a member of the committee in charge of theColumbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. In his theoretical writingshe has elaborated a special terminology needed for analysis of contempo-rary works. Apart from compositions for traditional media, Babbitt hasprogrammed a number of special works on tape to be performed on thesynthesizer.

Babbitt composed Sextets for violin and piano in 1966. The title, inplural, may appear paradoxical, but it refers to the sextuple parameters ofthe work. In Babbitt’s own words: “The polyphonic structures are repre-sented instrumentally, timbrally (as different modes of tone color withinthe instrumental source), registrally, articulatively, dynamically or by anycombination of these means.” Babbitt adds: “The deliberately alphabeticalorder of the instruments in the title should suggest that the various distri-butions of the ‘voices’ within the constant ‘sextet’ create changes in therelative, quantitative dominance between the two instruments.” (Thealphabetical order here refers to the listing of the piece as being for pianoand violin, rather than for violin and piano.)

The texture of the music indicates the total emancipation of disso-nance, with the familiar dodecaphonic birthmark of the major seventhbeing the generating interval. Even a mere glance at the score reveals aserialism of multiple dimensions, indicated by the use of differentiateddynamic degrees of pianissimo, pianississimo, pianissississimo and pianis-sissississimo, as well as fortissimo, fortississimo, fortissississimo andfortississississimo. (What superviolinist, what hyper-pianist can make anaudible difference between ppp and pppp?) But let us return to Babbitt’soriginal exegesis: “The five ‘parallel’ sections or areas into which this one-movement work essentially divides from the standpoint of coextensive

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progressions through pitch-aggregate formations probably are initiallymost easily recognized and differentiated through such redistributions;thus the first section is ‘dominated’ by the piano, the second is still pianodominant but less so, the third is instrumentally ‘equal’ while the fourth isdominated by the violin, as is the fifth, but less so, reflecting in these ‘back-ground’ terms an exact interchange of the roles of the instruments in theinitial section. Within each section there are similar redispositions of ‘voice’representation by alterations in the mode of sound production or articula-tion by the individual instruments. It should be apparent that the ‘parallel’sections are in no complete sense, or even in a single musical dimension,total repetitions; rather they may be heard as variations of familiarly trans-formed consecutions of similarly deployed set-segments and harmoniccollections (of which the segments are components) compositionally inter-preted and reinterpreted by—among others—the modes previouslymentioned.” Amen.

Arthur Berger was born in New York on May 15, 1912. His principalstudy was with Walter Piston at Harvard University. Then he made ajourney to Paris for study with Nadia Boulanger, who sternly repressed hisincipient Schoenbergian proclivities and inculcated him in the pandiatonicdoctrine of Stravinsky’s neo-classical period. Upon his return to America,Berger was active as a teacher, music critic, and, of course, composer.Gradually, he shed the Stravinskyan mold and returned to his firstSchoenbergian love. His Duo No. 2 for violin and piano, written in 1950belongs to the neo-classical period. It is in two sections, marked Sempliceand Moderato Grazioso. The generative rhythm of the opening is intranquil eighth-notes in 4/4 time. The mood is pastoral, and the writing isin diatonically pure white notes. The music becomes agitated towards themiddle, with rapid figures flying across from the violin to the piano part,and back. Then the initial mood returns, and there is a brief formal coda.The second section is in alla breve, with the eighth-notes still being theformative elements. The character is dance-like, suggesting a ballerina insearch of a Russian ballet company, meanwhile showing off her expertisein pointes and pirouettes. The cadence is gentle, undisturbed by thedissonant fourth inserted in the tonic of F major.

Harvey Sollberger was born in Cedar Rapids, lowa, on May 11, 1938.He studied flute in his home town and later took courses in compositionwith Jack Beeson and Otto Luening at Columbia University. In his ownworks he takes his point of departure from the established Schoenbergian


precepts developing in the direction of integral serialism à la MiltonBabbitt, with note values, registers, instrumental timbres and dynamics allordained according to their proper serial differentiation. With CharlesWuorinen and other kindred spirits, Sollberger organized concerts ofavant-garde music in New York and elsewhere, officiating as conductorand flute player. His expertise on the flute is of the highest order; hisfacility in the modern idiom and felicity of interpretation are horsconcours. No wonder that so many young composers are tempted to writespecial works for Sollberger.

Sollberger composed his Solos in 1962; the work is scored for violin,flute, clarinet, horn, double-bass and piano. Sollberger describes his workas follows: “I think of Solos as a large single-movement work which dividesquite clearly into three main sections. The two outer sections, whichtogether might be heard to form a continuous piece but for the‘interruption’ of the scherzo-like middle section, constitute the bulk of thework. The relation of the violin to the other instruments is fluid andconstantly changing, ranging from 1) the violin’s assimilation into theensemble to 2) its participation in little chamber music interludes (suchas the ‘violin and piano sonata’ early in the first section) to 3) traditionalsolo-tutti confrontations. The work as a whole is bound together byperiodic restatements of refrain material which first occurs in the openingmeasures.”

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The 20th century marked a revolution in the style and technique of musi-cal composition greater than in any century before. This revolution can besummarized in three main points: emancipation of dissonance, departurefrom tonality and development of asymmetrical meters and rhythms.

Until the very end of the 19th century, the unbreakable rule ofcomposition was that each separate, individual section, each movementand certainly the complete work itself had to terminate on a perfecttriad—a major triad in most cases, a minor triad in certain cases. Majortriads were in the majority and minor triads in the minority.

In classical music, if this term is applied to all music before 1900, theterminal point had to be on the tonic of the original key or on the tonic ofa relative key. So firm was this unspoken rule that Richard Strauss madea joke of it in one of his songs, which ended in a tonality other the initialkey. He provided an alternate ending to the piece in the initial key, with asly footnote: “This ending is to be used for all performances given before1900.”

Instances could be found in old music when a composition would endon the dominant seventh chord, a marked dissonance that could not betolerated in its naked state. But in such cases there was always a sequel,which provided a proper resolution into the tonic triad. A bold Russianinnovator, Vladimir Rebikov, defied the musical establishment by endinghis little opera The Christmas Tree on the augmented triad, technically adiscord, although it consists of two concords—to wit, major thirds. Thenon the threshold of the 20th century, the musical ground began to shift.

11. INTRODUCT ION [TO TWENT IETH CENTURY MUS IC ]

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Ch. 11: originally published as the introduction to Twentieth Century Music byRichard Burbank, Facts on File Publications, New York, 1984.

First these shifts appeared in spontaneously generated popular music;ragtime players would add a major sixth to the obligatory major triad fora concluding concord. Acousticians philosophized that this major sixthabove the concluding major triad, usually occurring in the treble, was nota dissonance at all but actually a 27th overtone of the fundamental tonic.This explanation begs the question. Our tuning does not follow the pureseries of overtones, and the extra high note would be off the overtoneseries by a substantial microtonal interval.

Another few years elapsed, and the instinctive, untutored andunprejudiced pianists of the ragtime era began adding the major seventhto the final chord, invariably in the major mode. Now, a major seventh isa striking dissonance, so what is it doing masquerading as a member of theconcluding harmony? Well, the major seventh, when sufficiently distancedfrom the fundamental tone, is its 15th overtone! Since it is theoretically apart of the overtone series, it is as good a consonance as any. Later a majorninth was added, always in the high treble, to the terminal major triad; itforms an even closer member of the overtone series than the added sixthor the seventh: It is the ninth overtone of the fundamental tone! Thenatural corollary was to add both the 9th overtone and the 27th overtoneand arrange them in a euphonious chord formation. Counting forconvenience’s sake from the fundamental low C (C, G, E, A, D), this typicalterminal chord was used by ragtime players and by their successors, jazzand rock musicians.

Among so-called classical composers who knew what they were doing,such terminal dissonances came into vogue simultaneously with theinstinctual and academically untutored jazz players. The pioneer in thisrevolution was Claude Debussy. He was apt to write these taunting andprovocative formations on the white keys of the piano keyboard. He alsobegan adding notes to the common dominant seventh chords.

Then came Alexander Scriabin. He knew little of Debussy and evenless of American ragtime music. He was not interested in acoustics or inthe science of overtones. Rather, he was fascinated by expanding the realmof chords built on perfect and augmented fourths as some sort of etherealsuspensions over the major dominant chord. These enhanced dominantseventh chords could be traced to Richard Wagner’s chromatic harmonies,but Scriabin liked to attribute a mystical origin to them. In his poetic pianopiece entitled Desir, he uses a chord combining an augmented fourth withtwo perfect fourths (C, F-sharp, B, E). From there it is only a small step

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to his “mystic chord,” which he set as a sort of extraterrestrial basic chordfor his “Poem of Fire,” Prometheus. Scriabin’s mystic chord is (starting onC) C, F-sharp, B-flat, E, A, D. To make this chord understandable, itsuffices to lead the F-sharp up a semitone to G and the A up a semitoneto B-flat, thus forming an old familiar dominant seventh chord, veryWagnerian-sounding indeed.

But what is that F-sharp doing in Scriabin’s mystic chord in the firstplace? Why it is the 45th overtone of the bass note C, brought down fromits ethereal heights to the middle of the piano keyboard. Interestinglyenough, jazz players are also apt to add an F-sharp high in the treble, overthe deep fundamental tone on C, a fascinating development proving thatart (Debussy, Scriabin) follows life (ragtime, jazz). Yet the perfect fourthnever appears in the treble of any of these dissonant chords that offendedthe delicate ears of music critics and academic musicians at the turn of thecentury. No F ever, no matter how high in the stratospheric treble overthe fundamental C! Not in Debussy, not in any of his followers, not in anywritten or unwritten ragtime or jazz pieces.

In 1937, I proposed the term pandiatonicism to describe suchenhanced diatonic harmonies and their constituent melodies. The termtook root and is now duly enshrined in all music dictionaries and even inthe Encyclopaedia Britannica. This type of harmony is found in the worksof Debussy, Igor Stravinsky and many other composers. Pandiatonicchords are built on perfect fifths, augmented fourths, perfect fourths,sevenths, and also major and minor thirds. A typical pandiatonic chord,containing all seven notes of the scale (usually the major scale) is C, G, D,F, B, E, A. The presence of F lends the chord a feeling of the dominantseventh on the organ point of C.

Polytonality (or more strictly, bitonality, for it is rare that more thantwo different tonalities appear in a harmonic complex) is a naturaldevelopment in the process of emancipation of dissonance. Fantasticparadoxes and fascinating musical oxymorons result from the mostcommon bitonal combination, that of two major triads placed at a distanceof an augmented fourth. The priority of such a combined bitonal form, Cmajor versus F-sharp major, is usually credited to Igor Stravinsky and is infact often called the “Petroushka chord,” because Stravinsky used it,vertically and horizontally, in the music of his famous ballet. Butapproximation and eventual coalescence of these two opposed tonalitieswere a fact of musical life long before Stravinsky. C major and F-sharp

Introduction [to Twentieth Century Music] 101

major lie on the opposite points of the circle of scales, and they are alsomutually exclusive in their initial hexachords. The close approximation andthe tangential encounter of these two tonalities are found in a number ofworks by Franz Liszt, Wagner, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and ModestMussorgsky. But it was Stravinsky who resolutely put them together, bothharmonically and melodically, and in so doing asserted the resultingbitonality.

In medieval universities music was a part of the faculty of sciences,and early musicians were concerned primarily with the mathematicalfoundation of intervals, melodies and chords. The reading of medievaltheoretical manuscripts, in their vulgar Latin (vulgar not in the sense ofbaseness, but in the sense of academic language), provides a lot ofinnocent merriment. Why is the octave a perfect interval? BecauseAbraham was circumcised on the eighth (octavo) day. Why is triple timethe best of time, as it was regarded in the Middle Ages? Because of theTrinity. Why was the tritone banished from use? Because it was diabolusin musica, the work of Satan. In Bach’s time a student would be punishedby a painful strike with a rattan stick across the knuckles for writing atritone. In free composition the tritone served to depict all kinds ofdeviltry. When the malevolent giant Fafner in Wagner’s Ring becomes adragon, he does so with the aid of a diabolical tritone in the bassoon. Theirony of fate: The tritone became the cornerstone of polytonality andatonality, accepting the function of a dominant in classical harmony.

The inevitable product of chromatic harmony as practiced by Wagnerand Liszt was the decay of governing tonality. Attempts had been made bymany composers to salvage the modulatory principles of tonality (Rimsky-Korsakov once used a triple sharp in order to justify the spelling rules oftonal transition), but in vain. The first symptom of this decay was thedisappearance of the key signature, that guardian of classical music. Nomore Symphony in D or Prelude in E-flat! The music staff was denudedof the familiar ladders of sharps and flats. The absence of these accidentalsdid not mean, of course, that everybody began writing music in C major,but it was a sign that it was no longer necessary to indicate a key iftonalities were to switch in every bar.

I propose a designation of euphonious dissonances for tonalcombinations that exclude major sevenths, minor ninths and minorseconds—the intervals that have a high degree of tonal interference. Bythis definition chords formed of whole tones employing tritones, minor


sevenths, major thirds and major ninths are euphonious dissonances, whilechords containing major sevenths, minor ninths and minor seconds arenoneuphonious dissonances. The major dominant seventh chords (e.g., C,G, E, B-flat, D) so beloved by Wagner and, after Wagner, by Debussy areeuphonious dissonances. The great advantage of euphonious dissonancesis that they can be moved in parallel motion, ignoring the resultingconsecutive fifths. Noneuphonious dissonances—such as minor seconds,major sevenths and minor ninths—are usable in pandiatonic structures,but they are inexorably confined to a single tonal matrix and cannot beused in parallel motion. In Le Sacre du printemps, Stravinsky makes useof noneuphonious dissonances in scale passages set at a distance of minorninths, pitting a C major scale against C-sharp major.

The name of Stravinsky is often associated with that of Picasso, whoabolished the ideal of prettiness, symmetry and optical perspective in hispaintings. He would be apt to add an extra eye to a human face just asStravinsky would add a jarring, noneuphoniously dissonant note to anotherwise peaceful tonal passage. There is a parallel to these artistic eventsin social life. Crinolines (strict triads) disappeared after Queen Victoriadied; corsets (diminished seventh chords) fell into desuetude with theoutbreak of World War I; the bra (whole-tone scales) in women andnecktie in men followed into oblivion in the wake of World War II.

According to Isaac Newton’s third law, every action is followed by anequal and opposite reaction. When musical action reached its greatestaccumulation of tonal masses, producing a maximum of decibels, so thatthe human ear seemed to have reached its limit of tolerance, the wavereversed itself. Composers voluntarily reduced their symphonic andoperatic apparatus to a workable minimum. No more super-Wagnerianmasses of instruments. No more five-act operas. No more horses on thestage, and no more huge mixed choruses. The new economy took the formof neoclassicism. Suddenly composers discovered new values in old music,especially baroque music. Suddenly the much-used and abused triadsacquired a new charm. And even such shopworn devices as the consecutiveruns of diminished-seventh chords (they were known in operatic parlanceas accorde di stupefazione—the chords of stupefaction—for they werehabitually employed in highly dramatic operatic episodes) acquired a newdignity.

With the restoration to fashion of baroque music came the revival ofthe classical art of counterpoint. The last great contrapuntist of the 20th


century was Max Reger. (He was quite a humorist, quipping that his namewas a musical palindrome, for it read the same backwards.) Reger’s reveredteacher Hugo Riemann told him in a moment of effusive confidence:“Max, if you want, you can be a second Bach!” Reger did not become aBach, but he continues to be venerated in Germany. Only Paul Hindemith,among modem composers, admired Reger unequivocally. And perhapsHindemith was the last great neoclassicist among 20th-century composers,even though he did not shrink from using harsh dissonances. WhenRichard Strauss heard Hindemith’s earlier chamber music at one of thosemodern music festivals that sprouted all over Europe after the end of theFirst World War, he asked him, almost compassionately: “Why do you dothis? After all, you have talent.”

The emancipation of dissonance in vertical harmony was inexorablyfollowed by the emancipation of tonality in melodic progressions. Why bea slave to the tonic-dominant complex? Why be confined to the corridorsof major or minor scales? Eureka! Let us throw off the chains of the majortetrachord and its minor relative under which we languished for athousand years since Guido from the little Italian town of Arezzo beganteaching his famous singing method. And so in the early decades of thepresent century a declaration of liberty, fraternity and equality of allchromatic notes was made; it took its practical form in a system that itsoriginator, Arnold Schoenberg, described as a method of composition with12 tones related only to one another.

Schoenberg was not alone in formulating this principle of composi-tion. He had several precursors, competitors and claimants of priority.Schoenberg’s method, which became known as dodecaphony (from theGreek dodeca, 12, and phone, sound), was presaged early in the centuryby, among others, the Italian theorist Domenico Alaleona, who publishedan article in 1911 in which he used the term dodecafonia. The Russiancomposer Nicolas Obouhov, a mystic who called himself “Nicolas l’illu-mine,” and who marked rehearsal numbers in his score Le livre de vie withhis own blood, demonstrated his system of 12 different notes withoutduplication as early as 1916. Then there was the Austrian composer JosefMatthias Hauer, who declared himself “the spiritual begetter and despitenumerous bad imitators, still forever, the only one who knows how to usethe music of 12 tones.”

When the astronomer Christian Huygens discovered the rings ofSaturn with his primitive telescope, he was careful to put this discovery in


the form of a Latin anagram so that he could prove his priority in casesomeone else observed the rings. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz and IsaacNewton contested the invention of differential calculus. Schoenberg tookthe precaution of handing a note to one of his students at a seminar inBerlin, specifically mentioning the inception of the method ofcomposition with 12 tones. Schoenberg denied his role as a musicalrevolutionary. “What I did was neither revolution nor anarchy,” he wrotein a letter addressed to me, in English, dated June 3, 1937. “1 possessed,from my very first start, a thoroughly developed sense of form and a strongaversion [to] . . . exaggeration. There is no falling into order, because therewas never disorder. There is no falling at all, but on the contrary, there isan ascending to higher and better order.”

Schoenberg’s sensibility in asserting his priority in the discovery of hismethod led to an extraordinary exchange of letters with Thomas Mann. Itall started with the publication of Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus, centeringon a mythical German composer of 12-tone music named AdrianLeverkühn. After he read the book, Schoenberg exploded in wrath, writinga letter to the editor of the Saturday Review of Literature:

In his novel Doktor Faustus, Thomas Mann has taken advantage of myliterary property. He has produced a fictitious composer as the hero ofhis book; and he made him the creator of what one erroneously calls mysystem of 12 tones, which I call method of composing with 12 tones. Hedid this without my permission and even without my knowledge. Inother words, he borrowed it in the absence of the proprietor. . . .Leverkühn is depicted from beginning to end as a lunatic. I am 74 andI am not insane, and I have never acquired the disease from which thisinsanity stems. I consider this an insult.

Schoenberg was persuaded to make peace with Mann on the promisethat the next edition of Mann’s novel would carry a note giving him creditfor his method. Schoenberg wrote:

I was satisfied by this promise because I wanted to be noble to a manwho was awarded the Nobel Prize. But Mr. Mann was not as generousas I, who had given him good chance to free himself from the uglyaspect of a pirate. He gave an explanation in a few lines which he hid atthe end of the book on a page where no one ever would see it. Besides,


he added a new crime to his first. In the attempt to belittle me, he callsme a (!) contemporary composer and theoretician. In two or threedecades, one will know which of the two was the other’s contemporary.

Thomas Mann answered Schoenberg’s letter in a philosophical mode,reiterating his belief in Schoenberg’s greatness but adding:

It is a sad spectacle to see a man of great worth whose all-too-under-standable hypersensitivity grows out of a life suspended between glori-fication and neglect, almost willfully yield to delusion of persecution andof being robbed, and involve himself in rancorous bickering.

Like many great men, Schoenberg was subject to superstitious fears.He had triskaidekaphobia, the fear of number 13. In order to exorcise it,he cut out the second letter in the name Aaron in the title of his workMoses und Aron when he noticed that it otherwise would number 13letters. When a friend remarked on Schoenberg’s 76th birthday that thedigits of his age added up to 13, Schoenberg seemed genuinely upset. Hedied on July 13, 1951, reportedly 13 minutes before midnight, at the ageof 76.

What establishes Schoenberg as the true creator of the dodecaphonicmethod is his adoption of the time-honored contrapuntal devices ofinversion, retrograde and retrograde inversion. Just using 12 differentnotes in a melody is no great task, but to invert a subject that would befertile when turned melodically upside down or played backward or playedbackward upside down requires great power of imagination. There are479,001,600 possible combinations of arranging 12 different tones (or tonerows, as they are usually described), and it requires the highest degree ofperspicacity to select one that would lend itself to fruitful transformations.When I sent a copy of my Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns toSchoenberg, he paid me a left-handed compliment. “You have in allprobability organized every possible succession of tones,” he wrote. “Thisis an admirable feat of mental gymnastics. But as a composer, I mustbelieve in inspiration rather [than] in mechanics.” Schoenberg’s emphasison inspiration is revealing, since he was constantly accused of being acerebral composer.

What distinguishes Schoenberg’s method from similar dodecaphonictheories is its comprehensive extension into the field of counterpoint and


harmony, so that the entire musical structure becomes a multiple functionof the original series. The basic tone row and its three transformations—inversion, retrograde and retrograde inversion—become the ingredientsof the contrapuntal and harmonic structure of a dodecaphonic piece ofmusic. Thus, a 12-tone series can be represented contrapuntally, orharmonically, by six units of 2 notes each, four units of 3 notes each, threeunits of 4 notes each, two units of 6 notes each or a single unit of 12 notes.(Luckily for Schoenberg and his disciples, 12 is divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6.)

In his practice Schoenberg excludes the major triad and its inversions,as well as minor triads in their fundamental positions, allowing occasionalinversions, especially the second inversion of a minor triad in passing. Whythis exclusion? Schoenberg could say, and actually did say, that major triadshave been overworked and ought to be given a rest. Of course, thematicoctaves are inadmissible in a truly dodecaphonic composition. I washorror-struck when I discovered, while rehearsing Schoenberg’ssymphonic piece entitled Accompaniment to a Motion Picture Scene(needless to say, it was never used in an actual movie), that two trumpetsin the score were both playing C at an octave’s distance. I approachedSchoenberg to ask him what was wrong. “Oh,“ he said, “das ist falsch!” Butwhat was the intended interval that was not “falsch?” I asked. “That Icannot remember,” Schoenberg replied. I summoned Roger Sessions, aprofound theorist as well as a remarkable composer, to help me solve thepuzzle, and after an hour or so at my piano, we traced back the basictone row and determined that the shocking interval of a perfect octaveshould have been a diminished octave, C over C-sharp. Problem solved,dodecaphonic syllogism resolved.

Schoenberg is described in most music courses and books as thefounder of the second Viennese school, a successor to the old romanticschool of Viennese composers. He and his star pupils Alban Berg andAnton von Webern, great composers in their own right, have beenirreverently referred to as God the Father, God the Son and the HolyGhost. Since the son of God was human, Alban Berg allowed himself totaste forbidden fruits, such as triads. And since the Holy Ghost is the leasttangible of the Trinity, Anton von Webern evolved the most profoundlyabstruse system of dodecaphonic application. Strangely enough, it wasWebern who eventually exercised the most profound influence oncomposers around the world. Let the theologians figure out how a ghost,however holy, could have become so powerful.


It was not long after Schoenberg’s death that his method of composingwith 12 tones became a dominant tool of modern composers. His greatestposthumous victory was the conversion to dodecaphony of its principalopponent, Igor Stravinsky himself! Stravinsky even expressed hiswillingness to forgive Schoenberg his mocking choral canon in whichStravinsky was ridiculed as Mr. Modernsky, who put on a wig so as to lookjust like Papa Bach. It was a very fine contrapuntal piece, Stravinskyopined and said he was proud of having inspired its composition.

Only the Russians were adamant in their refusal to accept Schoenbergand his handiwork. Nikita Khrushchev made a pun: “You call it dode-caphony, but we call it plain cacophony” (the two words rhyme in Russian).And suddenly the dam broke. Dmitri Shostakovich himself began usingoccasional dodecaphonic passages in his later symphonies; and after himmany other Soviet composers began to use dodecaphonic melodies.

An inevitable reaction set up against Schoenberg’s dodecaphony; itsuddenly became old-fashioned. Pierre Boulez, the standard-bearer of allthat is modern under the sun, published an essay brutally entitled“Schoenberg Is Dead.”

With dissonances safely emancipated and the chromatic tones of thescale democratically rendered equal, the modern techniques seemed toreach an impasse. What next? Why, split the semitones into quarter tonesand even smaller fractions. This was the task of an enterprising Czechcomposer and teacher, Alois Haba, who was the first to publish a textbookon fractional tones. The Mexican composer Julian Carrillo was anotherpioneer; he published a magazine entitled Sonido 13, symbolically indi-cating divisions beyond the available 12 chromatic notes, and heconstructed instruments that were supposed to produce such fractionaltones. Still another composer of quartertone music was Ivan Wyschner-gradsky, a Russian living in Paris, who constructed pianos tuned a quartertone apart. A surprising adherent to the technique of composition in quar-ter tones was a grandson of Rimsky-Korsakov, Georgi, who published abook on the subject. The American Harry Partch built instruments thatwere supposed to produce 43 equal intervals to an octave. However, allthese fractional intervals were approximations of the true tuning; only withthe advent of electronic instruments did an exact division of an octave intofractional intervals become possible. Ernst Krenek, a composer of extra-ordinary power of invention who belonged to the Schoenberg school of


composition, contributed pieces in such true divisions of an octave usingelectronic instruments.

There are in mathematics some formulas that connect seeminglyunrelated symbols in a rather elegant equation; such is the Euler formula,which brings together the imaginary number, the ratio of the cir-cumference of a circle to its diameter and the base of natural logarithms.There are similar surprises in music theory. For instance, the diminishingarithmetic progression with a semitone as the difference between twoadjacent members, beginning with 9 and ending with 3, forms a bitonalchord—e.g., (from bass up), C-sharp, A-sharp, F-sharp, C-sharp, G, C, E,G. Dodecaphony opposes triadic forms, but it is possible to split achromatic scale into four mutually exclusive triads—e.g., C major, F-sharpmajor, D minor and G-sharp minor. Furthermore, it is possible toconstruct a chord including four triads connected by thirds, modeled afterfamiliar seventh or ninth chords—e.g., F-sharp major triad, E major triad,D minor triad and C minor triad. (This is, incidentally, the only possiblechord of this nature, verified by a computer, which after hours ofelectronic labor confirmed that there is no other combination satisfyingthese requirements.)

Natura non facit saltum, says the ancient adage enunciated longbefore Darwin. Nature does not make a leap in the arts either. The toler-ance of dissonances came gradually; polytonality and atonality crept intomusic little by little. But there are exceptions both in the theory of evolu-tion and in the arts, manifested by a sudden emergence of a newphenomenon unrelated to existing species. In music such a phenomenonwas Charles Ives.

Nothing in his early life presaged Ives’ eventual rise as a great Ameri-can composer. He played the organ in village churches near his home inConnecticut; he entered Yale and graduated in musical composition in theclass of Horatio Parker. But music was not a career for an American boyearly in the century. Accordingly Ives went into the insurance business andmade a success of it. During his leisure time he composed. Then suddenlyhe suffered a massive heart attack, which was complicated by a chroniccase of diabetes. His wife, providentially named Harmony, took care ofhim, but he had to stop composing. He decided to publish, at his ownexpense, 104 of his songs as well as his Concord Sonata, in four move-ments, each named after a writer in Concord, Massachusetts: Emerson,


Hawthorne, the Alcotts and Thoreau. Both the volume of songs and theConcord Sonata were obtainable gratis from the composer; Ives did notintend to make money from his music, even if he had to go to considerablelengths to avoid doing so. Because of his illness, he became practically arecluse, dividing his time between his summer home in Connecticut and abrownstone he owned in New York. Some sympathetic friends, to whomhe played his pieces on his rickety upright piano, asked him why he had tocompose music that is so hard on the ear. “I hear it this way,” he invariablyreplied. When an overzealous copyist tried to change a particularly disso-nant note in his manuscript, Ives wrote in the margin: “Please do notcorrect! The wrong notes are right!”

Virtually all of Ives’ works are instilled with American themes; hequotes American church hymn tunes, popular ballads and militarymarches, but he invests them with highly dissonant harmonies and oftenchanges them melodically. As a boy he arranged the American nationalanthem in strikingly discordant harmonies. Long before polytonality,asymmetrical rhythms, atonality and polyrhythms became accepted terms,Ives employed such devices in his compositions. It may be said that his har-monies followed the increasingly complex social movements of Americanlife; that may be the reason why the music of Ives, written years ago,sounds contemporary to late 20th-century ears.

American music in the 19th century was but a faint reflection ofGerman music. Edward MacDowell, regarded as the first American com-poser of stature, received his musical training in Germany; his harmoniesfollow the Germanic mold. It was only after the First World War that theGerman influence on American music began to wane, and this was due toa large extent to the fact that German conductors, performers and teach-ers, who had dominated the American musical horizon, suddenly foundthemselves enemy aliens, and several of them were forcibly dismissedfrom their posts; among them was the great conductor of the Boston Sym-phony Orchestra, Karl Muck, who was arrested and interned as a spy forthe kaiser.

But even when such ridiculous episodes were relegated to theshameful past, German music had irretrievably lost its influence inAmerica. Young composers and performers flocked to Paris for theirinstruction and enlightenment. Nadia Boulanger became the wet nurse ofa generation of American composers; among her students were AaronCopland, Walter Piston, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, Elliott Carter, Elie


Siegmeister and many others. Of these, Aaron Copland became the mostfamous. His career was extraordinary. Fresh from Paris, he played a pianoconcerto of his own composition with the Boston Symphony, conductedby Serge Koussevitzky. It was dubbed a jazz concerto, because it had a lotof syncopation, and it shocked the prim, grim Boston audiences, whoexpressed their dismay openly. But Copland was not to be frightened awayby such a show of horror and continued to compose in a modern Americanmanner. He emphasized distinctly American subjects in such works asAppalachian Spring, Billy the Kid, Lincoln Portrait and Rodeo. HisFanfare for the Common Man for brass and percussion became famous.

A different type of American is reflected in the works of Roy Harris.He believed it was providential that he was born on Lincoln’s birthday inLincoln County, Oklahoma. He gave ostentatiously American titles to hissymphonies and other works: Folksong Symphony, Gettysburg Address,Abraham Lincoln Symphony, American Creed. He was also preoccupiedwith creating a genuine type of American modality based on old churchmodes but arranged rhythmically and melodically in an American manner.

Walter Piston resolutely declined to write stereotypically Americanmusic. He felt that any music written by an American was ipso factoAmerican and remarked somewhat sarcastically that one does not have tochase buffalo on the prairie to qualify as an American; reading books inthe Boston Athenaeum was as American a pastime as any activity in thewild west. He wrote a number of remarkable symphonies, concertos andchamber music, but his most popular piece remains a ballet score entitledThe Incredible Flutist. During a recording of this work, a dog barked, andPiston was persuaded to include the bark in the score.

Samuel Barber never studied with Nadia Boulanger, but he achievedfame by following his natural flair for lyric melody. He studied voice as wellas composition and even gave a vocal recital as a young man. His musicpossesses a quality of natural birth; whatever he wrote—symphony, con-certo, piano sonata or symphonic sketch—seems flawless in its technicalbrilliance. His most famous piece was an adagio from his early StringQuartet; arranged for string orchestra, it was played by Arturo Toscaniniand immediately became popular. Barber was not averse to exploring jazz;some of his pieces are cunningly peppered with jazzy syncopation.

The most versatile and the most celebrated American composer is,beyond any cavil or doubt, Leonard Bernstein. His success has no prece-dent in the annals of American music. He is known to the world as a


charismatic conductor and is beloved by the masses for his musicals, suchas West Side Story, which contains some of the most fetching Americantunes after Gershwin. But Bernstein has also composed symphonic works,among them the remarkable score for The Age of Anxiety. It must beadded that Bernstein is a successful lecturer and a television personalitywho knows how to communicate musically and verbally with the young. NoAmerican musician has ever collected such a grand garland of popularachievement.

Experimentation was the soul of American music in the new moderncentury. George Antheil, an American who spent much of his youth inParis, where he became associated with James Joyce and other leaders ofnew art, set for himself the task of reflecting the age of the machine inmusic. The most celebrated product of this endeavor was his Balletmecanique, scored for a variety of percussion instruments, 16 pianos andairplane propellers ad libitum. A succes de scandale was a natural conse-quence of this assault on the tender ears of peaceful concert goers. TheBallet mecanique was a futuristic event; indeed its attempt to glorify themechanical world was close to the “art of noises” of the Italian futuristcomposers, who shocked the world with their exhibitions before the mur-derous noise of the First World War. But all the futurists could work withwere drums and old-fashioned phonograph horns and megaphones; therewas simply no technique available to deafen the audience with sound. Stillthe Italian futurists aroused their public sufficiently to start a number offistfights; in a communique they claimed victory over the audience.

The true apostle of modern music was Henry Cowell, who challengedthe listening world with things like tone clusters, which he invented as ateen-ager in San Francisco. Tone clusters are produced by playing on thepiano keyboard with fists, elbows and whole lengths of forearm, either onwhite or black keys. His pioneer composition with tone clusters wasentitled Amiable Conversation. Amazingly enough, it was published inGermany by the most dignified publishing house of Breitkopf & Hartel.Cowell also enhanced the sound production of the piano by playingglissando directly on the strings under the lid of an open grand piano. Healso plucked on the strings, or else he placed things like paper clips,darning eggs and coins on the strings to alter the tone color. I risked myown reputation (such as it was) when I engaged Cowell in 1928 to besoloist in his own work, replete with tone clusters and such, with my


Chamber Orchestra of Boston. This event produced Cowell’s favoriteheadline in the Boston Post: “USES EGG TO SHOW OFF PIANO.” Buttone clusters eventually became a legitimate means of tone production,and the term was included in most music encyclopedias.

Cowell had to pay out of his own pocket for the publication of his bookNew Musical Resources, in which he offered all kinds of novel suggestions,such as splitting the binary or ternary meters into sections, generating newrhythmic divisions. This book has now become a standard work for modernmusicians.

Cowell’s most faithful and most inventive follower was John Cage.Starting off with Cowell’s metapianistic techniques, he inaugurated aprepared piano, which altered the piano sonorities far beyond Cowell’smodest efforts. With Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gyorgy Ligeti, MauricioKagel and others, John Cage became the begetter of aleatory techniques.The word itself comes from the Latin alea, meaning by lot. For his aleatorycompositions John Cage used both dice and an old Chinese book of gamesthat gave a table of all possible combinations of numbers.

At about the same time, the idea of total serialism was developed byMilton Babbitt and his followers and associates. To the “classical” serializa-tion of 12 different notes was added the serial distribution of 12 differentintervals. A new commandment was added to the dodecaphonic manual:Thou shalt not use an interval twice in succession. This meant good-bye toconsecutive melodic fourths, so beloved by early practitioners of atonality.The palm of invention of intervallic serialism should be tendered to FritzHeinrich Klein, an Austrian composer who used the nom de plume Heautontimorumenos, a Greek word that means self-tormentor. His musi-cal self-flagellation paid off. He constructed a chord containing alldifferent intervals and all different notes, a tonal matrix that he appropri-ately entitled Mutterakkord. (I went him one better by constructing aGrossmutterakkord, which not only contained all 12 different notes and all11 different intervals but was also integrally invertible. This gimmick wasnot infertile; it was used as a foundation of an interplanetary opera,Aniara, by the Swedish composer Karl-Birger Blomdahl.)

Marching on toward total serialism, Milton Babbitt serialized tonecolors and dynamics, note values and rest values. This simply meant thatno self-respecting serialist should use the same tone color, or instrument,twice in succession or the same degree of dynamics, whether forte, piano


or their gradations. The serialization of note values required that no twonotes of equal value should be used until all other rhythmic subdivisionshave been exhausted. The same rule of exclusion applied to the durationof each individual rest.

Outcries, sighs or even death rattles have been stock in trade foroperatic composers for centuries. Schoenberg initiated a new form ofvocalization, the Sprechstimme—half-spoken, half-sung sounds—and heapplied it magisterially in his Pierrot lunaire. Obouhov added cries, groans,moans, shouts and other human and inhuman sounds to his vocabulary ofvocal expression. Hans Werner Henze made use of clicks, screams,bellowing and snorting in some of his scores.

One of the most successful composers of enhanced vocal music isGeorge Crumb, who makes effective use of explosive shrieks, hissing andwhispering in fractional intervals. He also orders the pianist to shout atcertain points of a piano piece. Wonders never cease.

Paul Wittgenstein declared in one of his cryptic utterances: “Whereofone cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” John Cage followedWittgenstein’s dictum literally in composing his celebrated compositionentitled 4 Minutes 33 Seconds. It is scored for one piano or several pianos,or any other group of instruments, and is in three movements. The printededition, retailing at 50 cents, contains two blank pages. The piece was firstunplayed (though not necessarily unheard, since there were incidentalnoises) by Cage’s faithful assistant David Tudor in Woodstock, New Yorkon August 29, 1952.

Closely related to aleatory composition is the graphic notation ofmusic, in which geometric figures suggest a variety of possible sounds tobe freely interpreted by the performer. One of the earliest proponents ofgraphic notation was the American composer Earle Brown, who generatedthe concept of “open-end” composition; as early as 1952 he outlined atheory of musical space relative to conceptual mobility and transformationof events in arbitrary, unstable time.

By and large, modern music remains identifiable by written musicalnotes and markings indicating meter, rhythm and dynamics. In old musicthe number of beats in a bar was indicated by the time signature, and itwas usually set in binary or ternary bars, with some simple combinationsthereof. There were march meters, polka meters, waltz meters, jig metersand occasional syncopated meters in which the stress did not coincide withthe strong beat of the bar. When Tchaikovsky dared to write a scherzo in


his Symphonie pathetique in 5/4, he was taken to task by the famousViennese critic Eduard Hanslick for making the piece unplayable. All hehad to do, Hanslick urged, was to add a beat and convert the movementinto a rolling barcarolle. But Tchaikovsky was dead by the time Hanslickhappened to hear his symphony.

Rimsky-Korsakov went Tchaikovsky one better by writing a chorus inhis opera Sadko in 11/4 time. To master this meter, the choristers sang itto the words, “Rimsky-Korsakov is altogether mad,” which has 11 syllablesin both the Russian original and the present English translation. In thefinale of Le Sacre du printemps, Stravinsky really made conductors sweatit out, for its metrical plan constitutes a succession of such time signaturesas 5/16, 2/8, 3/16 and even 1/16.

Meters in prime numbers, such as quintuple time signatures, are notthe product of modern invention. They are found in natural folk rhythmsof many lands. Two bars of 3/8 and a bar of 2/8, aggregating to a sum ofthree and five beats to a bar, are common in southeastern Europe. Thegreat Hungarian composer Bela Bartok spent many years collecting folksongs in his native Transylvania and adjacent regions, a task in which hewas aided by another great Hungarian Zoltan Kodaly. Bartok, and to alesser extent Kodaly, made use of these natural melodies and rhythms intheir own works. But being a product of the 20th century, Bartok alsomade use of consistent noneuphonious counterpoint, freely employingmajor sevenths and minor ninths in his works. Kodaly, who was an educa-tor by nature, refrained from such extreme modernities, but he also madea significant contribution to modern meters and rhythms. In folk musicand in modern works based on folk melodies, different rhythms combinedfreely, giving the rise to polymeters and polyrhythms.

The great explorer of complex rhythms and meters combined with atotally liberated spirit of dissonance, Edgar Varese dispensed with the termcomposition in his works. He called his music “organized sound.” It is com-pletely removed from the world of sounds observable in nature. Even in ascore that bears the seemingly descriptive title Ameriques, Varese tends torepresent the conceptual Americas as the birthplace of new science, newtechnology and new sound. His other works bear such scientific titles asIntegrals and Hyperprism (a projection of a prism into higher dimen-sions). His unique score entitled Ionisation is arranged for pitchlesspercussion instruments and two sirens. The title refers to the disintegra-tion of atomic nuclei.


Schoenberg, Varese and, before them, Scriabin, regarded folk songs asraw material of no value to musical science. For Scriabin music was aunion with eternity; for Schoenberg it was a logical continuation ofprevious historic achievements. It is significant that even in works in whichhe renounced tonality, Schoenberg adhered to classical forms, includingan old-fashioned reprise; Alban Berg and Anton von Webern followed thisformality of design. Varese, on the other hand, pursued the ideal of totalabstraction, arranging his themes by successive agglutination.

Folklore and abstraction are not necessarily irreconcilable. If folklorerepresents an irreversible past and abstraction a conjectural vista of anidealized future, there is a way of reconciling these sources. A modernpoet, painter or composer in search of a future simplicity and clarity candip into the remote past for unadorned primitives. It is not for nothing thatStravinsky’s ultramodern score Le Sacre du printemps was subtitled Scenesof Pagan Russia. This reference allowed him to use crude chunks of pri-mordial material, stumps of tetrachords without elaboration and withoutsubjection to rules of harmony or counterpoint.

Popular songs of the remote past may serve handily in lieu of folksongs. Carl Orff delved into a collection of medieval student songs in theGerman monastery of Benedictbeuren and concocted an effective scenicoratorio Carmina Burana (i.e., songs of Benedictbeuren), which enjoyedtremendous success despite the fact that the words, in Latin and earlyromance languages, cannot be understood without an interlinear transla-tion. Other composers followed this example by arranging old sacred andsecular music in a form that became known as “realizations.” There is morethan one way to cook a goose.

When the great Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos was asked,“What is folklore?” he answered, “I am folklore!” Indeed, Villa-Lobosrarely, if ever, used actual folk tunes in his works but rather approximatedthe Brazilian rhythms and melodic patterns in his own inventive fashion.Carlos Chavez, the towering figure in Mexican music, made use of a fewMexican tunes in some of his Mexican-flavored scores, but most of hismusic was self-made.

George Gershwin, like his predecessor Stephen Foster, did not have toborrow tunes from American life; he created the music of modern Amer-ica out of his own American imagination. And with all that, his music isauthentically modern. His dissonances are mostly of the euphonious kind;he made ample use of the blue notes, a lowered seventh and a lowered


third. The lowered seventh can be explained in terms of the overtonesseries as an approximation of the seventh overtone occurring below theoctave. Gershwin’s rhythmic sense was very precise. His song “I GotRhythm,” which is all too frequently mongrelized by the big bands as amere syncopation, is an example of Gershwin’s inventiveness. Cast in theframework of common time, it represents the following succession ofrhythmic values: an eighth-note rest, followed by four dotted eighth notesand again an eighth-note rest, adding up to 16/16—i.e., 4/4. In his song“Fascinating Rhythm,” Gershwin performs an acrobatic stunt by interca-lating a three-beat thematic passage within a bar of 4/4 time. And in his“Rhapsody in Blue,” Gershwin made, as one critic remarked, an honestwoman out of jazz.

Jazz and its healthy predecessor, ragtime, formed the art of urbanfolklore, alive with its syncopated rhythms, added sixths and sevenths, andits general air of aggressive vitality. Soon jazz spread all over the world,penetrating even Russia, which resisted its incursion for years. ErnstKrenek wrote an opera entitled Jonny spielt auf, which portrayed a blackAmerican jazz player who conquers Europe, seducing European maidensand riding roughshod over the world. In the finale he sits atop a hugeglobe, symbolizing his conquest. The idea of a black man doing such thingsmade it necessary for the Metropolitan Opera House to delegate the partof the conquering jazz hero to a blackface musician.

Then came rock ’n’ roll. Lamentably, it lost the virility, the fertility andthe felicity of jazz and became a monstrously aggrandized and enhancedbeat. It made up in loudness what it lost in syncopated vitality. Rock musicimpaired the hearing of the performers themselves; as protection againstthe assault of its deafening decibels, the frequenters of rock concerts aresometimes provided with cotton earplugs. But the most pitiful loss of allwas the abandonment of the syncopated jazzy beat and a gradual reductionof the music to a uniform blast in 4/4 time. This is not to say that all rockmusicians are brutal savages. Most of them yearn for musical education andeven try to read the hefty volumes of Joseph Schillinger’s System of MusicalComposition, although they can hardly fathom Schillinger’s algebraicformulas, which are unnecessarily strewn across the pages of this learnedtreatise. Schillinger, it must be recalled, was the musical guru of the jazzage; even Gershwin went to him for help. Schillinger’s great idea was toreduce melodies to diagrams and charts; thus, he drew on graph paper themusical counterpart of the 1929 stock market crash.


With the renunciation of folklore as raw material of sophisticated com-position, a surrogate had to be found. It was provided in the form oftechnological music, which originated in Paris under the name musiqueconcrete; it was the creation of a French radio engineer, and it postulatedthat any noise, intentional or unintentional, produced in the studio couldbe used as materia musica. This material could then be transmogrified byelectronics and arranged as a “composition.” After all, the word composi-tion means simply putting together, and it does not necessarily connoterational organization. Accordingly, it was possible for the American com-poser Richard Maxfield to collect assorted sounds recorded during amodern dance recital and arrange them in a work entitled Cough Music.(Poor Maxfield! He committed self-defenestration from a Los Angeleshotel room.)

Another way of providing raw material is the method of objets trouves.This allows a composer to pick up musical quotations from establishedworks and insert them into his own production. Luciano Berio did that inhis Sinfonia, putting in snatches from Gustav Mahler, Claude Debussy andothers. In one of his piano pieces, George Crumb helped himself to themiddle section of Chopin’s Fantaisie impromptu, commonly known amongthe hoi polloi by the tune of the popular song “I’m Always ChasingRainbows.” Of course, composers of all times have made surreptitious useof other people’s tunes in their own works, and musicologists are stilltrying to discover who stole what from whom among great composers.(Handel was quite adept at that variety of petty larceny.)

The originator of the method of objets trouves, along with much othernonsense, was that great clown of modern French music, Erik Satie. Hewas sadly aware of his lack of theoretical knowledge of music, which hetried to remedy by going to school to learn counterpoint at the age of 40,but he compensated for it by proclaiming that art must provide entertain-ment. He amused himself by deliberately hoodwinking the public throughsuch shenanigans as inserting a learned footnote declaring that a certainpassage was a funeral march by Franz Schubert when it was nothing ofthe sort. In one such moment of playful distraction, he created the conceptof “furniture music.” Music should be treated like furniture, Satie declared,demonstrating this conceit by placing several groups of musicians indifferent rooms of an art gallery, instructing them to play anything theywanted without paying attention to each other. Satie was not modest inproclaiming his own greatness. He instructed that the curtain at one of his


stage productions should bear the legend: “Anyone who does not believethat Erik Satie is the greatest composer living is asked to leave the hallwithout delay.”

Satie surrounded himself with talented young composers who sharedhis belief that music ought to be fun. These composers, five young menand one young woman, became known as Les Six. Three of them becamefamous: Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger and Francis Poulenc. Lessfamous was Georges Auric; even less famous was Germaine Tailleferre;and quite obscure was Louis Durey. The French Six tried to simplifymusic, but their styles were quite different. Milhaud composed works ofhuge dimensions awash with polytonal complexities; Honegger glorifiedthe American locomotive in his symphonic poem Pacific 231; Poulencwrote charming pieces, free from modernistic gargoyles, quite tonal inharmony and symmetric in form.

Years passed; another war was fought; and a new wave of moderncomposers appeared on the musical horizon. New resources had to befound in unexplored lands. The American composer Steve Reich went toGhana to study African drumming; he demonstrated that music canproduce a deep impression by sheer repetition. Reich became known as aminimalist. Another American composer, Philip Glass, espoused ahomophony of an even starker type. His surrealist score entitled Einsteinon the Beach became a huge success in Europe as well as in America.

Curiouser and curiouser. La Monte Young, of the same generation asReich and Glass, made irrationality the cornerstone of his method ofcomposition. Sometimes he dispensed with musical notes altogether andlimited himself to verbal instructions, such as “Push the piano to the wall;push it through the wall; keep pushing.” He sought to achieve immortalitysimply by claiming it. He supplied this bit of information for one of hiscompositions: “This piece of music may play without stopping forthousands of years.” One seems to perceive the eerie ghost of Satie in theectoplasm of such proclamations.

The begetter of new simplicity, as it was termed in Paris in the 1920s,was the brilliant American Virgil Thomson, grandmaster of sophisticatedbedazzlement and befuddlement. In Paris he became associated with theFrench modern composers of the time; he could indeed be called the sev-enth member of the French Six. Like his Paris contemporaries, hepreached hedonism—that is, an art for art’s pleasure. He became an inti-mate of Gertrude Stein, but in his compositions he reversed Gertrude’s


famous equation of identity “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” making it“Rose is not a rose is not a rose is not a rose.” Thus, in his famous operaFour Saints in Three Acts, there are at least a dozen saints among thedramatis personae, and there are four acts in the opera, not three. As tothe harmonic content of the score, Thomson seems to be saying, “Majortriad is a major triad is a major triad is a major triad.” The prolixity of nakedtriads in Virgil Thomson’s music is indeed astounding, and it also serves todeflect invidious criticism. If a Schoenbergian were to use a triad by inad-vertence, he would be hurled into the Gehenna of disgrace, but thenThomson was never a Schoenbergian; when he used dodecaphonic con-structions at all, they were apt to appear in a series of four mutuallyexclusive triads. (“Nicolas, did you hear your little triads in my piece?” heasked me after the performance of one of his symphonic works; indeed,he borrowed his mutually exclusive triads from my Thesaurus of Scales andMelodic Patterns.)

The animating spirit of modern composers is frugality. The staging isoften reduced to a few symbolic trees, benches and occasional ladders.Gian-Carlo Menotti in America and Benjamin Britten in England reducedthe orchestras in their operas to a minimal number, usually 13, and theypractically eliminated the chorus. If comment was required in dramaticsituations, it was usually entrusted to a single voice, much in the mannerof Greek drama or, for that matter, the Prologue in Ruggero Leoncavallo’sPagliacci. Michael Tippett of England is also apt to reduce his orchestraland choral equipment to a minimum. The ultimate of this musical anorexiais reached in The Four-Note Opera, by the American composer TomJohnson. This is not a spoof a la Virgil Thomson; Johnson actually uses onlyfour notes in his opera. All that is left of old-fashioned grand opera is theGran’ Ol’ Opry of Nashville, Tennessee.

If hedonists and minimalists represent the infrared of the musicalspectrum, then computerized music can be placed in the ultraviolet por-tion of it. The sudden availability of an infinite variety of serial sequencesin computer technology naturally excited many composers, who ceased totrust their own inspiration. The trouble with computer music is that it hasto be programmed by humans, so that many allegedly computerized com-positions reflect the limited imagination of the technicians whoprogrammed the music. To be sure, though, technicians and composerscan program a computer to compose a certain number of dissonances, fol-lowed by a certain number of consonances, and they can even specify whatkind of dissonant or consonant chords are to be used.


Another development of specialized serialism is music in space. Inthis category of composition, each instrument is assigned its place on thepodium or in a room. Its justification is vectorial sound, so that the listenershear each instrument from its assigned direction. My nephew, the Sovietcomposer Sergei Slonimsky, wrote a sort of ambulatory string quartet inwhich the instrumentalists are placed in the audience and advance towardthe stage one after another, playing their assigned parts until they are allassembled together. Well, Haydn composed ambulatory music some 200years before my nephew in his Farewell Symphony, in which musiciansextinguished their candles (this was the 18th century, remember) and leftthe stage, one by one, until only the silent conductor was left with hispurposeless baton to bid farewell to the audience.

Then there is serialism by appointment, whereby each player isassigned a certain interval and is not allowed to deviate from it throughoutthe duration of the music. A cello, say, would be confined to perfectfourths, a viola to tritones, a violin to semitones, etc. Vectorial sound pro-jection will help to sort out the serial intervals. But even this assignmentof specific intervals to selected instruments is not new. A string quartetascribed to Benjamin Franklin (he never wrote it, but that is beside thepoint) was scored for open strings only, so that any amateur group canperform it with perfect ease; besides, the instruments are each tuneddifferently from one another in fifths or fourths, so that surprisingdissonances result. Another example of instrumental serialism by specialassignment was the peasant orchestras maintained by rich landowners inRussia in the first half of the 19th century. The musicians were recruitedfrom among the serfs; each was assigned a single note to play, so that noone had to learn to read music. Such serfs were known by the notes theyplayed; when two of them escaped, their owner advertised: “Escaped E-flat and F-sharp from the owner’s orchestra. Reward.”

Intervallic specialization in modern compositions signaled new andoriginal possibilities in contrapuntal writing just in time to save fugalcounterpoint from extinction. The great master of this sort of spatial andintervallic techniques is Elliott Carter. His concertos and other works arenot mere jeux d’esprit but works of great musical interest. Stravinsky, whorarely found merit in American music, declared one of Carter’s concertosto be the first American masterpiece.

The ultimate in spatial music is environmental music, in which objectssurrounding the composer’s workroom are declared by creative fiat to beparts in the score. This concept has enabled one composer from San


Francisco to write a work scored for skyscrapers, airplanes, helicopters andautomobiles. The Italian futurists of the time before the First World Warwould have hailed this method of composition with loud cries of delight.

Can a musical style be legislated? Certainly the Catholic Church gavestrict prescriptions for proper ecclesiastical part writing; the norms ofGregorian chant were strictly defined by the church. But even the mostpious composers were free to write different types of secular music. Inmodern times an attempt was made by Soviet authorities to establish anobligatory type of composition defined by Russian theorists as socialistrealism, a method of composition based on the concrete representation ofSoviet reality. But what Soviet reality? In the early years of the RussianRevolution, composers tried to imitate actual sounds of the streets,factories and weapons. They put factory whistles and steel sheets in theirscores but still failed to achieve the desired reflection of the life of themasses. A militant group called Proletarian Organization of Musiciansmade an earnest attempt to define music according to dialecticalmaterialism. March time was good; waltz time was suspect as bourgeois inessence. Major keys were good for the masses; minor keys tended toweaken spiritual energy. Still, doubts emerged. Why should the proletarianmasses like the music of Tchaikovsky? Simple: In his symphonies andoperas, Tchaikovsky celebrated the funeral of his class, and theproletarians could not help enjoying such a burial of class enemies.

Serge Rachmaninoff was out as a poet of decadence and a swornenemy of the Soviet Union; he left Russia, never to return, on the day ofthe October Revolution and settled in the United States, the archfoe ofthe Bolsheviks. Beethoven was all right; he was a revolutionary at heart,even though he did write the opening movement of his Heroic symphonyin 3/4 time. Mikhail Glinka, the father of Russian music, was all right, too,even though he did compose an opera entitled A Life for the Tsar. Thatlittle predicament was easily corrected, however, by changing the title toIvan Susanin, a patriotic peasant who misled the Polish commandoraiders intent upon killing, not the Tsar, of course, but the leader of theRussian people named Minin. Other operas were similarly revised. Toscawas now a member of the Paris Commune who killed General Galliffet,who suppressed the commune in 1871 (never mind the historical factthat Galliffet died peacefully in bed in 1909; this is mere pedanticbourgeois detail). Finally, the Soviet authorities became sick and tired ofthis proletarian nonsense and disbanded the Proletarian Organization of


Musicians. One Soviet composer exclaimed: “Now I can write music in3/4 time!”

Russian music split in two: Many Russian composers joined theemigration, most of them to Paris and America. Rachmaninoff ’s departurewas followed by the emigration of Alexander Glazunov, AlexanderGretchaninoff, Nicolas and Alexander Tcherepnin (father and son), andSergei Prokofiev. However, Prokofiev had second thoughts and soonreturned to Russia, where he was welcomed as a prodigal son, with honorsand praise. After a musical honeymoon he was attacked by extremeradicals for his alleged addiction to Western ways of making music. Afterthe infamous decree of 1948, Prokofiev found himself in a camp of“formalists,” a code word applied to those who strayed from the properpath of Russian traditionalism. Prokofiev tried to ingratiate himself withJoseph Stalin by writing an overture for the Soviet ruler’s sixtieth birthday,but somehow it lacked true Stalinist spirit and was never performed. Thenhe wrote an opera to a libretto depicting the heroic deed of a Soviet pilotwho lost both legs in combat but, after having artificial legs made, re-enlisted in the Soviet air force and scored several victories. But the operanever went beyond a preliminary performance; it was declared formalistin its style and idiom and unworthy of its heroic subject. Prokofiev diedon the same day as Stalin, March 5, 1953. When he was safely dead, Stalinwas disgraced as a tyrannical madman, while Prokofiev was posthumouslyglorified. The tenth anniversary of Prokofiev’s and Stalin’s death wascelebrated with ample tribute to Prokofiev in the Soviet press, while Stalinwas all but ignored.

A close contemporary of both Stravinsky and Prokofiev was NikolaiMiaskovsky, who remained in Russia. He wrote 27 symphonies, all ofwhich were published, recorded and performed in Russia, but heremained virtually unknown outside his native land.

While Stravinsky left Russia before the revolution and Prokofiev spenthalf his life abroad, a true Soviet composer was Dmitri Shostakovich, whowas never tempted to leave his country and labored valiantly to effect adecent compromise between his original rebellious nature and therequirements of the official Soviet line. He was damned for his opera LadyMacbeth of the District of Mtinsk, which was denounced by an anonymouswriter in Pravda as being both cacophonous and obscene (there weresuggestive trombone glissandi in an orchestral interlude). Shostakovichthen wrote a ballet on the subject of a collective farm—it was dismissed


as an unworthy attempt to depict Soviet workers. Shostakovich wasrehabilitated with his symphonies; his Seventh Symphony in particular,dedicated to the heroes of the Leningrad siege, became a display piece ofSoviet patriotism. But his Thirteenth Symphony was criticized for hishaving used a poem mourning the Jews massacred at Babi Yar. The criticspointed out the poem’s inequity, in that it only commemorated Jews,whereas there were also Ukrainians and Russians among the victims.Shostakovich agreed to fix the text; it did not help. Still, Shostakovich wasgiven honors and distinctions, including the Order of Hero of SocialistLabor. A man of frail physique, he traveled little, but in 1973 he did makea trip to America to accept an honorary degree of doctor of fine arts fromNorthwestern University; a more compelling reason for this visit was toconsult an American cancer specialist. But his illness was beyond remedy,and he died in 1975. A postage stamp was issued in his memory bearinga quotation from his Seventh Symphony and his typically bespectacledvisage.

It would be most instructive to trace influences of modern techniqueson composers whose style was fully formed in the 19th century. GustavMahler wrote music that departed widely from his immediate forerunners,but still he never went beyond harmonies that were traditionally justi-fied—not until his unfinished Tenth Symphony, which employeddissonances that appeared quite unheralded by his previous music. RalphVaughan Williams accepted the previously illegal parallel triadic progres-sions; Frederick Delius, who always affected lyrical moods with traditionalmodalities, made use of whole-tone groups that deviated from tonality;even Jean Sibelius made a perilous leap into the unknown in his FourthSymphony, using whole-tone passages and their related augmented triads.Ernest Bloch accepted and brilliantly used an implied bitonality of triadsat a tritone’s distance; in his last string quartet he even experimented with12-tone melodies, although he never developed them in a Schoenbergianway. And of course, Richard Strauss never hesitated to project the sharpestdissonances when he needed them for purposes of illustration.

The 20th century has been the most turbulent period in all musicalhistory. The variety of musical compositions produced in every country inthe world has been more ample than in any previous century. What kind ofmusic will emerge in the future as a result of all these conflicting tenden-cies? Being a man of the present, I cannot predict.


In my first published book, Music Since 1900, I attempted to draw apanorama of modern music. I took into consideration the intrinsic impor-tance of each musical event in my chronology, as well as its impact on thecontemporary audience. Whenever suitable, I quoted critical reviews incontemporary newspapers. Inevitably I selected adverse criticism to pointout the irony of nonrecognition of works that subsequently proved to bemasterpieces. The same penchant toward rejection of music that was star-tlingly new on the contemporary scene was revealed in the numerousreviews I collected for my Lexicon of Musical Invective. La mer ofDebussy was dubbed Le mal de mer by a critic who intended to be witty,and Le Sacre du printemps was described as Le Massacre du printemps. Inan index of these invectives, I tried to prove my thesis of “non-acceptanceof the unfamiliar” in music as in other arts.

Someday I hope to bring up to date the events tabulated in MusicSince 1900. In the meantime Richard Burbank has assembled a com-pendium of events in music and related arts that is immensely larger andmore comprehensive in scope. And his quotations from the contemporarypress, both in praise of the events and otherwise, provide a panorama ofextraordinary effect of an art in flux, an evolution of new forms, an emer-gence of new ideas. It is invaluable for scholars and fascinating for musiclovers. As an early worker in the field of creative chronology of music, Isalute the author and the publisher for the completion and publication ofthis truly remarkable accomplishment.


P a r t I I

IND IV IDUALCOMPOSERS

“To be recognized only after death. . . .” These are the opening words ofSchönberg’s letter addressed to those who greeted him on his seventy-fifthbirthday in September 1949. In the same letter he recalls his predictionmade in 1912: “The second half of this century will spoil, byoverestimation, all the good of me that the first half, by underestimation,has left intact.” When Schönberg was asked long ago whether he was really“that composer,” he replied: “Someone had to be Schönberg, but nobodywanted to be; so I had to volunteer.”

Schönberg has now less reason for such bitterness: he is beginning tobe appreciated by many, as well as worshipped by a few. The second halfof the century is sure to make up for the neglect and the rebukes hesuffered in the first.

Bartók was not so fortunate. He did not live to witness the universalacceptance of his music. His grave was still unmarked when his name be-came a household word, and when the frequency of performance of hismusic made him one of the most popular composers of today.

The appearance, almost simultaneous, of long playing recordings of allsix string quartets of Bartók and the four Schönberg quartets is symbolicof the acceptance by the people of these two masters of contemporarymusic. The cliché of “being born before one’s time” here comes true. Inthe light of repeated history the cliché may be simply the formulation ofthe obvious truth that men of genius, whether in music or in science,anticipate the development of future tastes and future concepts. In thecase of Bartók the acceptance has already come 100 per cent; in the caseof Schönberg the opposition still lingers, but the intransigence of his

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Ch. 12: originally published in The Saturday Review, September 30, 1950.

antagonists becomes less effective with each passing year while the armyof his ardent supporters grows by leaps and bounds. The most remarkabledevelopment in Schönberg’s influence is the emergence of a powerfulschool of Schönbergians in the Latin countries, notably France and Italy,which have for many years been impervious to the penetration of abstractmusical ideas, particularly those originating from Central Europe. Add tothis the fact that the French Ecole Dodécaphonique and the ItalianMusica Dodecafonica were cultivated during the war and Germanoccupation, when such music was verboten, and we can gauge the measureof the potency of Schönberg’s method of composition. Russia is today theonly country where twelve-tone music is taboo, but its attraction wasadmitted by several Russian composers who were called upon to “atone foratonality.” One of them, Gabriel Popov, was sternly reminded of the factthat he had admitted his admiration for Schönberg by dedicating to himhis first opus. If the Schönbergian sin is worth official censure, it must bea delectable sin.

But to return to the quartets. Listening to the first Schönberg quartetand to the first of Bartók one is struck by the generic similarity of theiridiom. The Viennese line, from Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, is clearlytraceable in Schönberg’s melodic and rhythmic inflections, and there aresuperimposed Wagnerian and Straussian strains. There is more of theBeethoven of the last quartets in Bartók’s first quartet than of Wagnerianprocedures. In both the Schönberg and the Bartók there is that anguishedchromatic lyricism that is the common trait of early twentieth-centurymusic. The two quartets were written about the same time; both are, bycoincidence, marked op. 7. The modern musical resources in both theSchönberg and the Bartók first quartets are exemplified by theintroduction of the whole-tone scale; but this element remains anextraneous one, not integrated into the texture. The building of climaxesby tenacious reiteration of thematic fragments is characteristic of earlySchönberg as well as of early Bartók.

The creative methods of Bartók and Schönberg diverged after theseearly works. Bartók intensified the rhythmic elements of his music,emphasizing the asymmetrical patterns, and coming closer to the folksongs of his native Transylvania, where Hungarian, Slavic, and gypsyinfluences create an intricate melodic and rhythmic mixture. Schönberg,on the contrary, attenuated the tonal ingredients until tonality was droppedaltogether and the key-signature disappeared. Schönberg was interested


in developing a new musical language suitable to express infinitesimallyvaried moods, and eventually formulated his “method of composing withtwelve tones” (not the twelve-tone system, a term commonly used, butrepeatedly rejected by Schönberg). Bartók, on the other hand, freelyapplied numerous techniques (including occasional series of twelvedifferent tones) with the purpose of extending his musical vocabulary. IfBartók is the poet of subjective folk consciousness, Schönberg is aphilosopher and a logician as well as a psychologist of music. Bartók goesinto the world outside for his inspiration; Schönberg seeks clarification ofhis musical philosophy within himself.

Both Bartók and Schönberg achieve unity in variety. From his firstquartet to his sixth Bartók progresses towards monothematism, with themain theme of an earthy folklike nature; Schönberg has found his unity inestablishing the basic twelve-tone series that underlies an entirecomposition. The four Schönberg quartets and the six of Bartók aremusical biographies of their creators. Following the gradual formation oftheir idioms one wonders how the accusation of “cerebral” compositioncould ever be leveled at either of these great men of music. One feelsrather that here are souls in anguish; the discomfort that the musicallanguage of Schönberg causes the untutored ear comes from this sufferingin public; or, in Bartók, from the boisterous joy in his more rustic moods,which has the frankness and even the vulgarity of a village fiddler.

Bartók’s first quartet was written in 1907, when he was twenty-sixyears old. His second followed ten years later. Both quartets are in Aminor; the indication of key is dropped in later quartets, though tonalityis never completely abandoned. There is an atmosphere of bittercheerfulness in the second quartet of Bartók; the insistently repeatedrhythmic phrases have an almost animal quality: “and the cock crew.”Strident chromatics in acrid harmonies enhance the impression of musicalanxiety; but the folklike melodies bring appeasement. The third quartetof Bartók is dramatically conceived, and its lyricism is strained and harsh.The Bartókian whooping-cough eruptions are here at its spasmodic high.The instrumental effects include snapping pizzicatos, and there areglissandos that suggest choleric outbursts of temper.

Bartók wrote his third quartet in 1927; his fourth followed in 1928. Itis naturally related in style to its immediate neighbor. There are the nowfamiliar glissandos, the rhythmic stamping, the canonic build-up forclimaxes. But there is a human quality in the long singing melody in solo

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passages. The outcries of anguish interrupt the more peaceful moods.Then there is a barbaric dance, with savage snapping of the strings,rebounding from the fingerboard.

Bartók’s fifth and sixth quartets are dated 1934 and 1939. In both ofthese the general tone is milder than in the earlier works. An unexpectedlyidyllic movement in the fifth quartet takes us back to “Lohengrin”; andthere is a brief interlude of an organgrinder’s tune. Of interest from thestructural standpoint are the bitonal scales that Bartók applies consistentlyin the fifth quartet, as he does in several other works of the period. But itis in the sixth quartet that Bartók appears in a resigned mood. The unityof plan is achieved simply through prefacing each movement with amelodic theme, unaccompanied and in various contrapuntal combinations.Scale passages milling around and gypsylike dancing tunes are presenthere, too.

The progress of Schönberg’s string-quartet writing reflects a gradualrealization of the unifying method of twelve-tone composition. The firstand the second quartets are well in the tonal tradition; there are also someprivate jokes—the waltz rhythms with a wink at Johann Strauss in the firstquartet; the sudden intrusion of “Ach, du lieber Augustin,” in the second.In the second quartet there is an innovation: a contralto solo that singsdolorous verses in the third and fourth movements.

Schönberg’s third quartet was written in 1927, when the principlesof twelve-tone music were firmly established. In this dodecaphonicsense, the third quartet is monothematic, for the generating motto is thebasic twelve-tone series. But the application of the principle is free, sothat the uninitiated cannot hope to be able to murmur contentedly whilelistening to the music: “Here comes the inverted crab of twelve-toneseries!” To nondodecaphonic ears the quartet will sound atonal, devoidof familiar key.

Schönberg wrote his fourth quartet in America in 1936. It uses thetechnique of twelve tones more strictly than in the third quartet but notas patently as to recount its procedures in a fairy-tale fashion. But,Schönberg will always say, there is no need to know a thing about theprocedures. If the lyricism—and the anxiety—of the music find their wayto the heart, his purpose will be achieved without an intellectual appealto the analyst.

The recordings of the Schönberg quartets were made in 1937 by theKolisch String Quartet and are now issued for the first time on long playing


records. One cannot expect these recordings to be as good as those madetoday, and acoustical and mechanical defects are inevitable. As to theBartók quartets, they were done by the Juilliard String Quartet that mademusic history last year by presenting the entire cycle on a national tour.They were recorded by Columbia with a perfection vouchsafed by therevolutionary microgroove technique.

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When a package of music arrives, covered with picturesque stampsshowing exotic scenes, we justly expect to discover fascinatingly freshmelodic treasures. On examination, the music generally disillusions us—it is too often the product of a mediocre European conservatory. Why doso many musicians from exotic lands emulate Europe instead of exploitingtheir native melodic resources? In a world where everybody speaksEnglish, the second-generation immigrant child is ashamed of his mothertongue. So, too, most composers of countries that are musical minoritiesappear reluctant to use their native modes and rhythms, and takeparticular pride in learning to write “like everybody.” In every town thereis of course some hack instructor with an antique Conservatory educationwho monopolizes the music market and successfully stifles individuality intalented students. At least fifty per cent of all non-European musicalproduction is ruined by such schooling. Luckier students, whose familieshave means, go to Europe to acquire a technic of composition; the moreconservative to Berlin, the more advanced to Paris. From Berlin they comehome armed with polyphony a la Reger; from Paris decked out inimpressionistic finery. After that, they go on composing German music orFrench music. In rare cases they apply their knowledge to the shaping ofnative melos; the exceptional ones modify their technic and fuse it withthe rhythmic and melodic forms of folksongs in their own countries.

Alejandro Garcia Caturla of Cuba, has gone through all that is neces-sary to qualify him as a modern composer. He has studied with NadiaBoulanger; several scores have been published by Senart in Paris, hisworks or fragments of works, have been performed by Stokowski, and he

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Ch. 13: originally published in Modern Music, January–February 1940.

has received the usual humorously benevolent write-up from OlinDownes. Articles about him have appeared in special magazines with lim-ited circulation, and he has finally broken into some up-to-date Americandictionaries. Once in a while, performances of his more ambitious worksare announced and hurriedly shelved. But whenever the music of Cuba,or even of Latin America, is mentioned, his name comes up. Most impor-tant of all, he goes on composing and is perhaps unaware that in a world ofcommercial success his music has a serious drawback: it is non-conformist.

He has only one typical trait—he follows the rhythmic and melodicmodes of the Cuban Son, which is neither a song nor a dance but a com-posite form of national folk music. One might analyze his melos asessentially pentatonic without distinguishing his music from any otherwhich is based or modelled on native Indian motives. Caturla’s poly-rhythms are also common to most Spanish Latin-American countries(triple time against duple time). As to harmony, any attempt to analyze thisstructure as a system, whether quartal or tertian, collapses before Caturla’suse of constructions by third or fourths, tritones or semitones, accordingto his needs. When pressed for self-analysis, he will say that his favoritecomposers are Debussy, Stravinsky and Ravel but that he does not believetheir influence shows in his music. For the rest, he insists that in his works,particularly the most recent, he has tried to be his own free self—withoutscholastic or other prejudices, to express only the melos of the Cubanpeople.

By Cuban people he means of course, the Afro-Cubans. Caturla is ofpure Spanish blood, but his selective affiliations with the Afro-Cubans areintimate. In Cuba, native music is the creation chiefly of Cuban Negroes.The native dances and legends bear African names. Among Caturla’sworks, Bembi and Yamba-0 and Three Cuban Dances are based on Negrofolklore. The story of Yamba-0 is interesting. Eleven years ago in Paris,Caturla’s friend, the Cuban poet Alejo Carpentier, gave him a poem, enti-tled Liturgia. Caturla undertook to write to this text a work for eight voicesand a soloist. As he proceeded, it became clear that the music was unper-formable; the conflicting lines of declamatory song would inevitably beconfused while the Afro-Cuban rhythms doubled the difficulties of execu-tion. Caturla abandoned the choral project and transferred the themes toa symphonic poem. Instead of picturing the initiation dance Naniga, whichis the main subject of Carpentier’s poem (Yamba-0 is a ritualistic howlrecurring in every stanza), Caturla decided to give an “impression” of the

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dance, thus acquiring more freedom for the composition’s design. Yamba-0 is, indeed, an extraordinary palimpsest of motives, rhythms, and blockharmonies, possibly the freest orchestral work ever to be performed. (Itwas given by the Havana Philharmonic on October 25, 1931.) It is quitepossible, of course, to “analyze” the melodic line of Yamba-O, as derivedfrom the pentatonic, but it is more difficult to find a formula for its rhyth-mic diversity, and it is virtually impossible to account for its harmonicsystem. The only refuge for annotators is to go literary and speak of “junglesounds,” “animal voices,” etc. Yet the meaning of Yamba-0 is clear, therhythms are potent, the harmonies fitting, though crude. Perhaps Caturladoes know what he is talking about when he says that he is trying to liber-ate himself from all scholastic prejudices (all is emphatic and includes allthe scholasticism of modern trends) and express himself in terms ofCuban song in the freest possible manner.

The decousu quality which performers seem to find in Caturla’s musicis responsible for the infrequency of its performance outside of Havana.One can understand the dismay of a conductor trying to figure out thecounterpoint and the chords, even in the more innocent works of Caturla,such as his Cuban Dances, for there is no counterpoint and the harmoniesare not recognizable, even to a musician versed in the chords of theeleventh and the thirteenth. As for the members of the orchestra theyfind it hard to follow the unsymmetric rhythmic line, where syncopationis itself syncopated and the sixteenth-note rests are hazards. Your orchestramusician is a man of law and order; he can stand a large dose of dissonancebut be balks at unperiodic rhythms which upset the physiological oom-pahpulse. Whether this lack of organization is really a fault in Caturla’s music,is debatable. His splashy rhythms and lump harmonies may well beperturbing to the players but the players must advance to a freer useof their faculties. Cuban orchestras have no difficulty in playing Caturlaright. I have had my share of experience in dealing with the practicalproblems of Caturla’s music, having conducted his orchestral works invarious cities of the old world and the new. They are easiest to play withLatin American musicians, who at least do not raise fundamentalobjections. There is no shaking of heads, no look of insulted submission.To a Cuban orchestra player the uncomfortable syncopation and mixedrhythms are merely written signs for a familiar dance. When played freely,Caturla’s music sounds enticing; when played note by note it may appearturgid. Hence, the difference of effect.


Caturla is now thirty-three years old. He was born on March 7, 1906,in Remedios, where be lives today, discharging the office of a judge. Thisbrings him security: musicians in Cuba, like those elsewhere, cannot liveby composing orchestral music. At one time Caturla organized anorchestra in the town of Caibarien and in the seasons of 1932–33presented programs of modern music: Ravel, Falla, Stravinsky, Gershwin;there was classical music, too, but contemporary composers predominated.It is characteristic of Caturla that he has never changed his faith, neverexperimented in eclecticism, and studiously shunned all fads and currentmusical infatuations. He is apparently little concerned with self-promotion, and it takes a great deal of effort to interest him in arranginga performance of his work. But he is full of devotion to a cause, and hiscause is glorifying Cuban music. For those to whom Cuban music beginsand ends with rhumba, Caturla wrote (in 1933–34) a magnificent one,with enough Cuban percussion to satisfy the most exacting. But thisrhumba is not the cut-and-dried syncopated affair familiar to enthusiasts.It is rhumba a la Caturla, with a lilt and an accent all its own, and therhythms are not shaved down to uniformity. Perhaps his most playablepiece, it may even become his Bolero.

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The problem of finding proper harmonic and contrapuntal setting for theessentially monodic line of folk music presents the greatest challenge fornational composers of all lands. Traditional arrangements of Europeanfolksongs, in academic four-part harmony, are intrinsically incompatiblewith the modal nature of folk music. When pentatonic melodies of theOrient are harmonized in this conventional manner, the incompatibilitybetween the melody and the harmonic setting is such that the very essenceof oriental melos is destroyed. Even more difficult is the representation ofmicrotonal intervals peculiar to some countries of the Orient.

Strangely enough, modern harmony, supposedly much more artificialthan triadic tonality and farther removed from the spontaneous generationof folk tunes, lends itself more easily to the intervallic progressions oforiental songs. Modern counterpoint, tending towards economy andallowing free use of dissonance, corresponds more intimately to thenonharmonic essence of oriental melos.

The oriental ear is peculiarly sensitive to undifferentiated soundswithout definite pitch, particularly sounds produced by metal. Suchpercussive bell-like effects are often perceived as frictional acousticalcomplexes, the minor second or the minor ninth.

Chou Wen-chung is possibly the first Chinese composer who hasattempted to translate authentic oriental melorhythms into the terms ofmodern Western music. He describes his esthetic purpose as a recaptureof the color, mood, and emotion of Chinese traditional music “by meansof its own transmutation, without adding whatever is not alreadysuggested in itself.” He poses the problem of conciliation between

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Ch. 14: originally published in American Composers Alliance Bulletin, 1961.

melodic pentatonicism and dissonance in the following unambiguousstatement: “The characteristic successions of transparent intervals usedin Chinese music are freely embroidered with opulent dissonancesserving as the palette from which the composer paints in orchestralsonority, timbre, texture and dynamics. The changing mood and theemotional content are thus projected by means of a tonal brushworkextending over the entire orchestral spectrum.” And he asserts hisnational heritage by concluding: “In my works I am influenced by thephilosophy that governs every Chinese artist, whether he is a poet or apainter, namely, affinity to nature in conception, allusiveness inexpression, and terseness in realization.”

Chou Wen-chung is fully endowed for the projection of his task, forhe possesses an innate feeling for Chinese art and a thorough training inmusic, particularly modern music. And yet music was not his earliestvocation. He was born in Chefoo, on July 28, 1923. The Japanese invasionof China forced him to go to Shanghai. When the Japanese occupied thatcity, he fled to the interior of China. He entered the Kwangsi Universityin Kweilin, where he studied civil engineering; as the Japanese advanced,he proceeded to Chungking where he received a Bachelor of Sciencedegree in civil engineering.

After the war, Chou obtained a scholarship in architecture from YaleUniversity, and in the fall of 1946 arrived in the United States. He decided,however, to abandon architectural studies for musical composition. Hisnatural aptitude was sufficiently impressive to enable him to enter theNew England Conservatory of Music on a Carr Scholarship. Whilepursuing regular academic studies, he also took a course with the writerof this article. It was immediately evident that the complexity of con-temporary theories presented no difficulties to him. Perhaps his trainingin exact sciences helped him in this respect. But above all, he knew whathe wanted to do in musical composition. I encouraged him to cultivate hisknowledge of traditional Chinese music because I felt that he had theunique chance of creating an oriental style in a twentieth-century idiom.Chou reminded me of this in his letter of July 16, 1960, in response to myrequest for a self-analytical declaration. (He calls his analysis “arationalization of the technical aspects of my works,” and adds “I do hopeyou will not quote from it directly, as it is written only for your reference.”But his analysis is so illuminating that I feel free not to comply with hisdisclaimer.)

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Here are the most interesting paragraphs from Chou’s letter: “LikeChinese calligraphers and painters, I have always regarded my techniqueas a spontaneous manifestation of my gradually crystallizing estheticconcepts. This is perhaps in agreement with the Confucian concept, ‘Musicis born of emotion; tones are the substance of music; melody and rhythmare the appearance of tones. The greatness of music lies not in perfectionof artistry but in attainment of the spiritual power inherent in nature.’ Iwas mainly stimulated by your suggestions when I began in 1949 to makea serious study of classical Chinese music, and subsequently other Easternmusic as well. In the meantime, I tried to integrate the result of thesestudies with the most advanced contemporary musical techniques. Ibelieve the foundation of my musical thinking was formed beginning withLandscapes written in 1949, and culminating with the composition of Andthe Fallen Petals.”

After a season or so in Boston, Chou went to New York where he hadthe good fortune of working with Edgard Varèse. He also continued hisacademic studies in music with Otto Luening at Columbia University,receiving a Master’s Degree in 1954.

Guided by instinct and technique, Chou Wen-chung composed aseries of works, mostly for orchestra, which possesses a personal stamp andthat most precious of all endowments, the power of communication to thelistener. It is extraordinary that Chou had no period of groping in searchof a style, no works discarded because of technical failures. And still moreremarkably, he did not have to fight for recognition, which came to him,so to say, on a silver platter. Leopold Stokowski, with his discriminatingtaste for the unusual and the exotic, performed Chou’s Landscapes in1953. On a commission for the Louisville Orchestra, Chou wrote his“triolet for orchestra,” And the Fallen Petals. Performances followed in themajor music centers of America, Europe, and Asia. Chou received aGuggenheim Fellowship in 1957, and a second one in 1959. He also helda grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to conduct a research programon classical Chinese music and drama at Columbia University from 1955to 1957. In 1958 Chou was appointed to the faculty of the University ofIllinois.

Sophisticated music critics, not easily swayed by mere prettiness oftonal colors and the exotic nature of musical materials, began to usesuperlatives in reviewing Chou’s works. A tangible sign of success was theacceptance of Chou’s works for publication by the renowned EditionPeters and the issuance of recordings.


Chou’s distinctive style is determined as much by his self-imposedlimitations as by his sensitivity to the fine nuances of tone, color, andrhythm. He writes: “While it is obvious that I have evolved a very personaltechnique, I do not seem to be aware of its grammar. Instead of followingthe rules of any system or method—even if it happens to be of my owndevising—I have always preferred to rely on my instincts as a composerand a sense of logic as conditioned by my esthetic convictions.”

The musical imagery in Chou’s works is dominated by Chineseimpressions and Chinese states of mind. His muse does not require largecanvases. He writes for the standard classical-size orchestra, with anamplified percussion section, but without exotic oriental instruments. Theduration of his orchestral pieces varies from four to eleven minutes each.Slow movements predominate. The opening phrases are invariablysubdued and soft, and so are most of the endings. There is no formaldevelopment in Chou’s music; variations are suggested by changes ofinstrumental color and of rhythmic patterns, rather than by cumulativeelaborations. The themes themselves are eloquent in their brevity. Themusic appears to be in a state of constant motion; recurrent dashes ofwavy scales and tremulous trills supply pleasing decorative touches.

If formal elements are not of the essence in Chou’s music, themelorhythmic nuances are cultivated with fine precision. Pentatonicmelodies constitute the main thematic source; vertical and horizontalminor seconds and minor ninths assume thematic importance in Chou’sworks; the consistency of these usages suggests a serial concept incomposition.

The use of percussion is correspondingly subtle. Chou indicates inspecific detail the manner of striking a drum; sometimes he instructs theplayer to lay a tambourine or a bass drum flat in order to disperse anddampen the sound. The deep Chinese gong is included in all of Chou’sorchestral scores.

The visual aspect of Chou’s scores (and one should not underestimatethis element in modern composition) is interesting. The pages arespacious, and unencumbered with too many notes. With someimagination, one can conjure up on these pages a pattern of classicalChinese ideograms in black ink executed with calligraphic penmanship.

The titles of Chou’s works relate to images of nature from old Chinesepoetry. So reverently does Chou approach the intimate meaning of thepoem that the music itself becomes a natural reflection of the words. Thenotes are spaced like syllables in flexible prosody; musical phrases suggest

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lines of verse; changes of mood are portrayed in changes of instrumentalcolor. Sometimes there is a direct correspondence between the words inthe title and the melorhythmic construction of the theme. Thus themeaning of the line “And the fallen petals” is conveyed by a series of fallingfourths in the pentatonic melody.

Chou’s own ideas on melody, tonality, harmony, rhythm, tempo, formand expression, are summarized in the following extracts:

Linear MovementMotives in linear movement are built in either pentatonic or heptatonicmodes, often freely embroidered with upper or lower embellishingtones—generally a minor second if a flowing melodic line is intended(e.g., Soliloquy of a Bhiksuni), or a perfect fourth if a richer sonority isdesired (e.g., And the Fallen Petals); sometimes a preceding embellish-ing tone is repeated, resulting in such intervals as a diminished fifth(e.g., The Willows Are New).

TonalityIn spite of the consistent use of and the prominence given to the non-scale tones in linear movement and vertical amplification, a feeling oftonal center practically always exists. A change in tonal plane is generallyeffected by: (1) using common tones as links between the tonal planes,(2) emphasizing or sustaining a neighbor tone or a chordal tone (unre-lated to the scale tones) at the end of a running passage or after a fer-mata to usher in a new tonal plane. The application of Chinese scalar-modal concepts in my music is principally a means for orderedconstruction of the basic tonal material. An exceptional example is theSeven Poems of Ta’ng Dynasty, in which the tonal center oscillatesrapidly so as to appear ambiguous. This is because the linear motivesconstantly ascend or descend on a ladder of minor seconds, i.e., the scaletones are displaced by their upper or lower neighbor tones.

Vertical AmplificationChordal combinations are generally the result of vertical amplificationof the linear movement. They are of two basic types: (1) the vertical for-mation is made up of the same tones as the linear motive it supports,with or without their minor ninths or seconds. This type of chord is usedalmost exclusively in Soliloquy of a Bhiksuni and The Willows Are New.


Such chords are like magnified reflections of the linear movement. (2)The vertical formation is made up of perfect fourths or fifths, with orwithout their minor ninths or seconds. Such chords are like shiftingcloud-formations and, when combined with orchestral texture-inter-weaving, can be easily molded by the composer according to his fancy—as if he were the wind that writes with endless eloquence in drifts ofclouds.

RhythmRhythm is conceived according to its value to expressiveness and texturalinterweaving. The general rhythmic idea is additive rather than metric.In other words, the desired duration of tones in the linear movementconditions the rhythmic design, although divisive rhythmic patternsemerge as a result of textural interweaving. In extensive solo passagesthe rhythmic meter often changes with every bar, as in the middle move-ment of Landscapes, and also The Willows Are New. The bar-lines andrhythmic groupings are used to facilitate performance. For example, inthe 2/8 sections towards the end of All in the Spring Wind the groupingsare actually 7–2–2–3–2–3–9 and 5–2–2–2–3–4–2–11.

TempoThe problem of tempo is integrated into my rhythmic concept. The for-ward motion ebbs and flows—like the stream in a winding course—according to the intensity of expression and the complexity of texture. InAll in the Spring Wind, the tempo slackens and tightens according to theformal scheme of the music.

FormForm is generally organized simultaneously with the conception of lin-ear movement and vertical amplification so as to achieve an integratedand balanced framework for an ordered interplay of motion, tension,texture and timbre. As a result, it has a tendency to be symmetrical indesign—not only in the complete work as a whole but in the componentsections as well—as exemplified by All in the Spring Wind, And theFallen Petals, Soliloquy of a Bhiksuni, and The Willows Are New.

Characteristically, Chou Wen-chung disclaims the importance oftechnical aspects of his music. “To paraphrase a fundamental Buddhist

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concept,” he writes, “the material is immaterial, the immaterial material.Technique is merely the vehicle for the ultimate purpose of expression, thecatalyst for the crystallization of emotion. Line (linear movement), mass(vertical amplification), and their inter-relationship (form), together withsuch elements as rhythm, texture, timbre and dynamics, serve only as themeans for achieving expressiveness and conveying emotion through thecontrolled flow of sound—the organized complexity and ordered interplayof all the properties of sound at the immediate disposal of present-dayinstruments and orchestral resources.”

Let us now consider Chou’s individual works. His first important scorewas Landscapes, which he wrote at the age of twenty-five. It is inspired bythree poems by Cheng Hsieh (1693–1765), Ting P’eng (c. 1661), and LiuChi (1311–1375). The guiding lines of the poems mark the sections of thework. They are “Under the cliff, in the bay,” “The sorrow of parting,” and“One streak of dying light.” The first section is a series of condensationsand rarefactions, in dynamics and in tempo; the main melody ispentatonic; the secondary intervallic scheme is quartal. “The Sorrow ofParting” is a dialogue between the English horn and the oboe; itsantiphonal character is brought out by the use of mutual intervallicinversions. The pentatonic structure is translucent; a cadential passing notedoes not affect its classical purity.

The concluding section has more mobility; in the composer’s words,“The changing mood is projected by means of a tonal brushwork extendingover the entire orchestral spectrum.” The music concludes on a pulsatingprogression of luminous points of sound, very softly, very slowly.

The score of All in the Spring Wind bears the subtitle “A Rondelet forOrchestra.” The epigraph is from a poem by Li Yü, last emperor of theSouthern T’ang Dynasty. The orchestra here is larger than in Landscapes,with a percussion group augmented by the celesta, xylophone, andglockenspiel. A measured beat of the timpani establishes the mood of theopening; minor seconds and minor ninths determine the intervallicscheme, and are used both vertically and horizontally. The dynamic planis outlined by recurrent intensifications of sonority in brief explosivefigures. The instrumental coloring is chiaroscuro, in light and shadows.Trills, glissandi, rapid tremolos create an illusion of static brilliance, butcumulative dynamic condensation leads to an agitated movement, unusualfor the composer. Equally unusual is the ending in fortissimo in the entireorchestra in unison. The piece is a tour de force of coloristic brushwork,


entirely athematic in structure. The only pentatonic references are in thefleeting gamelan-like passages.

And the Fallen Petals, a triolet for orchestra, takes its title from a poemby Meng Hao-jan (689–740). It is the most formally organized work ofChou; its cyclic structure is emphasized by the use of an identical figurein the Prologue and the Epilogue. This basic figure is set in the pentatonicmode, composed of a succession of falling fourths that illustrate the fallingpetals of the title.

The changing moods of the music are indicated by descriptiveheadings marking the principal sections in the score: Lontano e misterioso,Gioioso in distanza, Vigoroso quasi barbaro, Inquieto and Tragico indistanza. The images that inspire the work are these: a quiet landscape,with budding blossoms dancing in praise of life in the spring wind, and astorm that drives the petals far and wide. The original image returns, asthe fallen petals are swept away and fresh blossoms on the branches danceagain in the spring wind.

The Willows Are New, for piano solo, composed in 1957, is in somerespects the most typical work of Chou Wen-chung. It embodies hisfavorite techniques in an immediately perceptible manner; furthermore,this piece can be played without difficulty by anyone who can read music.Vertical structures and melodic embellishments are based exclusively onthe frictional intervals of minor second and minor ninth, with the tritoneoccupying a focal position in some patterns. The somber low registerpredominates, while the high treble is used for bell effects. In a work asexiguous and fragile as this, expressive nuances assume major importance,as they do in similarly evocative pieces by Scriabin or Anton Webern. Chouexplains that its effectiveness depends on a calculated rubato, a constantexpansion and contraction on the temporal scale of the recurrent thematicmotives. The changing meters indicate the approximate fluctuations ofthematic occurrences; the general instruction is Lento ma non troppo,with intense but restrained feeling. It is interesting to note thatcondensations and rarefactions of speed and dynamic intensity areconcomitant; acceleration is accompanied by crescendo; a slower tempo bydiminuendo, down to the point of extinction (estinto). As usual, Chou Wen-chung is ready with a poetic and yet technically meaningful program note:“In The Willows Are New, mutations of the original material are wovenover the entire range of the piano and embroidered with sonorities thatare the magnified reflexes of brushstroke-like movements . . . projected by

Chou Wen-chung 145

means of the same principle that marks the art of Chinese calligraphy,wherein the controlled flow of ink—through the inter-action of rhythmand density, the modulation of line and texture—creates a continuum ofmotion and tension in spatial equilibrium.”

The title, The Willows Are New, is taken from a poem by Wang Wei,the Chinese poet, painter and musician who flourished in the eighthcentury. Sprigs of willow, used in farewell ceremonies, are regarded as asymbol of parting.

In 1958 Chou Wen-chung composed Soliloquy of a Bhiksuni, inspiredby a scene in a sixteenth-century Chinese drama representing a Bhiksuni(Buddhist nun) worshipping before the image of Buddha. Chou’s renditionof the inner state of the worshipper is poetic and eloquent:

I am only sixteenIn the early spring of LifeYet I am thrust throughThe Gate of EmptinessHearing only the sound ofTemple bells and ritual pipesStriking stone chimesEndlessly endlesslyRinging bellsBlowing the shell trumpetBeating drumsTrying vainly to communicateWith the Land of the Dead

The Soliloquy is scored for a muted trumpet solo, four horns (alsomuted most of the time), three trombones, tuba, drums, triangle,tambourine, suspended cymbal, and gong. The pentatonic scale of themelody is often embellished by chromatically lowered auxiliary notes.

The harmonic formation is in fourths, in minor seconds and in minorninths. Once more, Chou asserts in his explanatory note the kinship withthe art of Chinese calligraphy, its linear and textural vitality.

In all these works Chou conveys the meaning of Chinese poetry bypurely instrumental sonorities. In his Seven Poems of Ta’ng Dynasty,composed in 1952, he lets the singer intone the words. This work revealsclearly the powerful influence of Varèse, in its intervallic scheme with wide


melodic leaps, in the use of instrumental sonorities, in its subtle dynamics.But there are some individual traits, and the songs retain their attractionand their effectiveness.

Chou’s music lends itself perfectly to choreographic interpretation. Inhis projects for future works, choreography is mentioned time and again.Classical Chinese art remains invariably the source of his inspiration. Heexplains the reasons for his dedication in the following lines:

“I am attracted to these classics of the East that have come to be fairlywell-known in the West, not only because of the dramatic impact of theirmulticolored content and the universal appeal of their humanistic messageat a time like ours, but also because of their polygenetic and polymorphoushistory. It is my belief that these qualities will afford me opportunities tocarry out some of my own ideals—musical or otherwise. The wonderfulTunhuang cave paintings come to mind: their power of communication,freedom of expression and freshness of conception, achieved through anaudacious fusion of styles inherited from the actively crisscrossing culturesof that era, between the fifth and the eleventh centuries.”

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It is rare to find a crusader in a big cause whose intellect is as strong as hisbattle-ax. Not all crusaders are more interested in their cause than inthemselves. Few are creators of original work in a field of art. HenryCowell is the exceptional type who possesses all of these qualities. InPushkin’s fantastic tale of Mozart and Salieri, there are these amazinglines:

And I dissected music as a corpse,By algebra I tested harmony of sounds. . . .

This scientific procedure Henry Cowell unashamedly resumes. Ifthere is one rule in his creative work, it consists in taking nothing forgranted. Harmony, rhythm, tonecolor—Henry Cowell submits them to atest as if they were mere human beliefs, not divine laws.

Henry Cowell’s life-story includes many adventurous chapters—bornin California, of intellectual parents, he lived in the freedom of thehospitable country, without benefit of an estate or even as much propertyas would insure safe transition from infancy into adulthood. Having hadno compulsory education, he conjectured and speculated by himself,unaided and unhindered. Musical sounds around him fascinated him assuitable material for synthetical experiments. When he first got hold of adecrepit upright piano, he discovered new possibilities on it. Considerablylater, when he revealed to astonished audiences gathered in New York,San Francisco, London, Berlin, Paris, Warsaw, and Moscow what could be

15. HENRY COWELL

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Ch. 15: originally published in 1933 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland StanfordJunior University; republished in 1962 by Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, Inc.

done with the grand piano, he was merely developing his first-handknowledge derived from these earlier experiences. At some interveningdate he thought up a convenient terminology. He was scientific as well aspictorial when he named a group of keys struck with the forearm a “tone-cluster”; a compound fairly threatening to break into the sacrosanct pagesof Grove’s Dictionary of Music, for the lack of another descriptive nameand from the necessity of designating a musical phenomenon which,however unpalatable to purists, is forcing itself irrepressibly into musicalexistence. Cowell had many years of conventional study, but only after hehad already created, developed, and scientifically systematized anindividual style of his own. When the first shock resulting from the exteriorappearance of his piano-playing passed, intelligent people found that thereis sound harmonic sense in the use of complete blocks of sounds,diatonically or chromatically arranged, treated as indivisible units. Ourmusical generation saw the use of triads in parallel construction, as if theywere unisons or octaves; and, in polytonal writing, still bulkier entitieswere liberally handled. Apart from the question of using one’s antebrachiafor the production of “tone-clusters,” there is nothing unacceptable in theidea to the seasoned musician; on the other hand, it is a logicaldevelopment of modern harmonic resources.

Thus, from innocent experimenting with the acoustical possibilitieslatent in an ordinary piano, Cowell came to conclusions of harmonic order.Experimenting with the soundboard of the grand piano led him todiscoveries in the field of tone-color. Everyone who has heard his weirdglissandos, interpretive of the ghost of his Irish ancestors, “The Banshee,”rendered directly on the piano strings, will admit that as a new orchestralcolor it is an undeniable acquisition. Pizzicato on the piano strings, as wellas the entire gamut of percussion, conjured up from the pianistic entrails,make the piano a richer instrument without impinging on its historicaldignity. As an orchestral instrument, Cowell’s string and percussion piano(that is, the ordinary piano enriched by extraordinary applications) oughtto be used whenever a masculine harp tone is required, and for newbattery sounds not obtainable on drums or cymbals.

Henry Cowell, as a composer, made an early start. Before he wastwenty, in the midst of distracting activities in rural and pastoral lifearound the paternal shack in which he was born and which is still his onlysedentary home-sweet-home, he had composed music of all descriptions,including a symphony and an opera. At the same vigesimal calendas he

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delved for the first time into the problems of notation. This latter, nothaving been taught him as an established religion, he examined withoutfear—and dissented from its inadequacies. The duple system ofrhythmical designations, giving adequate representation of only halves,quarters, eighths, etc., was the particular beam in the eye which HenryCowell endeavored to extricate. He proposed a special notation for otherfractions, so as to avoid the annoying and unscientific methods of settingdown triplets, quintuplets, etc. This lore, nurtured by Cowell at StanfordUniversity, where he worked as a free lance, was later embodied in a book,New Musical Resources, published in 1930 by Knopf. In 1931 Cowell,annoyed by the wistful realization that, no matter what notation we maydecree, human players will still be human—that is, inaccurate,physiologically limited, rhythmically crippled, and unwilling to reform—hit upon the idea of an instrument which would faithfully produce all kindsof rhythms and cross-rhythms, as the tempered piano faithfully producesa given intonation for which a player on a string-instrument has to fumbleby ear. He spoke to Professor Leon Theremin, builder of acousticalinstruments, expounded his ideas, and secured the inventor’s valuedcollaboration. As a result, a new musical wonder, provisionally christened“rhythmicon,” was presented to the world for the first time on January 19,1932, at the New School for Social Research, where Cowell is in charge ofmusical activities. The rhythmicon can play triplets against quintuplets, orany other combinations up to sixteen notes in a group. The metrical indexis associated, in accordance with Henry Cowell’s scheme as expounded inNew Musical Resources, with the corresponding frequence of vibrations.In other words, quintuplets are of necessity sounded on the fifth harmonic,nonuplets on the ninth harmonic, and so forth. A complete chord ofsixteen notes presents sixteen rhythmical figures in sixteen harmonicswithin the range of four octaves. All sixteen notes coincide, with thebeginning of each period, thus producing a synthetic harmonic series oftones.

Henry Cowell composed, in 1931, a suite in four movements, fororchestra, entitled Rhythmicana, in which he treats the new instrument asa sort of rhythmical organ; in one of the movements he amusingly imitatesthe rhythmicon’s effects by building a harmonic scale in wood wind.

Henry Cowell’s choices of titles for his compositions are indicative ofa scientific spirit which animates him whenever he sets about to solve amusical equation. Synchrony (published by Edition Adler in Germany) is


a tone-poem for music and dance; its rhythms are quite simple, yet Cowellmanages to maintain an air of innovation by such devices as a suddenduplication of the metrical design and by a most ingenious orchestration.In his Sinfonietta for Chamber Orchestra he is almost academic, exceptfor the “frictional” use of the interval of a minor second and someunearthly passages for the French horn scaling its harmonic series withlittle solicitude for the embouchure. In this and similar passages from hisother works Cowell is expressive, and it is strange to observe how the twospirits—that of strict science and that of musical expressiveness—achievea happy symbiosis in Cowell’s productions. Polyphonica, for twelveinstruments, is for science, but the suite (“The Banshee,” “TheLeprechaun,” and “The Fairy Bells”) for string and percussion piano andchamber orchestra, is all for expressiveness, for dynamic and color effects.The first is absolute music, product of a mind that takes nothing forgranted; the second is applied music, often with a programmatic titlewhich, however, is always added after the music is completed!

When Cowell is intent on one particular problem, say that of dissonantcounterpoint, he deliberately dismisses the wealth of his new musicalresources and, by so doing, achieves an unencumbered presentation of themain problem. In the Piano Concerto (published by Edition Senart ofParis) his problem is sonority, and he uses a full-fledged technique of tone-clusters to the fullest advantage in solo part and orchestra alike. It is easilyunderstood that a tone-cluster in the orchestra is built by simple additionof instruments, and that fifteen instruments, producing single notes, arerequired to build a two-octave diatonic tone-cluster.

Cowell’s titles are usually taken from Celtic lore. The harmonicscheme in these works (many of them published by Breitkopf and Haertel;we will mention The Tides of Manaunaun, Exultation, The Harp of Life)is surprisingly mild. Indeed, the idiom is so “audaciously conservative” thatit is disarming. Cowell was not attempting to revise tonal harmony in thesepieces. But in this very unpretentiousness lies their appeal; for, in theirprimitive directness they draw immediate response from audiences willingto accept the exterior peculiarities of tone-production. The sensationalelement in Cowell’s appearances in both hemispheres does not cancel thefact that, harmonically speaking, many of Cowell’s piano pieces are ofcrystalline simplicity. On the other hand, the sonorous richnesses ofcluster music have aroused admiration which Cowell’s “scientific” selfnever seemed to command. Professors of great universities have written

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exorbitant characterizations of these tone-pictures; and abroad—inEngland, France, Germany, Poland, and Russia—Cowell’s name hasbecome identified with Brobdingnagian sonorities. Cowell went to Russiain 1929; there he was received as a personification of industrial America,with machines governing the tide of life: “And I saw clearly the electricfloodlights of Broadway filling the room, and the New York skylinehovering above the mist,” wrote a Russian intellectual after a demon-stration at the Leningrad Institution of Arts and Sciences.

Henry Cowell edits a unique quarterly publishing ultramodern music,under the title, New Music. As publisher, he demands no preconceivedqualifications from his composers, and anyone with anything new to sayengages his interest. He bars no one except himself—not a note ofCowell’s music has been published in Cowell’s edition. He specializes onAmerican composers of the non-conformist type, but welcomes occasionalEuropeans. He publishes piano pieces, chamber music, and even fullscores when finances permit. New Music has distribution all over thehabitable globe, from Japan over both Americas to all of Europe.

Henry Cowell, in managing various non-lucrative enterprises, is asmuch of an innovator as he is in composing his own and administeringother contemporaries’ music. As director of the North American section ofthe Pan-American Association of Composers, he has organized everyactivity which this organization has had, including concerts in New York,San Francisco, Havana, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Vienna, Prague, Budapest,and other places. He works with determination unlessened by therealization that the world, even that part of the world that goes by the nameof musical, is little flexible. But Henry Cowell would not be himself if hedid not follow the path of most resistance.


On the automobile road to Wahoo, Nebraska, the sign reads: “Wahoo,Birthplace of Howard Hanson.” Thus the Chamber of Commerce ofHanson’s home town acknowledged the honor he brought to Wahoo. InAmerican musical geography Howard Hanson is the first important Amer-ican musician to come out of the Middle West. He is also the foremostScandinavian-American among composers. Throughout Hanson’s cosmo-politan career that has taken him across the breadth of the continent andto Europe, Hanson has kept the ties that connected him, an American-born musician, with the land of his ancestors. On the tercentenary of thefirst Swedish settlement in America in 1638, Hanson wrote a symphony,his third, to express the composer’s reverence “for the spiritual contribu-tion that has been made to America by that sturdy race of northernpioneers who were in later centuries also to constitute such a mighty forcein the conquering of the West.” Hanson’s early symphonic poem, Northand West, is also dedicated to the same theme, as is his Hymn for thePioneers, beginning “Spirit of the Northland, strengthen us ever.”

It was from his mother that Hanson received his early musicalinstruction. Later, he took lessons at Luther College at Wahoo. Althoughhe studied piano, he never aspired to become a concert player. Hisinterest, even in boyhood, was concentrated on composition, which hestudied diligently under several teachers in Lincoln, Nebraska, and NewYork City.

The popular conception of a musical composer is that of a tousled-haired Bohemian, spending his time at the coffeehouse, and jotting downfleeting inspirations on the back of the menu. There is nothing in Howard

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Ch. 16: originally published in The Christian Science Monitor, October 14, 1944.

Hanson’s biography that would substantiate such a picture. Hanson hasalways been orderly and tidy in his musical habits. Even his earliestcompositions disclose a competence, free from groping uncertainty ofmusical means and intended effects. At the age of 19, he accumulated animpressive enough stock of scholarship to be engaged as an instructor incomposition at the College of the Pacific in California. And two years later,at 21, he was named Dean of that school!

In California, he wrote the music for the Forest Play, and conductedit in the open-air festival under the giant redwood trees. This score, and asymphonic composition entitled Before the Dawn, Hanson submitted tothe jury of the American Academy of Rome, an institution created in 1920to enable young American musicians to receive the benefit of professionaltraining in Europe. Hanson won the fellowship easily and went to Romefor a three-year stay. He spent long hours listening to the magnificentchoirs of St. Peter’s and other Roman churches and making a thoroughstudy of Gregorian chant and medieval counterpoint. The outcome ofthese studies was the symphonic poem, Lux Aeturna, which Hansonconducted with the Augusteo Orchestra in Rome. Also in Rome he wrotehis first Symphony, subtitled The Nordic Symphony, a reflection of theNorthland, Swedish and American.

Upon his return to America, Hanson gave a performance of theNordic Symphony in Rochester, New York. There he met GeorgeEastman, famous inventor of the Kodak camera, and donor of severalmillion dollars for a conservatory of music, named the Eastman School ofMusic. Beyond compare, the Eastman School is the best-equipped musicalinstitute in this country. It occupies a specially erected building, on theintersection of two busy streets. It has 200 pianos in its practice rooms, anauditorium seating 500 people, and a music library. Adjoined to theEastman School is the great Eastman Theater, where concerts of visitingsymphony orchestras and operas are given.

Howard Hanson was 28 years old at the time he met Eastman. Yet soimpressed was the latter with the young man’s eagerness of purpose andexecutive ability that he intrusted to him the directorship of the EastmanSchool of Music, a post that Hanson has held uninterruptedly for 20 years.

In addition to his academic duties, Hanson has established a series ofconcerts of American symphonic music, performed by the EastmanSchool Symphony Orchestra. During the 19 years of these concerts, 798


compositions by 336 composers have been presented, of which 272orchestral works were by 161 students of the Eastman School of Music.

Among Eastman School students whose music has been presented byHoward Hanson, are several who have already made a mark for themselvesoutside the walls of their Alma Mater: William Bergsma, who writeseffective music in an optimistic neo-classical manner; David Diamond,composer of symphonic and vocal works charged with emotion, and highlypersonal in expression, even when enveloped in a tangle of acousticaldiscords; Herbert Inch, composer of neo-archaic but romantically coloredinstrumental pieces; Gail Kubik, who interprets American themes in termsof absolute music, in clearly delineated forms; Goddard Lieberson, whoseinspiration ranges from symphonic rumbas to modernistic neo-romanticpieces, always with a touch of irony in melodic inflection; Robert Palmer,whose masterly technique is a foil to an imaginative nature, with a strongpersonal voice; Burrill Phillips, writer of lively and cleverly turned-outovertures and ballets; Gardner Read, the musician of earnest and deeplyfelt moods, whose neo-romantic style of composition is enough of thetwentieth century to make it new and interesting; and many others who,in the tomorrow of American music, will be recognized as representativeof the age.

Inasmuch as Howard Hanson has been the mentor of American musi-cians, it is interesting to quote his views on what modern music is andshould be. He wrote in the preface of his Second Symphony, pointedlysurnamed Romantic Symphony: “I recognize, of course, that romanticismis at the present time the poor stepchild, without the social standing of herelder sister, neo-classicism. Nevertheless, I embrace her all the morefervently, believing, as I do, that romanticism will find in this country richsoil for a new, young, and vigorous growth, an escape from the bitter typeof modern musical realism.”

In his own words, Hanson shows that romanticism does not meanadherence to the outmoded systems of harmony. He is no stranger tomodernism; his harmonies, often compressed in space, challenge the ear.When Hanson conducted the first rehearsal of his Fourth Symphony, aviola player asked him if it was not by error that he had B flat in his part,while the trumpet was playing B natural. It was not, and in addition therewas in the same chord also a discordant B, and the astringent effect wasfurther intensified by the basic harmony of F minor in the trombones.

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Because of the modal flavor of his melodies, the austerity of hisinstrumental writing, and the evocation of Scandinavian moods, Hansonhas been called the American Sibelius. There are undoubtedly points ofaffinity, and of modern composers, Sibelius has influenced Hanson’s styleof musical thinking probably more than any other. But points ofdivergence are also many, and Hanson’s music is more than Sibeliustransplanted to the new continent.

Howard Hanson is one of the few American musicians who have hadan opera performed on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House in NewYork. It was Merry Mount, produced on Feb. 10, 1934, with LawrenceTibbett singing the principal part. The opera, freely adapted afterHawthorne’s tale, “The Maypole of Merry Mount,” depicts Puritan Massa-chusetts of 1625.

Howard Hanson has been a guest conductor, performing his ownsymphonies, with virtually all major orchestras in this country. Boston hasbeen particularly receptive to Hanson’s music. All his four symphonieshave been performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Whatever the ultimate evaluation of the intrinsic quality of Hanson’smusic, it remains intensely, emotionally, personally, his music.


1. MUSICAL REBEL

As a dedication for his Essays Before a Sonata Charles Ives wrote: “Theseprefatory essays were written by the composer for those who can’t standhis music—and the music for those who can’t stand his essays; to thosewho can’t stand either, the whole is respectfully dedicated.” This sonata,with which Ives challenged the musical public, is subtitled Concord,Massachusetts, 1840–60. Its four movements bear the names of U.S.writers of the Concord group: Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, andThoreau. The music is as difficult to play as it is unconventional intechnique. In the Hawthorne movement the pianist is instructed to use astrip of wood to sound two octaves of notes in one chord. The style variesfrom simple hymnlike tunes to complex combinations of sounds thatcannot be classified by any system of modern harmony. The Alcottsmovement is inspired by the “fate motive” of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,which the Alcott sisters liked so much. Ives remarks about the Emersonmovement: “A metronome cannot measure Emerson’s mind and oversoul,any more than the old Concord Steeple Bell could.”

In this observation lies the essence of every piece of music Ives wrote.To him music is a transcendental expression of the universal soul, not tobe measured in materialistic terms of notes and tempo. But since Ives isan American, he looks at the universe from America. The subject of hisworks is American; their source of inspiration belongs to all mankind.

In his orchestral set Three Places in New England, Ives draws a vastpanorama of this universal Americanism. The first movement bears thename of Boston Common, with a particular reference to the St. Gaudens

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Ch. 17: Part 1 originally published in Américas, Vol. 5, No. 9, September 1953.

monument to Colonel Shaw and his colored regiment. The secondmovement portrays Putnam’s Camp in Redding, Connecticut, with itsRevolutionary memories. The third is “The Housatonic River atStockbridge,” in which once again the Beethoven “fate motive” is thedominant theme. Here, as in the Concord Sonata, American tunes insimple harmonies are placed in juxtaposition with the most extraordinaryoutbursts of sound, with conflicting tonalities thrown together andrhythms torn to shreds. If this be chaos, it is the chaos of American life,which cannot be represented by nicely ordered harmonies. Indeed, theword “nice” is the ultimate term of opprobrium in the vocabulary ofCharles Ives. When he wants to express his distaste for some composer, hesays that he composes like “a nice old lady.”

The technical devices applied by Ives in Three Places in New England,in Concord Sonata, and in works like Lincoln, the Great Commoner, TheFourth of July, The Masses, Washington’s Birthday, and An Election arethose of polytonality, atonality, and polyrhythmy. Such procedures are nowaccepted idioms of modern music, but they did not even have a name whenIves wrote these works in the early years of this century. Historicallyspeaking, he is a pioneer of modern music, an individual discoverer ofeffective harmonic applications that gradually found their way into generaluse. Ives stopped writing music about 1930 when his illness—diabetes—made it impossible for him to handle the pen. And after that it took someyears before the spirit of the times caught up with his prophetic innovations.

Ives is the son of George Ives, the band leader who played forAbraham Lincoln. When Lincoln asked General Grant what he thought ofthe band, Grant made the famous reply: “I know only two tunes: one isYankee Doodle, and the other isn’t.”

The elder Ives was an extraordinary person. Never satisfied withthings as they were, he was a born experimenter in music. Once he brokehis band into several sections and placed them in a church steeple, on thevillage green, and on the roof of a building on Main Street in Danbury,the Connecticut town where Charles Ives was born in 1874. He let themplay variations of traditional hymns such as Greenland’s Icy Mountains orJerusalem the Golden, with little thought of euphony. The memory of thisexhilarating music-making lingered in Ives’ mind, and he brought it out inthe second movement of Three Places in New England. There he had twoorchestral sections play a march tune at two different speeds, so that threebars of one section equaled four bars of the other. In order to conduct this


musical episode properly, the leader has to beat different measures witheach hand, four bars with the right hand against three bars with the left.No wonder orchestral conductors were slow at tackling the Ives scores inpublic performance.

Father Ives was fascinated by the natural sounds of the countryside.He tried to catch the true pitch of the village church bells. He found thatthe ordinary scale was not good enough, and proceeded to work out amachine that could produce quarter tones. He attached twenty-four violinstrings tuned in quarter tones to a wooden frame, but it did not seem togive the true pitch heard in church bells, and he soon abandoned theattempt. Charles Ives, too, investigated the possibilities of quarter tonesand wrote three pieces in this manner.

Ives learned the rudiments of music from his father, and played thedrums in the band as a boy. He also studied the organ, and at the age oftwelve gave a recital in the Danbury church. Later he received thoroughacademic training at the Yale University School of Music under theguidance of Horatio Parker. He wrote a symphony that is entirelyconventional in idiom but demonstrates a complete mastery of technique.Those critics who believe that the harmonic wildness of Ives’ later scoresshows ignorance of musical laws can be reassured by an examination ofthis early symphony. Great innovating forces spring not from ignorance butfrom a higher knowledge.

After completing his formal education, Ives did not settle down as aprofessional composer. He got a job as an insurance clerk, and found thissupposedly unpoetic occupation fascinating because he had to deal withpeople. He made rapid progress and soon established a copartnership—the Mutual Life Insurance Company. He prospered moderately, and fromthe proceeds of the business set aside enough money to publish some ofhis compositions. No price and no copyright registry are listed in his firstvolume, 114 Songs by Charles E. Ives. The earliest of these songs is dated1889, when Ives was fifteen. A note in the collection stated simply: “Thisbook is privately printed and is not to be sold or put on the market.Complimentary copies will be sent to anyone as long as the supply lasts.As far as the music is concerned, anyone (if he be so inclined) is free touse it, copy it, transpose or arrange it for other instruments.”

Publication of the Concord Sonata followed, and copies were againdistributed gratis. Subsequent works of Charles Ives were published by theNew Music Quarterly, a noncommercial venture dedicated to the publica-

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tion of ultra-modern works. It was only after 1940, when his music becamecomprehensible to musicians and Ives was hailed as a genius by hard-headed critics, that commercial publishers woke up to the opportunity andbegan publishing his compositions on a business basis.

Soon music by Ives began to be performed in concert halls. John Kirk-patrick, a devoted young pianist, spent two years learning the epic ConcordSonata and played it, from memory, in New York on January 20, 1939.Lawrence Gilman wrote in the Herald Tribune: “This Sonata is exception-ally great music—it is, indeed, the greatest music composed by anAmerican, and the most deeply and essentially American in impulse andimplication.”

The Concord Sonata was recorded by Kirkpatrick for Columbia. A stillearlier piano sonata was soon published and recorded. Ives became muchmore than a name and a legend. Eagerly, the sophisticated musical publicbought the available Ives music and recordings. Indeed, Ives, the mostuncommercial of all composers, became a source of comfortable profit tomusic publishers and phonograph companies. This consummation is notonly a tantalizing paradox, but a demonstration of the truth that reallygreat music is inevitably destined to become popular.

In 1947, Ives received the Pulitzer Prize for his Third Symphony,written thirty-six years earlier. It was not easy, however, to foist worldlyhonors on Charles E. Ives. He met delegates of the Pulitzer PrizeCommission with the comment: “Prizes are only for kids. I am grown up.”

Ives lives far from the madding crowd. Partly because of his illness,but mostly because of his individual way of life, he shies away frompersonal contact with the official world. Only once did he attend aperformance of his works. He has no radio in his home in New York Cityor in his country house in West Redding, Connecticut.

For more than twenty years he has not heard any public concerts. Heis blissfully unaware of what is going on in the musical world. He has nointerest in following the developments of new schools of composition,except for the work of a very few American composers of his generationwhose music is as unfamiliar to the public as his own once was. In his homehe keeps only Beethoven scores and other classics.

Ives is equally aloof from the everyday happenings in the world atlarge. He does not read daily newspapers, and his only source of informa-tion is the London Spectator, to which he subscribes. When he went to


Europe in the autumn of 1932, he cut off even this contact with the news.He learned about Roosevelt’s election accidentally from a Frenchinnkeeper.

His wife, Harmony Twichell-Ives, protects him from the excitementsof the world. She administers the daily shots of insulin without which hecould not live, and takes care of his mail. On rare occasions, they entertainvisiting friends, a highly selected group, for Ives does not acclimatizehimself easily to strangers. He has an abhorrence of photography. Onlytwo snapshots of him are known to exist. It was not until 1949, on hisseventy-fifth birthday, that he allowed a Life photographer to enter hishome to take an “official” picture.

Like his favorite author, Thoreau, Ives is a political rebel. He believesin drastic measures to remedy world ills. When the ideals of PresidentWilson were defeated in the election of 1920, he wrote an angry song enti-tled November 2, 1920. To a wry, dissonant accompaniment, he set thewords: “Too many readers go by the headlines, party men would muddle upthe facts, so a good many citizens voted as grandpa always did, or thoughta change for the sake of change seemed natural enough. It’s raining, let’sthrow out the weather man—Kick him out!—Kick him out! Kick him!”

Ives published this song with a footnote: “The assumption, in the text,that the result of our national election in 1920 was a definite indication thatthe country (at least, the majority mind) turned its back on a high purpose,is not conclusive. Unfortunately, election returns coming through the pre-sent party system prove nothing conclusively. The voice of the peoplesounding through the mouth of the parties, becomes somewhat emascu-lated. It is not inconceivable that practical ways may be found for moreaccurately registering and expressing popular thought—at least in relationto the larger primary problems, which concern us all. A suggestion to thisend in the form of a constitutional amendment, together with an article dis-cussing the plan in some detail and from various aspects, will be gladly sentby the writer to anyone who is interested enough to write for it.”

The proposed amendment was nothing less than the establishment offederal legislation by the people without the intermediation of politicalparties. Ives circulated the text of the amendment among senators andother politicians, but met with no response. He was no more bitter aboutthis failure than he was about the failure of his music to find a willingaudience.

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In 1938, Ives submitted a memorandum to President FranklinRoosevelt advocating the abolition of war. He wrote: “War between nationsis the one perfectly stupid thing that still hangs over the world. It settlesnothing and never will settle anything except the bottom of the graveyard.”This proposal, too, was futile. Ives has seen two world wars go by in hislifetime. But to him the failure of effort is no reason for abstaining fromall effort. In this respect Ives is a true follower of his spiritual ancestors,Emerson and Thoreau.

In his music, too, Ives speaks to the people. He intersperses his man-uscripts with characteristic remarks, which are sometimes incorporatedeven in the published editions. In the sketches for his Three-Page Sonatahe inserts a reminder: “Back to first theme—all nice sonatas must havefirst theme.” Further along, there is an inscription: “March time—but nota march, Rollo!” In one of his songs Ives indicates a “blue note” and addsin parentheses: “Use Saturday night.”

In his string quartet, in three movements marked “Discussion,”“Arguments,” and “Call of the Mountains,” Ives adds this comment: “Stringquartet for four men who converse, discuss, argue (politics), fight, shakehands, shut up, then walk up the mountainside to view the firmament.”One passage is marked “Andante Emasculato”; another passage, “conscratchy.” He advises the player: “Too hard to play—so it just can’t be goodmusic, Rollo.” And then again: “Join in, Professor, all in the key of C. Youcan do that nice and pretty.” And finally, Ives compliments himself: “Prettytune, ladies.”

The music of Ives presents a singular mixture of precision andfreedom of interpretation. He aims to represent village-band playing orbarn-dance fiddling, in which improvisation and a spirit of fun in music-making are paramount considerations. On that unique occasion when hewent to a concert to hear his music played, the orchestra gave a ratherscrambling performance. But he commended the conductor in thesewords: “This was just like a town meeting—everyone for himself.Wonderful how it came out!”

In his symphonic poem The Fourth of July a violin is given a dronepart in a completely independent rhythm, which has to be maintainedregardless of what goes on in the rest of the orchestra. Even moreastounding is the metric and rhythmic scheme in the last movement ofThree Places in New England. The rhythms are so complex that there aretriplets within quadruplets, with additional inward groups of rhythmic


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Manuscript of Three-Page Sonata. Ives’ scrawled comment at repeat sign: “Back tofirst theme—all nice sonatas must have first theme.” (Copyright Mercury Music, Inc.Photograph from the Charles Ives Papers, Irving Gilmore Music Library of YaleUniversity. Used by permission of the publisher.)

Printed version of Three-Page Sonata. Editor’s note says it “pokes fun at conventionalsonata form, yet is a genuine sonata movement.” (Copyright Mercury Music, Inc.Photograph from the Charles Ives Papers, Irving Gilmore Music Library of YaleUniversity. Used by permission of the publisher.)

units that present a difficult problem to figure out even on paper. In onepassage a seemingly insurmountable compound rhythm resolves itself intoa simple succession of strong beats. Thus Ives is having fun with theplayers and conductors.

The second movement of his Fourth Symphony opens with differenttime signatures marked for various instruments: 6/8, 5/8, 7/4, 2/4, and 4/4.The barlines do not coincide until the conclusion of three bars in 4/4,which equal six bars of 5/8 and two bars of 7/4, all moving at differentspeeds.

It is characteristic of Ives that the instrumentation of his works isextremely flexible. A highly complex orchestral score can be performed byeither a small group of players or a huge orchestra. Some instrumentalparts are ad libitum, held together by the piano, which is present in almostall his compositions. On the other hand, Ives may suddenly inject a bit ofsong into a violin sonata, or a flute part into a piano sonata, as in theThoreau movement of the Concord Sonata. He explains: “A flute may playthroughout this page. If no flute, then piano alone—but Thoreau muchprefers to hear the flute over Walden.” One of his songs contains aparenthetical indication: “From pieces for basset horn, flute, three violins,piano and drum”; another song is marked: “Originally for English hornwith violins, flute and piano.”

Similarly, sectional repeats and possible cuts are indicated in many ofhis works. In Hallowe’en, for strings and piano, the musicians areinstructed to play the music four times, with slight variations, with thisinjunction: “In any case the playing gets faster and louder each time,keeping up with the bonfire.” Ives then adds: “It has been observed byfriends that three times around is quite enough, while others stood for thefour—but as this piece was written for a Hallowe’en party and not for anice concert, the decision must be made by the players regardless of thefeelings of the audience.”

His manuscripts, with their numerous suggestions of alternateinstrumentation and ad libitum parts, are a source of both delight anddespair to admirers determined to prepare the music for publication.Added to this is an almost illegible handwriting, so shaky that the visualimpression is that of a chaotic jumble of notes. But once the manuscriptis deciphered and copied, the logic of its melodic, contrapuntal, andharmonic texture becomes clear. In case of doubt, Ives himself can berelied upon to clear the point. There is never any hesitancy on his part as


to which note is the right one and which sharp or flat is in its proper place,even though some of his unpublished manuscripts date fifty years back.Occasionally, he even sits down at a ramshackle old piano and plays somepassages to show how the music should go.

Charles Ives, the creator of the most complex music in existence, incomparison with which the wildest scores by other twentieth-centurycomposers are mere child’s play, remains, at nearly seventy-nine, anunreformed idealist. He keeps his faith in the progress of man and in theprogress of art. Designed on a plan of gigantic dimensions, his unfinishedUniverse Symphony, in which several orchestras are to play simultaneouslyin a transcendental harmony of disharmonies, is a declaration of this faith:that one must dare beyond the immediately feasible in order to makepractical what once was regarded as impossible.

2. MUSICAL PROPHET

The above signed belongs to a select group of people who may claim thedistinction of being the earliest friends of the music of Ives. It was twenty-five years ago that I met Ives. I will never forget the gradual revelation ofhis music that came to me when I studied the score of his orchestral setThree Places in New England. The poetic invocation of old America, theturbulence of rhythms and massive harmonies, the stirring motion ofwaves of musical matter supporting the melodies in a unique contrapun-tal design, all this was absorbing to me. The music was unlike any “modern”music of the day. It could not be fitted into any category. It was a tran-scendental dream, but a dream filled with concrete images that assumedan objective reality.

There was a challenge: could this music be communicated to anaudience, even though it was so personal, so difficult to perform, soimprovisatory in character?

The rhythmic problems alone were staggering. The second move-ment, a musical souvenir of Putnam’s Camp in Redding, Connecticut, with

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Part 2 originally published in Musical America, February 15, 1954.

its Revolutionary memories, contained an episode in which two villagebands marching towards the meeting place from two different directions,played tunes at different speeds, so that three bars of one metrical periodcorresponded to four bars of the other. I met this “polymetrical” problemby beating three bars in 4/4 time with my right hand against four bars in2/2 time with my left. The left hand had to move 331/3% faster than theright. Downbeats of both hands coincided at the end of a period of threebars in the right hand and a period of four bars in the left hand. Visually,it must have been amusing, but the orchestra seemed to have no difficultyin following my twofold beat.

I conducted Three Places in New England in Boston, New York, LosAngeles, Havana and Paris. The reaction varied from spellbound enthusi-asm to speculation as to what the chambers of commerce in New Englandwould say of this dissonant portrayal of its natural attractions. But the mostsignificant reaction came nearly twenty years after my first presentation ofthe score, from a New York critic who reviewed a second performance ofthe work given by the Boston Symphony. The critic quoted his own news-paper at the time of the premiere and expressed amazement that a workso intense, so effective and so direct could have been then judged as dis-cordant, confused and noisy. This candid avowal was an apt illustration ofsomething that we, the early Ivesites, knew long ago: namely, that Ives wasmany years ahead of his time, and that the times would finally catch upwith his prophetic visions.

The paradox of Ives’s genius (this word has been used without qualifi-cation by several otherwise sober critics when writing about Ives) is thathis music is at once fantastically complex and appealingly simple. His sub-ject matter is American with hardly an exception; the titles alone show thenational source of his inspiration: The Fourth of July; Lincoln, the GreatCommoner; Washington’s Birthday. His enormously difficult ConcordSonata for piano is in four movements named after the great Americanwriters of the Concord group: Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, andThoreau. To describe Hawthorne’s “celestial railroad,” Ives instructs thepianist to use a strip of wood to produce two full octaves of white or blackkeys. There are passages of great rhythmic intricacy; but then, as Ives says,“a metronome cannot measure Emerson’s mind and oversoul, any morethan the old Concord Steeple Bell could.”

No matter how complicated the rhythmic and contrapuntal patterns,the fundamental musical thought in the Concord Sonata is melodically


simple, evocative of hymn-like American tunes and nostalgic ballads, in anative—one might say a Currier and Ives—manner.

When one listens to the music of Ives without prejudice, as a laymanwould, the impression received is that of a bright American landscape,grandly designed and touched with sweeping brush strokes that suddenlyillumine the scene.

When one examines this musical panorama with regard to the specialdevices used, as a professional musician would, the analysis uncovers anastonishing abundance of technical virtuosity in writing.

When one considers Ives’s achievement in the context of the periodduring which he wrote most of his music, as a historian would, theconclusion is inescapable that Ives has anticipated every known musicalinnovation of the twentieth century.

A mere tabulation of new technical devices applied by Ives, longbefore other composers began to experiment with modernistic structures,reveals the extraordinary scope of his music:

1. Polytonality2. Atonality3. Dissonant Counterpoint4. Tone-Clusters5. Polymeters6. Polyrhythms7. Quarter-tones

In addition, Ives employs a method of free counterpoint that may bedescribed as “controlled improvisation.” The essence of this techniqueconsists in giving a rhythmic phrase to an instrument, or a group ofinstruments, with instructions to keep playing it at varying speeds andvarying dynamics for a certain number of bars.

These revolutionary advances in composition were made by Ivesbefore 1920. He has written little music since then on account of a diabeticcondition which makes it difficult for him to handle a pen. But his fightingspirit remains undiminished. His fierce loyalty to friends is as remarkableas his intransigence towards those whom he blames for social and musicalills. When he talks, he assumes a fighting stance, his right hand raised anda finger of scorn pointed at the imaginary antagonist. In music, and in life,Ives is fired by passionate convictions. He does not compromise. His

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beliefs in the goodness of the good and his abhorrence of the badness ofthe bad are absolute.

Charles Ives inherited his musical Americanism from his father,George Ives, a remarkable personality of his time. George Ives was a bandleader. During the Civil War, he played for Abraham Lincoln. After aconcert, Lincoln asked General Grant whether he enjoyed the music.Grant then made his celebrated reply. “I can’t tell,” he said. “I know buttwo tunes; one is Yankee Doodle, and the other isn’t. Which one did theband play?”

Father Ives was something more than just a band leader. He wasagitated by new musical ideas. Why should music he made of twelve notesto the octave? he wondered. Why should a tune be confined to a singletonality? Nature knows no such limitations. So Father Ives experimentedwith musical sounds much as Benjamin Franklin experimented with kitesto catch the unknown force from the skies. Father Ives intended to capturethe true pitch of church bells, and this led him to an attempt to constructa quarter-tone machine. He tied 24 violin strings to a wooden box, andtuned these strings in quarter-tones. He failed to reproduce the churchbell sound by this method, but he influenced his son to experiment furtherwith quarter-tones. These experiments were the first in America, and assuch they made unwritten history.

Father Ives believed in musical freedom. Once he told the membersof his band to disperse into several sections, placed several musicians onthe village green, sent another group to the church steeple, and put stillanother group on the roof of a house on Main Street in Danbury, Con-necticut, the birthplace of Charles Ives. Then Father Ives let them playtraditional hymns with variations, and listened to the curious harmoniesand rhythms that resulted from this free enterprise.

Thus, polytonality, microtones, polyrhythmics and other formidabletechniques of modern music were unwittingly anticipated by George Ives,and deliberately worked out by his son Charles. An interesting page fromthe history of American ingenuity!

Charles Ives received academic schooling at Yale University, where histeacher was the venerable Horatio Parker. After graduation, Ives went intoa business that seemed poles away from music—life insurance. He wassuccessful, and soon founded a copartnership, the Mutual Life InsuranceCompany. But business left him enough time for music. He wrote pagesand pages of it, in all styles, for all possible combinations of instruments.


The music world got its first glimpse into the Ives universe in 1922when he published a collection of his 114 songs. The announcement ofthe publication said simply: “Complimentary copies will be sent to anyoneas long as the supply lasts.” The volume is now a collector’s item.

Characteristically, the 114 songs are printed in reverse chronologicalorder, beginning with the song entitled Majority, dated 1921, in which thepiano part contains (for the first time in print) a number of “tone-clusters,”and ending with his earliest song, Slow March, dated 1888, when Ives wasfourteen years old.

The subject matter of these songs is as varied as their musical idioms.One finds here a cowboy ballad, Charlie Rutlage, written in a syncopatedragtime manner; romantic songs to French and German texts; and anangry proclamation under the meaningful title, Nov. 2, 1920. The wordsto this song, written under the impression of an American election thatdistressed Ives, are his own: “Prejudice and politics! The stand-patterscame in strong and yelled: Slide back! To HELL with ideals! All the oldwomen, male and female, had their day today.” An avalanche of chromaticsin minor seconds accompanies this outburst.

Smug normalcy and social self-complacency always arouse the fighterin Ives. The words “nice” and “pretty” have become invectives in hisvocabulary. He knows that timidity and conformity are enemies of actionand progress. And he invokes the spirit of his American ancestors to assisthim in his fighting task. He writes in the introduction to his set of pieces,Tone Roads: “Over the rough and rocky roads our old forefathers strodeon their way to the steepled village church or to the farmers’ harvest fair,or to the town meetings where they got up and said what they thoughtregardless of consequences.”

Ives himself got up and said what he thought—regardless of whatothers said or did. And he won. He now enjoys a large popular following.His recognition includes a Pulitzer Prize and other tokens of worldlyesteem. The story of Charles Ives teaches the timid of heart that even interms of success with the public, it pays to proclaim one’s ideas and serveone’s ideals fearlessly, boldly, with the unswerving determination of afighter for the right cause.

Charles Ives 169

Ulysses Kay is a composer who refuses to carry a label—technical, racial,stylistic. He writes music that corresponds to his artistic emotions, within aframework of harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration that provides himwith the broadest range of expression. He is not automatically satisfied withevery piece he writes, simply because it is his. Some of his music causes himacute embarrassment for no more specific reason than his detachment fromthat particular phase of his work. Some of the material he rejects is of excel-lent quality and it would be a pity if he would physically destroy themanuscripts. He has not been driven to that yet but he keeps such compo-sitions unpublished and does not offer them for publication.

The musical language of Ulysses Kay is that of enlightened modernism.This is the only “ism” that he accepts, and even that only as a matter ofchronological placement. Dissonant, expressive, if occasionally acrid, har-mony is part of the inevitable modernistic material; Ulysses Kay is notself-conscious about its use. On the other hand he does not feel constrainedto employ dissonance; there are passages in his work that are classicallymoderate.

What about the most challenging technique of modern music—thedodecaphonic system of composition? Ulysses Kay does not apply it in hisworks, but neither does he oppose it on ideological grounds (as Hindemithdoes). If at any future time he finds that for greater expressiveness andgreater coherence of musical material he needs the thematic unity andmelodic diversity provided by the 12-tone series, he will surely turn it to hispersonal use.

In view of these considerations, it is awkward and misleading to classifyKay’s music as that of an American composer of Negro extraction, a productof the Eastman School of Music and the seminars of Columbia University,

18. ULYSSES KAY

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Tanglewood and Yale; the work of a Prix de Rome winner, a FulbrightFellow to Italy, a denizen of the American Academy in Rome—eventhough all these are facts of his life.

Ulysses Kay writes:

My musical memories date back to early childhood in Tucson, Arizona,where I was born on January 7, 1917 . . . memories of my father (who hadbeen a cowboy and a jockey in Texas, but was then a barber) singing andbeating out rhythms to pacify or entertain me . . . memories of my mother(who was from Louisiana) singing in church and at work around home.

My life seemed always to have been involved in music. An older sisterstudied the piano, playing classical sonatas, much of Chopin, Rachmani-noff, salon pieces and popular songs of the day. But my favorites were thegay and energetic marches that she pounded out as I, aged three or four,cavorted about with a broomstick. My brother played violin and later sax-ophone, though he had left home before I was in focus musically.However, at age ten or so, I was given his violin and my sister gave me asaxophone when I was about twelve.

My mother also played the piano and apparently was concerned aboutme and music. During one of our frequent visits to Chicago (when I wasabout five or six), she asked my Uncle Joe—yes, the famous King Oliver—if he would teach me to play the trumpet. To which he replied, “No,Lizzie. Give that boy piano lessons so’s he can learn the rudiments. Andthen he’ll find what he wants to do in music.”A most acute comment froma real musician whose work, style, playing and tunes, even then, werebeing literally taken “on the cuff” by members of the confraternity whosat out front night after night while he played.

Of course, all this was unknown to me then, and for years I remem-bered only the big, quiet, dark man with the bad eye, who always got uplate in the afternoon and drank quart cups of sweetened water with hisfirst huge meal of the day. Shy questions from me about Uncle Joe’s bandand his trumpet playing invariably broke his quiet mood and started himteasing me. Yet his work and life in music seemed magical and his phono-graph records held no end of fascination for me.

Musical life back in Tucson consisted of piano lessons—later, violinand saxophone lessons; glee club, marching band, high school danceorchestra, and, finally, one year of the liberal arts course at the University.An A.B. degree seemed desirable, but, missing music terribly, I changed

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to the music school and majored in Public School Music. Piano study withJulia Rebeil introduced me to the works of Béla Bartók and othercontemporaries; music theory with John L. Lowell gave me a completelynew world to conjure with. Through his encouragement I won a scholar-ship to the Eastman School, where I studied with Bernard Rogers andHoward Hanson. There, at Eastman, I heard my first orchestral worksperformed publicly—an invaluable experience.

A Tanglewood scholarship enabled me to study with Paul Hindemithduring the summer of 1941, and Hindemith helped me get a scholarshipto study with him at Yale during 1941–42. Shortly thereafter I enlisted inthe Navy, auditioning on my long since neglected alto saxophone, and wasassigned to a band stationed at Quonset Point, Rhode Island. In the Navyband I learned flute and piccolo, played piano in the dance orchestra, didmuch arranging and some composing.

After the war I came to New York, enrolled at Columbia, attended OttoLuening’s seminar sporadically, and composed as much as possible. Aunique experience at this time was writing and conducting music for “TheQuiet One.” This sensitive film, written and produced by people with atrue concern for music, was a fine opportunity for me as a composer.There followed prizes, performances, a two and a half year sojurn at theAmerican Academy in Rome, return to America—and I’m still composing.

Kay’s first work, which he acknowledges at all, was a set of ten pianopieces for children, written when he was 22 years old, an age regarded as“old” for an opus 1. These pieces are charming miniatures along modallines, redolent of European folksongs and incongruously close to Liadov’sharmonizations of Russian songs. This set was followed by his first impor-tant orchestral work, a Sinfonietta; in this work a pastoral mood prevailed,with hardly a ripple of hidden excitement. In his Oboe Concerto, composedwhen he was 23, and in Five Mosaics for chamber orchestra of the sameperiod, Ulysses Kay is still a lyric composer, evoking well-proportionedlandscapes of sound, and amply succeeding in this modest undertaking. Inhis early works Kay tried out his technical strength; very soon contrapuntalthinking of an increasingly complex character evolved. He began to writefor chamber music combinations demanding variety and polyphonicwisdom—a violin sonatina, a duo for flute and oboe, and a quintet for fluteand strings. He began to receive recognition from his fellow musicians andfrom the various executive and legislative musical bodies. His nameappeared on the programs of contemporary music festivals in the United


States; Leonard Bernstein played the piano part in his Sonatina for Violinand Piano at a New York concert of the League of Composers; and in 1944the New York Philharmonic, under the direction of Thor Johnson, per-formed at the Lewisohn Stadium his first important work for largeorchestra, the overture Of New Horizons. In 1946 this score received theAmerican Broadcasting Company prize. Ten years later, Ulysses Kay con-ducted this work in Tucson: the local boy made good.

Little by little, Ulysses Kay entered the charmed circle of young (and, astime passed, not so young) American composers whose biographies werecuriously similar: prizes (not too rich, but flattering); sojourns at the Ameri-can Academy in Rome (on grants of millions—not of dollars, but of Italianlire); pictures on the music page of the Sunday Times; publication of fullorchestral scores (not engraved, but autographed by another, not so fortu-nate composer, working in a publisher’s office); commissions to write forfilms (the documentary variety, for a limited public, on a low budget); mem-bership in a composers’ association (paying actual royalties plus additionalbonuses); and finally, a serene state of artistic security (but with a gnawingfeeling of inadequacy of reward, and even of inadequacy of one’s ownmusic).

The list of Kay’s works is an impressive one; in a dictionary entry hemight bear the adjective “prolific,” but without the stigma, we hope, of utteruselessness that hounds so many “prolific” composers. Kay is anything but adictionary composer; he is eminently alive, and the multiude of his worksdoes not smother the truly inspired pages of his best compositions. Perhapshe is right in discarding some of his scores; not because they are inferior,but because other scores are superior. He might as well exhibit his best.

If a selection were to be made among his compositions for such awindow display, then the following should be chosen: the cantata, Song ofJeremiah (1947); Piano Quintet (1949); Three Pieces after Blake (1952); Ser-enade for Orchestra (1954); the Second String Quartet (1956). It should benoted that two movements from the string quartet are instrumentalrearrangements of Three Pieces after Blake (an act of self-borrowing aboutwhich the composer is somewhat shy, even when reminded that Beethovenused the same minuet in his piano sonata No. 20 and in his Septet). All theseworks possess the salient characteristics of Kay’s mature style: a melodic linefull of intervallic tension; rich polyphony, almost “Netherlandish” in its clar-ity in complexity; vibrant harmonic progressions strongly supported by animaginatively outlined bass; sonorous instrumentation, with dynamic risesand falls in artful alternation; an energetically pulsating rhythm.

Ulysses Kay 173

The melodic line is one of the most individual traits of Kay’s works.Every segment has a certain tonal center, explicit or implicit; the melodyconverges upon such a tonal center by convolution, in spirals. A large inter-val, usually with dissonant harmonic implications (a major seventh, a minorninth) may open such a spiral melody; a smaller interval would follow it,moving in the opposite direction; a still smaller one would reverse the direc-tion once more, until the central tone is either reached or approached.Conversely, a small interval (as likely as not, a minor second) may expandspirally from the central position to the peripheral one.


Three pieces after Blake for dramatic soprano and orchestra.

Ulysses Kay 175

The rhythmic diversity and intervallic variations offer a multitudeof possibilities for a melodic development that is tangentially atonal,and yet, symmetrical and even singable.

“The Children’s Hour.” (Copyright 1954 by Peer International Corporation.Reproduced by permission.)


String Quartet no. 2; first movement.

In his polyphonic writing, Ulysses Kay rarely follows the strict pro-cedures of fugal imitation; rather he emulates Beethoven’s “imitationthrough deviation” which gives freedom without a loss of contrapuntalcohesion.

Ulysses Kay 177

Serenade for Orchestra. (Copyright 1955 by Associated Music Publishers, Inc. [BMI]International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.)

In his harmonies, Kay applies a spiral method virtually identicalwith his melodic practice, inflating or deflating his chords chromatically.


Serenade for Orchestra. (Copyright 1955 by Associated Music Publishers, Inc. [BMI]International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.)

His instrumentation is always limited to essentials, without neglect-ing tonal color; he does not affect an inordinately large orchestra, or theeconomically reduced skeleton ensembles so much in vogue amongneoclassicists. His rhythm shows a natural impulse rather than an arti-ficial striving for unenforceable complexities.

Ulysses Kay 179

When he needs an acceleration of pace, he merely adds a unit to asub-division progressing from two to a beat, to three, four, or (rarely)five—an ancient device, but how effective!

The majority of Kay’s works are set in absolute forms wherein theprogress of musical thought is the only driving force. But he is alsosingularly gifted for dramatic expression. His short opera to Chekhov’shumorous sketch The Boor reveals a Mussorgskyan flair for a speech-likemelorhythmic line; without resorting to obvious effects he manages toportray the preposterous characters in the play and their fantastic behaviorin a direct and forceful manner. The work was commissioned by theKoussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress. With all theopera workshops in this country eagerly looking for short effective stagepieces, why is it that this work still remains unperformed?

American composers are at the crossroads—at an intersection of threeroads, the serial, the neo-baroque and that of the intransigent avant-garde.The serial road, in the Schoenbergian direction, is rapidly growing overwith cryptochromatic weeds. The neo-baroque road has been pollutedbeyond recovery by Stravinsky’s acolytes. As to the third road, it hasbecome an Escher print, in which giant ants are twisted on a Möbius strip,with the vistas literally “far-out.”

Intersections of three roads are trivia in Latin; the word trivial comesdirectly from it. Benjamin Lees is not trivial in his music. He must havefound a new, untraveled road, or at least not traffic-congested, for hismusical peregrinations. The fourth road of Benjamin Lees has featuresthat are common to the landscape of musical history, ranging fromstraightforward triadic constructions to acrid chromaticism. He eschewsexperimentation for experiment’s sake. Even his notation is “normal,” andhe refuses to resort to the fashionable graphics à la moderne. Time was,not so long ago, that the basic requirement for “important” music was itsunpleasantness. Art had to be ugly to be interesting. It must be quite ashock to a contemporary composer to read the banner headline of anarticle by the esteemed Washington music critic Irving Lowens, “FiveBeautiful Etudes from Lees,” reviewing a work for piano and orchestra,completed by Benjamin Lees in his demesne at Great Neck, New York, on28 September 1974, and first performed by the Houston Symphony amonth later.

The score employs a large orchestra with a flurry of rhythmicpercussion. The opening measures are given to two muted trumpets, an

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Ch. 19: originally published in Tempo, June 1975.

oboe and a couple of flutes a-flutter, accompanied by a snare-drum. Theharmony, built on minor seconds and major sevenths, is sharply dissonant.The basic rhythmic progression is in rapid 16th-notes; the meter is inmultiples of 3/8, occasionally stumbling into 5/8. If we are to believe themusical therapists that music is beneficial when it naturally correspondsto the systolic and diastolic alternation of heartbeats, then the first of thefive “beautiful Etudes” by Benjamin Lees can be used for cardiacstimulation, allowing for an occasional syncope.

Music lives by contrasts. The second Etude abandons the acrid inter-vallic scheme of the first in favour of spacious triadic structures. The thirdEtude is an exercise in parallel triads, chromatically linked, giving theimpression of amplified unisons. It opens “briskly, with authority,” and pro-gresses steadily in rhythm and dynamics, with melodic notes adorned bytrills and grace-notes. The ending is polytonal, with two minor triads, on Aand on F, capped by a high B. The fourth Etude presents another contrast.It is a Scherzo, with Chinese blocks, glockenspiel, celesta and later the cas-tanets setting the pace, while the piano projects a series of consecutiveminor sixths. The bass drum provides an epitaph. The fifth Etude retainsthe thematic intervallic structures of minor seconds and major sevenths,but they are mitigated by harmonic couplings in minor thirds. The lollingmeter is in multiples of quarter-notes; there is even a soupçon of a waltz.The concluding chord spans the thematic major sevenths.

Perusing the scores of Benjamin Lees, one is beginning to noticecertain idiosyncrasies. Each of his Etudes for orchestra begins either withan instrumental solo, or with the presentation of a “concertino” for severalinstruments. Our curiosity is aroused. Do these consistently used solointroductions serve as declarations of intentions, statements of aims whichepitomize the content of the music as a prologue does in Shakespearedrama? We find such a prologue in the flute solo that inaugurates TheTrumpet of the Swan for narrator and orchestra, the score of which Leescompleted on 15 March 1972. It opens with a clearly triadic statement forsolo flute, ending with a minimally chromaticized cadence.

Benjamin Lees In Excelsis 181

The cantata Medea in Corinth, written in 1970, and scored for fourvoices and instruments, begins with a horn solo. The Concerto forChamber Orchestra, completed on 15 August 1966, opens with a uniquecombination of bass clarinet and bass drum. In the Third Symphony, threeinterludes and a postlude, as well as the opening, are written for solo tenorsaxophone. There are exceptions, of course. Thus the orchestral Spectrum,completed on 29 April 1964, enters in medias res, with a statement forseveral instruments in unison.

The Trumpet of the Swan is a symphonic narrative based on the bookof the same title by E. B. White. Scientists have largely destroyed thebeautiful legend that swans have voices that correspond in perfection totheir shape; their natural cries of joy or of distress are but croaks andgrunts, similar to those of frogs in the swamp. And the song of the dyingswan, fabled in mythology and choreography, is a death rattle. But wouldit be proper for a composer to mimic the ornithological swan? Of coursenot. E. B. White’s tale is poetic and gently humorous. It tells the story ofsorrow when the father swan discovers that his firstborn cygnet is mute.Because of that the baby swan nearly falls a victim of a red fox; fortunatelythe predator is chased away by an intrepid farm boy. The old swan isdetermined to remedy the cygnet’s defect. He flies to the city, locates amusic store, and dives into the window in search of a trumpet for hiscygnet. (Here Lees introduces a pane of glass in the percussion sectionwhich is shattered to produce a realistic effect.) The father swan spots ashiny trumpet on the shelf and carries it back to his nest. He hangs thetrumpet around the cygnet’s neck and teaches him to blow. The cygnet isdelighted with the trumpet and plays a merry gigue on it.

Now that he can sing, he feels the onset of cygnet love. He splashesdown on a lake in the Philadelphia Zoo, and there he finds a long-neckedlady swan whose name is Serena. She sings her own response to thecygnet’s excited love song on the English horn.



But danger lurks. An intruder tries to catch Serena with a net. Swiftlythe cygnet flies to her defense, drives his sharp bill into the seat of theman’s trousers and puts him to flight. The cygnet then takes Serena to hispaternal lake, to raise a family of his own. In the meantime his fame as atrumpet player has spread all over Philadelphia, and he is actually engagedas soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the first swan to be sohonoured. Naturally, the work itself received its first performance withthat great orchestra, on 13 May 1972.

Benjamin Lees could not very well model his trumpeter swan afterthe mellifluous cello swan of Saint-Saëns, or on the romantically magicalswans of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. After all, his swan’s trumpet waspurloined from a thoroughly realistic music store and so had to berealistically set to music. But doesn’t E. B. White’s tale remind us ofProkofiev’s Peter and the Wolf? It certainly does; there is a brave boy whokeeps away the predators, and there is a perfect happy ending. But Leeskeeps away from the temptations of emulating Prokofiev’s animalnaturalism. His music tells the swans’ story on his own terms in his ownpersonal idiom.

By natural inclination, Benjamin Lees is a symphonist. Hisinstrumental and chamber music has symphonic dimensions. AmongAmerican composers only Walter Piston is so consistently symphonic in hisproductions. True, Benjamin Lees has written stage works and choralscores: a music drama, The Oracle, composed in 1955, a comic opera, TheGilded Cage (1971), a dramatic cantata to texts by Walt Whitman, Visionsof Poets (1961) and Medea in Corinth (1970) for voices, wind quintet andtimpani. Faithful to the classical ideal of symmetric construction, heprefers the tripartite form. Almost all of his symphonic works are in threemovements. His Second Symphony, composed in 1958, is tripartite. Itsfinale is an Adagio, while the middle movement, a Scherzo, constitutes asubstantive statement that elevates it to the stature of a symphonic sectionall by itself.


Benjamin Lees completed his Third Symphony in 1968; it was firstperformed by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra on 17 January 1969,under the direction of Sixten Ehrling. It is a most extraordinary work,laced with interludes for tenor saxophone. The third interlude is a dip-tych, one panel of which is a triadic invocation with a clearly outlinedtonality of G minor; the second panel, hinged to it by a brief rhythmicdecoration of percussive Chinese blocks, is acutely chromatic, with eachphrase contained within the major seventh, or rather, as Lees spells itenharmonically, a diminished octave.

In the third movement of the Symphony, Lees inserts a boldprogression of a descending chromatic scale, doubled in major seconds inclarinets against a similarly enriched ascending chromatic scale in thebassoons.

Benjamin Lees has written two piano concertos, a violin concerto, aconcerto for orchestra, a concerto for chamber orchestra, an oboe concertoand a concerto for string quartet and orchestra. All these concertos aresymphonic in their structure. Let us examine the Concerto for StringQuartet and Orchestra. Lees completed the score on 6 December 1964;it was first performed on 19 January 1965 by the Paganini Quartet with

the Kansas City Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of HansSchwieger. The introductory violin solo to the second movement is a locusclassicus of Lees’s style. The initial phrase moves from an empty fifth onC to its empty dominant on G. The second part of the phrase shifts to anempty fifth at the distance of a tritone, coming to rest on an empty fifthon F sharp. By an anamorphic change, the melody is extended to a Cminor triad in open harmony, followed by an F sharp minor triad in openharmony. There ensues an interplay of minor seconds (or their extension,the minor ninth) coming to rest, through a series of diminished octaves.

These progressions are symptomatic of the modulatory schemes ofseveral works of Benjamin Lees: triads, usually explicitly or implicitlyminor triads, in close harmony; interplay of intervals of the diminishedoctave, and minor triads in open harmony; cadential conclusions withshifting tonics at the distance of a minor second, major seventh or minorninth, wherein a minor ninth appears as the summation of two tritoneshinged by a minor second.

As in most compositions in a symphonic form, Benjamin Lees hascast his Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra as a triptych, with thetwo outer panels symmetrically enclosing the more spacious central part.Both the first and last movements are set in Allegro, the first con brio, theother energico. The inner slow movement is Andante cantando. This slowmovement itself is tripartite, beginning with a graceful canon formed bythe second violin, viola and cello of the “concertino.” This canon recurstwice before fading out. The concluding harmony of this slow movementis typical of bitonal usages which Lees applies in several of his works,namely a superimposition of two major triads having a single tone incommon, in this case C major and E major. In his addiction to tripartitesymmetry, Benjamin Lees continues the historic line of such composers


as Chopin and Brahms, but he avoids the overt use of literal da capo. Nowthat graphic notation is so much in fashion, it would be interesting tomake a geometric diagram of a typical Lees structure, dividing it intothree triangles, each component triangle into three smaller triangles, andso on with the numbers of resultant sections being powers of 3: 9, 27, 81,243, etc.

Benjamin Lees completed one of his most significant works, theConcerto for Chamber Orchestra, on 15 August 1966. This work isprimarily an essay in rhythmic antiphony. Characteristically, it opens withan instrumental solo, presented by the bass clarinet accompanied by thebass drum, a unique essay in low sonorities, marked Adagio, misterioso.Its generating motive is a wave rising up a minor ninth, and immediatelyreceding to the initial tone.

After several deliberate false starts, the main tempo, Allegro, is struck.A series of trills in the upper strings aggregates to a dissonant bitonalchord, with high woodwind and muted trumpets throwing off chromaticsparks which are quickly extinguished in a downward cascade. Once morethe trilled strings build up to a dissonant chord, giving rise to a prolongedthematic statement. There is a shrill solo of the muted trumpet in highregister and the rhythmical flow is fractioned in brusque display in whicha 16th-note is the minimal rhythmic unit. A rapid fire of antiphonalexplosions forms a sparkling, crackling scherzo section; it gradually burnsout, and in the glowing embers there is heard once again the bass clarinetsolo accompanied by the bass drum. This is allowed to slow down to anatural coda.

The second movement, Adagio, is born out of a languid progressionof slow major seconds. In contrast to the first movement, the thematicelements in this Adagio are composed of large intervallic progressions,initiated by a solo flute. The call of the muted trumpets signalize agradually accelerated pace with ever increasing rhythmic frequencies,from even half-notes to quarter-notes, to eighth-notes, until a grand climaxis reached in fortissimo. Once more the movement recedes to a languid



procession before coming to an end, with the trumpets, now unmuted,paired in major seconds.

The third and final movement is marked Spiritoso, and the flow ofmusic justifies this description. In constantly changing meters, with the16th-note as a basic unit, the musical current pursues its relentless rush.The characteristic paired major seconds determine the harmonicfoundation of the initial section. The intervallic span is then allowed toexpand to a minor third, until all intervallic elements converge to theresounding chord on D. This completes the tonal cycle of the entire work.The structure of the Concerto for Chamber Orchestra demonstrates thestrong feeling that Benjamin Lees has for what may be called cyclicstereometry, in which the cyclic element is asserted by the recurrence ofthematic figures and a frequent return to the tonic in unison, while thestereometric element is represented by a crystallic symmetry of antiphonalcounterpoint.

Spectrum for orchestra, which Benjamin Lees completed on 29 April1964, seems to suggest by its very title the intention to explore the entiresonorous range of the orchestra. Set in a single movement, it approximatesthe genre of a tone poem. It opens Andantino tranquillo, without theintroductory instrumental solo which we have come to expect in a work byBenjamin Lees. Here the projection is chordal, with characteristicchromatic étincelles given out by the strings. The muted trumpets give apervasive sound in a coloristic gamut; the shimmering bitonal figurationsin the high treble of the piano provide the background for the rhythmicsignals of the woodwinds. The sonorous spectrum is amplified as thetrumpets enter unmuted; sparks fly off misterioso in the woodwinds andin the muted strings in figurations reminiscent of the introduction to theConcerto for Chamber Orchestra. The climax is reached in triple forte, asall colours of the spectrum are flashed in a brilliant rainbow. What isbeguiling in this work is the persistence of the intervallic figure of anascending major second and a descending minor second, which graduallyelevates the pitch of the melodic line. At times this ascent is made moredecisive by an upward leap of a tritone.

So personal, so distinct, so assertive are the stylistic and idiomaticusages in the works of Benjamin Lees that an immediately recognizableGestalt is formed from an attentive perusal of his scores. His most recentwork, the Second Violin Sonata, completed on 27 February 1973, may wellserve as an exhibit. It opens characteristically with a long violin solo,

intervallically built of perfect fifths, perfect fourths, and tritones. By theprocess of simple addition, these melodic intervals form double stops: aminor seventh (made up of two perfect fourths), a major seventh (formedby the addition of a tritone to a perfect fourth), and of course, an octave(a classical summation of a perfect fifth and a perfect fourth).

The main subject of the first movement of the Violin Sonata, Allegro,is contained within the interval of the major seventh, which is divisible intothe tritone and a perfect fourth. The remarkable fidelity which Leesobserves in treating thematic intervals suggests serial procedures. ButLees is no serialist. In none of his works does he set up any semblance ofan explicit tone-row, and rarely if ever makes use of the orthodox serialdevices of inversion and retrograde motion. Although he dispenses withkey signatures in his works, the aura of tonality is unmistakable.Furthermore, he does not hesitate to make use of sequences, generallyabhorred by modern composers; nor is he averse to using the baroquetype of harmonic and melodic figurations, another device commonlyscorned by the musical élite.

The second movement is an Adagio, introduced in the piano by analternation of dissonant chords of bitonal derivation, marked “sad, distant.”The entire development of this movement is spent in gradual crescendoand diminuendo, with the music dying away towards a bitonal ending. Thethird movement is Allegro. It has the character of a toccata and progressesbriskly towards a brilliant assertive conclusion, ending on a chordthematically built of major sevenths.

As a professional pianist, Benjamin Lees has a natural way with themodern keyboard. His Fourth Piano Sonata, which he wrote in 1963, is asgood a specimen as any of his lean and rational pianistic style. Typically,it is cast in three movements. The very first note of the opening is aforceful C. One turns hopefully towards the end of the piece, expecting tofind a forceful C, and one’s expectations are not disappointed. The firstmovement of the Fourth Piano Sonata is in crisp toccata manner, Allegro


energico. Time signatures change frequently, with the minimal rhythmicunit remaining a 16th-note. Relaxation of tempo is achieved by the simpledevice of setting the eighth-note as a unit; and when further relaxation isdesired, a quarter-note. The second movement is an Adagio. Its formsuggests a free fantasia; the tempo varies all the time, reaching prestissimoat one point before subsiding into a tranquil coda. The intervallic matrixis a diminished octave, enharmonically equivalent to the composer’sfavorite major seventh. The last movement is Allegro deciso. The form isthat of a Rondo-Toccata. The thematic interval is again a diminishedoctave, but the ending is clear, a triumphant quadruple union on C in thelow register.

Benjamin Lees marked his half century last year under the mostfavorable signs of the musical zodiac. At a time when so many otherwisevaliant composers are star-crossed and complain of malign neglect,Benjamin Lees rises in excelsis on the musical firmament. He encountersbenign conjunctions among conductors and instrumentalists, who arewilling and often eager to perform his music. His orchestral works havebeen conducted by such podium luminaries as Eugene Ormandy, GeorgeSzell, William Steinberg, Erich Leinsdorf, Dorati, Mehta, ThomasSchippers, Max Rudolf, Sixten Ehrling, Jean Martinon, Hans Schwiegerand Milton Katims. For his piano music, Lees is fortunate in having afaithful and brilliant performer in Gary Graffman. He is also fortunate inmundane rewards. He has held two Guggenheim Fellowships, a FulbrightFellowship, a Copley Foundation Award and the UNESCO Award. Hevisited Russia under the auspicies of the Office for Cultural Exchange ofthe State Department. And his ASCAP ratings, reflecting the frequencyof performances of his works, are at their allowed maximum. Altogether,an encouraging spectacle of a U.S. composer recognized in his own land.


The problem of performing complicated music has received novel anddrastic solution at the hands of an American in Mexico whose name isConlon Nancarrow. The name may be faintly familiar to attentivefollowers of modern music, for in 1938 the New Music Quarterlypublished some of Nancarrow’s piano pieces, complicated in rhythmicdesign, and arresting in musical content. A biographical noticeaccompanying the publication reads:

Born October 17, 1912, in Texarkana, Arkansas. Studied two years atCincinnati Conservatory. Played trumpet in several jazz orchestras. Em-ployed on Boston WPA for about two years. Went to Spain to help fightFascism in May, 1937.

After his Spanish adventure, during which Nancarrow received aslight shrapnel wound, he went to Mexico, where he became a natural-ized Mexican citizen. But he did not detach himself from the musicalworld at large. He followed the developments of modern music withassiduous interest, and collected an extensive library on musical subjects,ranging from acoustics to the latest developments of 12-tone music.

In Mexico, Nancarrow continued to compose, mostly for piano. Therhythmic complexity of his music was such that he had to change thetime signature practically in every bar. The difficulties of performanceby a human pianist accordingly became enormous.

Realizing that only a mechanical instrument could guaranteeperfection of his rhythmic and dynamic ideas, he conceived a plan as

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Ch. 20: originally published in The Christian Science Monitor, November 10, 1962.

revolutionary as it was simple. He decided to put his music directly onthe roll of a player piano.

He thereupon drew a chart of correspondence between the 88 keysof the piano and the perforations on the piano roll; he calculated carefullythe geometric coordination between the required duration of each notein a complex rhythmic design and the length of the vertical lines onpaper; and he proceeded to punch holes on paper rolls to make his musicperformable.

To give some notion of the amount of work involved in this process,a single sustained note requires punching a vertical line of holes severalfeet long. Then each interval skip requires an individual shift in thehorizontal direction, and a shift in the vertical, according to note values.

Obviously, this hole-punching method of composition could not bedone by hand. So he invented a machine to make the process morespeedy, much like a huge typewriter, with horizontal and vertical tabula-tors. Still, the setting of a single piano piece, lasting only three minutes,required vast and extended labor. Not since medieval times, probably, hasa composer worked so industriously and so determinedly on the problemof adequate representation of his thought.

He writes music on manuscript paper first, and afterwards “copies”it on his punch-hole machine, following the chromatic scale, as a typistfollows numbers on the margin indicator on the typewriter. When the“copy” is finished, it can be played on an ordinary, old-fashioned player-piano.

There are advantages in the method. A note can be sustainedindefinitely like a pedal point on an organ. There is no limit to velocityin passage work; no technical difficulties exist for melodic skips that areawkward or unperformable by a pianist’s hands. Above all, polyrhythmiclines can be maintained in different registers of the piano, or criss-crossed at will.

In order to control the dynamics, he has rigged up a pressure gauge,looking very much like the radiator of a central heating system. To makethe articulation of piano keys more precise, he has tightened themechanism of the hammers. The piano pedals are superfluous in hisscheme, for the harmony can be sustained by punching so many moreholes in the piano roll.

The direct method of composition on piano rolls is only the firststep in Nancarrow’s ambitious scheme of creating a perfect performing

Conlon Nancarrow 191

machine. He has already started on the construction of mechanicaldrums, with hammers hitting different parts of the drumhead, thussecuring a variety of timbres, like those employed by Stravinsky (in hisHistory of a Soldier); Bartók (in his Music for Strings, Percussion andCelesta); and particularly Varèse (in his all-percussion work, Ionization).Later, there will follow similar applications for string and windinstruments. When, many years hence, Nancarrow completes hisproject—and he is fully determined to see it through—he will have athis service an orchestra of rhythmic and dynamic precision andtechnical perfection that would justify the wildest dreams of musicalalchemists.

His musical laboratory is in itself fantastic to behold. It is coveredwith overhanging mats to deaden unwanted reverberations and echoes.The punching machine, the two player pianos, the various drums, thepressure gauge, and the numerous other wooden and metallic gadgetsseem out of this world.

The laboratory is housed in a modernistic villa designed by theMexican artist, Juan O’Gorman, and decorated with stone mosaics. Asystem of multi-colored lights in the rooms and in the laboratory has forhim some symbolic significance.

The question arises whether Nancarrow’s music is good enough, asmusic, to justify all these elaborate contraptions; and, for believers inmusical innovation, it may be answered in the affirmative. Nancarrowhas original melodic invention. His gift for rhythmic counterpoint isremarkable. His harmony is compact and resonant.

In common with modern trends that oppose murky chromaticism, hewrites along diatonic lines, in a style that is described by the termpandiatonic, in which all seven notes of the scale are freely mingledtogether, forming pleasantly spiced dissonances. His form is clear andsymmetrical in relation to the central melodic idea. Many of his shorterpieces give the impression of a slowly rising curve toward a middleclimax, followed by a gradual decline toward a gentle coda.

He glories in rhythm. His Boogie-Woogie Suites invest popularAmerican rhythms with luxuriant variety of moods, from the nostalgic tothe riotous. These rhythmic pieces, abounding in sparkling scales anddashing figurations, produce an exhilarating effect on the listener, aneffect due, in good measure, to the unlimited resources of the techniqueof composition by hole-punching.


Without intrinsic talent, however, all the mechanical tricks in theworld would amount to nothing. The important thing is that Nancarrow’smethod gives full expression to what he has to say in purely musicalterms. And what he has to say, nobody, we may be certain, has ever saidbefore.

Conlon Nancarrow 193

Walter Piston owes his patronymic to his grandfather, Pistone, an Italianby birth. The final “e” fell off when Pistone came to America; he marriedan American woman, and his son, Walter Piston’s father, married anAmerican.

Piston was born in Rockland, Maine, on January 20, 1894. Hischildhood and early youth were spent without indication that he was tobecome a musician. Other interests occupied his time; he went to an artschool in Boston, and after graduation entered upon the career of anartist. He studied violin and piano mostly as a sideline. He did not go tocollege to study music but became interested in it from an intellectualpoint of view. For himself and by himself he tried to establish thefundamental musical laws.

He played the violin in the Pierian Sodality, which is the UniversityOrchestra of Harvard. Later he became its conductor, and studiedinstruments and the technique of orchestral scoring.

At that time he was already proficient in theory and practice ofcomposition. He attacked the large forms at once, and wrote for theorchestra. Following in the footsteps of many an American composer, hewent to the Conservatory of Fontainebleau to study with NadiaBoulanger; and upon his return he was well qualified to join the HarvardMusic Faculty when the opportunity came. He has written a scholarlyvolume on harmony, shortly to be published.

Perhaps the most significant work of Piston is his orchestral Suite,performed by Stokowski at the all-American broadcast in the spring of

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1932. The composer appears in it a full-fledged modernist. The oldsystem of tonality all but breaks down in this score; Piston desperatelyfights the tonic-dominant complex; and to avoid fifths and octavessuggestive of tonality, he builds his themes on the augmented fourth andthe major seventh, these two banners of the dodecuple system. Heacknowledges the fascination which the formula holds for him; but hedoes not join out-and-out atonalists in cultivating the rigid schemes of theVienna school; rather his atonality is an escape from the musical past. Thefugue of the third movement of the Suite is built on a motive of threenotes, with interval-indices, the major seventh, the augmented fourth,and the perfect fourth (which latter is the difference between the firsttwo). It is instructive to observe that the perfect fourth is treated byPiston as a tetrachord, always tonally.

The Suite is an American work, and Piston is nothing loth toincorporate a “blues” interlude in the score. “Snaredrum with wire brush”marks the four-four time, and the crooning melody is woven against it inthe best manner of symphonic Broadway.

Walter Piston is one of the most frugal composers, even in NewEngland; Sessions is only second to him. But what little Piston writesinvariably finds its way to public performance. His is not a hedonisticmusic, yet it is human and playable.

The Sonata for Flute and Piano enjoys particular favor among thesponsors of advanced chamber music; then there is the charmingTriphony for Flute, Clarinet, and Bassoon. The Suite for Oboe and Piano,in five divisions, commands easy attention in view of the paucity ofmaterial for this combination. The Sonata for Pianoforte and the ratherobsolescent Symphonic Piece (a sort of absolute music with a vengeance)complete the catalogue of Piston’s acknowledgeable works.

Among American composers, Walter Piston appears as a builder of afuture academic style, taking this definition without any derogatoryimplications. There are composers who draw on folklore, and there arecomposers who seek new colors, new rhythms, and new harmonies.Walter Piston codifies rather than invents. His imagination supplies himwith excellent ideas, and out of this material he builds his music, withoutwords, descriptive titles, and literature. He is an American composerspeaking the international idiom of absolute music.

Walter Piston 195

Probity, fortitude, dignity, humanity—all these abstract virtues are rarelycombined in a single individual. Still more rarely, are they joined byknowledge, art and practical performance. In the field of music, Walling-ford Riegger—Wally, as he was known to friends—was one of those whopossessed such noble qualities. I met him in 1928 when I was starting onmy career—later aborted because of circumstances—of a professionalconductor. I met Charles Ives, Edgar Varèse and Henry Cowell, andthrough them became associated with the cause of modern music, musicso new that it seemed to be extraterrestrial in its sound and its techniques.I also began to be interested in the new technology of musical sound,“organized sound,” as Varèse called such structures. I worked with JosephSchillinger, the Russian inventor of “mathematical” music and with LeonTheremin who came to the United States to demonstrate his electronicinstrument that bore his name, the Thereminovox. And then I metWallingford Riegger. In his cast of countenance he was a typical scholar, aphilosopher, always wearing glasses, always quiet, never given to exuberantutterances. He studied music in Germany and was interested in theproblems of musical education. He wrote a number of didactic piecesunder so many pseudonyms that music historians and biographers aredriven to desperation in trying to account for them all. Wallingford Rieggerwas William Richards and Walter Scotson and Gerald Wilfrid Gore andJohn H. McCurdy and George Northrup and Robert Sedgwick andLeonard Gregg and Edwin Farell and Edgar Long. These Doppelgängerwrote music for use, Gebrauchsmusik.

Riegger played several instruments well, and he learned to manipulatethe Theremin cello connected with a rheostat which controlled the flow ofthe electric current and allowed the player to change dynamics and timbre

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of the sound. As Wallingford Riegger, he wrote works of remarkablestrength, in a modern idiom that was a logical extension of the classicalBaroque. His pieces were admirably coordinated without pedantry andunfailingly productive of the intended structural purpose. His Study inSonority for ten violins still remains a unique achievement in multiplecounterpoint of sounds. I had the privilege of having given the first per-formance of his masterpiece Dichotomy, scored for chamber orchestra,which I conducted at one of my concerts in Berlin in 1932. The work gavea chance to the critic of Allgemeine Musikzeitung to produce a verbal sur-realist landscape which in its desire to damn the music achieved theopposite effect of enhancing its visionary essence. A translation would notgive the review its proper flavor; here is the text in German: “Es klang, alswenn eine Herde Ratten langsam zu Tode gepeinigt würde und dazwis-chen von Zeit zu Zeit eine sterbende Kuh stöhnte.” A pack of rats beingslowly (what a beautiful modifier!) tortured to death against the back-ground of a dying cow groaning now and then! Wally loved this review. Herefused to be upset by ignorant opinions, and he appreciated opponentswho had the power of expressing themselves effectively. He was a modernSocrates who accepted the necessity of condemnation for his teachingwithout withdrawing any of his precepts.

But there was one occasion when Wally spoke up from the woundedheart, vehemently, intransigently defending his rights. It was when hewas summoned by the infamous House Committee on Un-AmericanActivities to answer charges of subversion. Specifically, he was accused ofhaving acted as a recruiting officer for the Communist party in the districtof Manhattan between 45th and 65th streets. His rebuke to the miserableinquisitors would merit a place in the history of the long fight for libertyagainst oppressors who would tarnish the name of the United States ofAmerica. Riegger did not invoke the defensive Fifth Amendment, but theFirst Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing the freedom ofexpression and creed. He inveighed against the effrontery of theCommittee to question him; his ancestors came to Kansas to work on thesoil, he said, long before the members of the Committee (and he recitedsome of their names betraying their Central European heritage), or theirparents, established themselves in the United States. It was not for them,he declared, to teach him the value and privilege of being an American.After a recess, the Committee came to the conclusion that it would serveno purpose to send Riegger to jail for contempt.

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Riegger was physically safe, but he was to suffer the consequences ofhis courage in his own career as a musician. To their everlasting shame,the regents of Boston University rescinded Riegger’s honorary degree thatwas to be bestowed upon him, citing the “embarrassment” caused by hisstand. But the Boston University Orchestra did perform a work of Rieggeras scheduled concurrently to his honorary degree. Also several columnistspublished articles saluting him for his action. But Riegger himself did notindulge in unnecessary rhetoric on the occasion. He came to see me inBoston during the whole shameful episode, and he commented on it in adetached, almost scholarly, manner, without anger and certainly withoutassuming a heroic posture. A few years passed, and his accusers weredriven back into the dark recesses of their dingy souls.


Composers of “absolute music” seldom like to have their personalitiesobtrude on the music. Roger Sessions writes a music as independent ofextra-musical considerations as could be wished. Yet, paradoxically, hismusic gains in appreciation when it is given a label in space and time—music by an American, written in our time of well-controlled ardors.

Roger Huntington Sessions, though born in Brooklyn, is a NewEnglander by heritage, temporal residence, and cast of mind. One couldgo back to Buckle and theorize with him about the influence of the climateon man and his creative propensities. For the “icy flame” of a NewEnglander seems to have been bestowed upon Roger Sessions at birth. Hisfamily history is very instructive; from generation to generation it has beenthe spirit of secession that animated the Sessionses during the threecenturies of their residence on colonial soil. From father to son they havebeen in the clergy. An irrepressible protestantism, understood in itsoriginal sense, must have influenced the progressive sons to secede fromthe particular denomination of the father, and fall into someinterdenominational heresy, down to the present end of the line, RogerHuntington Sessions, a protestant against all denominations and, verylikely, against all established religion. The civic spirit in Roger Sessionsmust have been behind his zero-per-cent Americanism (which, it may becogently argued, is the true hundred-per-cent Americanism, understoodin the progressive sense). He was one of the very few Americans abroadwho compromised themselves in the eyes of right-minded people bysending a “protestant” cable to Governor Fuller of Massachusetts in thedays of Sacco and Vanzetti. On a previous occasion, when a more personal

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question was involved, he sacrificed a paying position for the sake of loyaltyto a teacher-friend. Of this more anon.

The characteristic circumstance is the fact that Sessions preservesintact the now obsolete sense of personal and civic justice. This, inaddition to an innate cosmopolitanism, made him select his residencesand friends in a world wider than the one he was born into. He tookresidence abroad as soon as the opportune Guggenheim Fellowshipafforded him a chance. He studied languages with astonishing fervor fora non-professional philologist. Thus he acquired a perfect command ofItalian, French, and German. As if this were not enough, he undertook thestudy of Russian, prompted by the circumstance that several Russianwriters and musicians were housed with him at Rome. In this labor of lovehe achieved extraordinary progress. His letters, in Russian, to this writerare not only grammatical but idiomatic as well, and occasional lapses inthe field of Russian conjugations are the only signs of the correspondent’snon-Russian birth.

A brief biography of Roger Huntington Sessions follows. BornDecember 28, 1896. Graduated from Kent School, Kent, Connecticut, in1911; graduated from Harvard in 1915. The next two years he spent inNew Haven studying under Horatio Parker in the Yale School of Music.From 1917 to 1921 he taught composition at Smith College. Sessions metErnest Bloch in New York, and showed him some of his earliest efforts,among them a symphony. Bloch saw his talent and determination, tookhim under his guidance, and very soon engaged him as assistant at theCleveland Institute of Music, of which Bloch was appointed director. InCleveland, Sessions composed incidental music to the stage play by LeonidAndreev, The Black Maskers. The early symphony was definitely relegatedto the limbo of perishable juvenilia, but the Black Maskers music survivedin the form of an orchestral suite, revised and corrected according to therestrained musical philosophy of the later Sessions. For this incidentalmusic to a Russian symbolical play was composed in an emotional,expansive style directly derived from the exalted orchestral imagery ofBloch.

In 1925 Sessions resigned from the faculty of the Cleveland Instituteof Music, under circumstances which may be called dramatic. ErnestBloch was not politic as a chief executive. Enthusiastic in everything thatrelated to his work, he was critically minded in his observations of thematters of management. In a country where arts and sciences are


dependent on the good will and munificence of various women’scommittees and wives of influential husbands, he dared to speak his mindwhen called upon to make a valedictorian speech, at a function, concerningthe policies of the school. As a consequence, he had to resign his position.Roger Sessions did not have to go with him, but resigned in protest againstBloch’s dismissal.

There followed his years abroad. In Florence he wrote three choralesfor organ, compositions of remarkable austerity, without a trace of theemotional spirit that animated the score of the Black Maskers. But whata fine example of saying much with few notes these three chorales are!With this, Sessions begins his search for immanent perfection incorrespondence with the particular design of each particular work. Hestates his profession of faith in these few sentences (1927):

I reject any kind of dogma or platform. I am not trying to write “mod-ern,”“American,” or “neo-classic” music. I am seeking always and only thecoherent and living expression of my musical ideas. . . . The Flemish andItalian composers of the late XV, XVI and XVII centuries, Bach, theMozart of “Die Zauberflöte” and the “Requiem” represent to my mindthe highest perfection that music has yet reached. . . . I dislike rhetoric,overemphasis, vulgarity, but at the same time believe that perfection inart consists in a sort of equilibrium which can be neither defined norcounterfeited.

And then:

I have no sympathy with consciously sought originality. I accept mymusical ideas without theorizing as to their source or their other thanmusical meaning.

Sessions’ greatest interest lies in the achievement of perfect form. Heis almost Aristotelian in his insistence on the importance of the musical“genus.” Hence the impression of austerity that the compositions of hismature period produce at first sight. Again, there is that “icy flame” thatmay be construed as ideal romanticism. Sessions’ recognition as acomposer resides in these few works written by him while abroad: theSymphony (1926–1927), the Sonata (1930), and the Concerto for Violinand Orchestra (1932). These works, analyzed from the point of view of (1)

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melody, (2) harmony, and (3) rhythm, reveal the following general design.Melody with Sessions is paramount. In the opening bars of the Sonata, thecantilena, stripped of almost all detail that is not necessary, rules allsupreme. Although he has not written a single composition for the humanvoice, Sessions derives his art of melody from the idea of a singing voice.This may be the reason why he is so eminently successful in writing slowmovements—by far the most difficult art in composition. To give themelody a living shape, he resorts to fractional repetitions of the melodicline, incorporated in the greater melodic design. By this the following ismeant: in order to secure a perfect form, the composer employs briefidentical figures usually at the end of a period, as a sort of reminiscentquotation, long enough to be recognizable, but sufficiently short not tosuggest a recapitulation. It is a device similar to that of terza rima in poetry(as in Dante’s Inferno), where rhymes follow each other in uninterruptedconcatenation.

From the point of view of harmony, Sessions’ compositions do notoffer any startling revelations. Suffice it to say that he does not pursue theformula vaguely described as “polytonality,” but he is unafraid to becomeharmonically involved if the logical development of separate partsnecessitates such a complication of design. “Warum einfach sein wennman kann kompliziert sein?” This ironical query is inapplicable tocomplications arising from the interweaving of contrapuntal parts inSessions’ works. His counterpoint is neither deliberately simple, norunintentionally entangled. A remarkable feature is the wise distribution ofchromatic material in the main themes. A tonal composer par excellence,Sessions is very liberal in using chromatic deviations in single melody(such as the opening theme of the Sonata), but when a fugal developmentis foreseen (as in the second theme of the Sonata and the opening phraseof the trumpet in the Symphony), the melodic ingredients are carefullyspaced, usually at thirds (Sonata), or fifths and sevenths (Symphony),leaving room for future imitations at a second, a fourth, etc. Whenaugmented or diminished intervals are used at the entrance of new voices,the harmony may reach a pretty high degree of saturation, filling thecomplete series of the diatonic scale, with (if the imitation is done at analtered interval) several chromatic tones into the bargain. The climax, inthe form of a tonal impasse, is often presented as an integral tabulation ofall elements (a very interesting case of such a climax is exemplified inmeasures 223–235 of the Sonata, where—Sessions could not have been


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unaware of this—even the visual impression betrays climactic tension:there are six staff-lines, of which two are for the sustaining and the loudpedal, respectively).

From the point of view of rhythm, Sessions is as free from extravertcomplication as he is from apostatic simplification. Again, his choice isgoverned by the necessity and sufficiency of each particular device. Hisfeeling for form necessitates a general symmetry of the metrical plan. Therequirements of phrasing, grouping (if only for the eye), make the timesignatures change rather often (particularly in the Symphony). Whenseveral rhythms are crossed by the bar-line, the accents and specialgroupings mark heterogeneous rhythms. Very often prime rhythms, suchas 5–8 or 7–8, are but composite measures of three and two units each(which division is always indicated in the score). Among polyrhythmiccombinations the favorite with Sessions is the superposition of 2–4 and3–8 time. If the general time-signature is 2–4, then the 3–8 time isindicated by overlapping groupings. There are several interesting examples(in the Symphony) of interpositions of prime (non-composite) 5–8, against2–4. Usually such parallel rhythms are sustained for a very short period(as three bars of 2–4 against four bars of 3–8).

The Concerto for Violin and Orchestra is Sessions’ latest composition.It embodies the familiar features of his musical system in a degree whichsuggests perfection. The slow opening movement, mostly for woodwinds(among them the Mozartean F clarinets, now manufactured by ProfessorRedfield in New York) is remarkable in its sustained song. The scherzo, onthe other hand, offers an extremely adroit display of instrumental flashesin quick succession. The solo instrument has the classical cadenza, butoutside of this revival there is little ostentatious virtuosity.

Sessions is an ardent student of old music, fonder of Mozart and Verdithan of Beethoven and Wagner. In his music is reflected the directlightness of the first two rather than the introspective depth of the greatdramatizers of music. Stravinsky is moving in the same direction; and, inspite of Sessions’ acknowledgment of Stravinsky’s influence, it is difficultto discover such an influence beyond a few more or less general rhythmicalreminiscences (notably, in the Symphony). Sessions has undoubtedly aright to his own place among twentieth-century composers; and the widerecognition of his works, despite their difficulty of idiom and performance,testifies to his worth.

In my program notes for concerts of American music I conducted in Parisin June, 1931, I described Intégrales by Varèse as “géométrie sonore.”Varèse approved of this rounded description of his music; perhaps heoriginated it and I merely quoted him. Whatever the origin of thisdefinition, it seems still, after more than half a century, a fitting one. Varèsestudied engineering; he believed that music, like architecture, must havesymmetrical and stable structure, that a composer’s inspiration must besimilar to that of a mathematician, that one must first think of numbersand then integrate them in a musical composition. Indeed, numbers wasthe medieval term for music in general; it even occurs in Shakespeare. Andnumbers may be beautiful. There is nothing in sonorous geometry thatnegates an aesthetic ideal. Inspiration must be supported by knowledge,and knowledge can be derived only from exact sciences and precisethinking. A composer must know of available possibilities of musicalcombinations; egocentric musicians who assert that their music came fromdivine powers and therefore must possess absolute beauty are sadlymistaken. A composer guided exclusively by inspiration, convinced that aray of divine light struck when a particular melody was created, is apt toproduce poor music. A composer fully equipped with musical knowledgein all possible styles and idioms has a very good mathematical chance toproduce excellent music.

I remember how pleased Varèse was when I compared him withPerotin, known as Perotinus Magnus, the medieval composer of organa inseveral parts. To medieval students music was a part of mathematics in thefaculties of universities; old theorists even applied moral principles tomusical intervals. Particularly forbidden was the tritone which was calleddiabolus in musica. It is not surprising that this interval has become the

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foundation stone of modern music in its multiple varieties, emphasizedparticularly in the method of composition as promulgated by Schoenberg.But while Schoenberg postulated nonrepetition of thematic tones, Varèsecultivated persistent repetition of single tones and short melodic themes.I remember how astounded, and in some ways disappointed, I was whenI showed Varèse my latest structural discovery, the Grandmother Chord,which contained all 12 different notes and all 11 different intervals, andwhich could also be inverted or spread melodically along the horizontallines. I did not have to explain to Varèse what it was. He searched throughhis pencil sketches which he made 20 or 30 years before and showed memy Grandmother Chord all written out, with the only difference betweenhis early discovery and my late product being in the choice of accidentals,whether sharps or flats notated enharmonically, so that the magnitude ofeach individual interval remained the same in both forms. He wassurprised that I spent so much time searching for the solution of theproblem. “All you have to do is to take the first note of the chromatic scale,then the last note, a major 7th up, then take the second note of thechromatic scale and the note before last, C, B, C-sharp (or D-flat), B-flat(or A-sharp), D, A, etc. following an inward spiral and ending up on F-sharp, which is, naturally, a tritone from either end of the octave thatencompasses the scale.”

Varèse’s whole life had an element of a logical theatrical play. As ayoung man in Paris he composed songs and piano pieces in the manner ofMassenet; several of them were published, but he disowned them aspuerile. But as soon as he found himself in works of considerablecomplexity he was confronted with the monster of reactionary press. Hewent to Germany, which early in the century was a country of new ideasreceptive to young talents. He met Richard Strauss who was impressed byhis talents and arranged for him a performance in Berlin of his early workBourgogne, which reflected the country in central France where Varèsegrew up. His music was received with faint praise and some outrightdismissal. He wrote to Debussy, whom he had known in Paris, to share hisfeelings. Debussy replied in a letter dated February 12, 1911: “You areperfectly justified,” Debussy wrote, “in not being alarmed by the hostilityof the public. The day will come when you will be the best of friends inthe world, but you had better give up your belief that our critics are moreperspicacious than those in Germany. Also, do not forget that a criticseldom likes what he has to describe. Sometimes he makes a special effort

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not to know what he is talking about!” This early encounter with the criticswas but a mild premonition of what was to come in future years as heproduced his tremendous works that defied every academic rule andscorched the ears of musical pedestrians with a thunder of dissonantharmonies, angular melodies and asymmetrical rhythms that filled thescores of Hyperprism, Arcana, Ionization and Integrales.

Hyperprism bore on the cover of its published edition the projectionof a four-dimensional prism into the world of three dimensions. The epi-graph of Arcana was a quotation of Paracelsus, Varèse’s favorite alchemist,which bespoke the arcane mysteries of music. I was surprised to find inthe coda of the work, a C-major chord. I asked Varèse why he inserted thiscommon chord in a network of harmonies bristling with tritones. “I wishedto create an impression of tremendous dissonance,” was Varèse’s reply.

Varèse defied the world of music much more than Stravinsky andSchoenberg ever did before him. His blows at common tastes wereanswered with equal savagery. When I conducted Arcana in Berlin in1932 a group in the audience which counted among them a sizable con-tingent of the nascent Nazi movement (Hitler was to mount the throne afew months after my concert) staged a concert of their own, blowing intothe big German housekeys. “With Housekeys Against Sounding Geome-try” was a banner headline in a German newspaper. A reactionaryGerman critic wrote: “The boldest imagination cannot conjure up whatEdgar Varèse has done. The last vestige of music must be wrested outfrom one’s brain to accept this roaring, groaning tonal assault. An insanelyraging zoo, noise of battle, cries of the wounded, a mass of men throwninto the crater of an erupting volcano in a hideous slaughter—one nec-essarily imagines something like that. This is the maddest thing that hasbeen heard in Berlin during the last decade, an abortion of soundingfolly which physiologically was so unendurable to many of the listeners,that they fled.”

Another critic struck a glancing blow at Schoenberg in his demolitionof Varèse: “In conclusion, there was an agglomeration of senseless tonalobscenities by Edgar Varèse. This monster was entitled Arcana; devoid ofspiritual discipline and artistic imagination, it belabors the listeners withhorsewhips and transforms peaceable concertgoers into hyenas. GreatArnold Schoenberg, you are with your famous Five Orchestral Piecesbrilliantly vindicated! They are utterances of modern classicism besidethis barbarous insanity.”


Reviewing Hyperprism at its first performance in New York in 1924,the dean of American music critics, Olin Downes, summarized in hisaccount in The New York Times his impression of the music in a singlesentence: “Varèse’s Hyperprism reminded us of election night, amenagerie or two and a catastrophe in a boiler factory.” W. J. Hendersonof The New York Herald verbally thrashed Varèse’s innocuous Octandre:“An Octandre is a flower having eight stamens. Varèse’s Octandre was noflower. It cannot be described. It ought not to be. Such music must beheard to be appreciated. It shrieked, it grunted, it chortled, it mewed, itbarked—and it turned all the eight instruments into contortionists. It wasnot in any key, not even in no key. It was just a ribald outbreak of noise.Some people laughed because they could find no other outlet for theirfeelings. The thing was not even funny.”

Varèse lived through it all. A lesser man would have abandoned hisfight, but Varèse had a prophet’s faith in his cause. He wrote me from Parison November 21, 1931:

I know where I am going and I know what will follow. We have a com-mon cause and I am happy about it. Have faith in my experience and donot mind my insistence on my plan. Its development is logical; its resultsare assured. You, Cowell, Salzedo, Ruggles, Riegger, Ives—we must allgroup together in a bloc. There is no question of personal vanity. Youknow me well enough to realize that prima donna posturing is the leastof my characteristics. So try to do everything possible, and also theimpossible. You are my “mechanic.” Needless to say, you are free to quoteall I have said to you. My opinions are not divided according to categories,and my admiration for you is expressed in public as well as in private.

Varèse faltered but once, about 1945 or 1946 when he had few if anyperformances in the United States, and when Europe was devastated bythe war. He showed me a statement from his publishers for the year; hisroyalties were exactly 37 cents, which were forwarded to him in postagestamps because the amount was so small that it did not justify making outa check. His loyal wife Louise asked me to circulate a “round robin” toconductors urging them to play Varèse. At one of his press conferences,Mitropoulos spoke very warmly of Varèse and reiterated his belief in thegreatness of his music, but he never put a Varèse work on any of hisprograms with the New York Philharmonic. Varèse spoke with seeming


determination of resuming his work on electrical engineering, which hehad studied in France as a young man. There was also a problem of money.Varèse had a few pupils, but they were also indigent, and repaid for theirinstruction in trade by copying Varèse’s music and performing othernecessary tasks. The main source of income for Varèse and Louise wasrenting the two upper floors in their brownstone building at 188 SullivanStreet in Greenwich Village, which Louise inherited from her family.Louise was also an excellent translator from French, and her translationbrought in some needed income. At some rare moment Varèse wouldexplode in righteous rage about conditions in the musical world. He wasnever envious of the success of other composers, but once when we talkedabout frequent performances of a colleague, he erupted in a scornfulapostrophe: “Il écrit de la merde qu’il transforme en l’or, et moi j’écris del’or transformé en merde devant le public.” We always spoke French whenwe were tête-à-tête.

Varèse’s favorite notion was that he was simply in advance of the cen-tury, and that the time would come when the world would catch up withhis ideas and that he would be recognized as the great composer that he is.And, altruistically, he would add the names of others still unrecognized, inthe first place Ives, and that we would all be marching hand in handtowards a more enlightened future. Such talk seemed like the hallucina-tions of a man possessed, so unrealistic was the idea that Varèse and Iveswould some day enter the pantheon of musical gods. The supreme historicirony of such utterances was that Varèse was simply predicting things tocome. The apotheosis of Ives came fortunately before his death in 1954,but Ives took it as an historic turn of the road, not so much for him per-sonally, as for the verities of his musical transcendentalism. Unlike Varèse,Ives was never a fighter on the public tribune, and never issued mani-festoes pro domo sua. Varèse seemed to accept his apotheosis when itcame (for it was never less than that) as a natural phenomenon that had tohappen, for had he not predicted it when he wrote me, “Nous marchonsensemble, vous et moi . . .” to give me courage in fighting the apathy of thepublic? And did he not predict that the world would catch up with hisideas? The world did literally that at a concert of Varèse’s work in TownHall in New York in the 1950’s, which was practically sold out. People actu-ally paid good money to hear Varèse’s music! He did not have to paper thehouse giving away free tickets to fill the hall. And the success was genuine,unaffected, not partisan, but general. The top international publisher


Ricordi offered him a favorable contract for taking over his entire cata-logue from his former publishers, with a guaranteed minimum of royalties,many-ciphered multiple of the insulting sum of 37 cents he had receivedbefore. Suddenly it was no longer necessary to beg conductors to play hisworks. I was no longer his sole “mechanic.” There were other mechanicsavailable aplenty who could read and execute Varèse’s scores within thesmallest quasihemisemidemiquaver.

By the time Ives and Varèse rose to their rightful place among worldcomposers, I had long ceased my own career as a symphonic conductor.As Henry Cowell put it vividly in his biography of Ives, I became a martyrof the cause. But the strong radiance of Ives and Varèse, and also of Cowellhimself, whose works I played consistently, reflected also on my ownimage. In his posthumous diaries and memos, Ives spoke in the highestterms of me as a conductor. Varèse, too, remained loyal to me. He askedme to contribute an analysis to the new edition of his score of hisIonisation, and the score bore a dedication to me. In my own copy of thescore he added the wonderful words: “au premier Ionisateur, NicolasSlonimsky de son ami Edgard Varèse.” I was indeed le premier Ionisateur,for I conducted the first performance of Ionisation, a signal event by allcounts. And I was the first to record it, which also was the first recordingof any work by Varèse. And I was also the first to record an Ives work, ashort piece, but still historic because of its phonographic primogeniture.If Cowell’s statement that I was a martyr of the cause is true, then mymartyrdom paid off well.

The story of the first performance of Ionisation deserves to be told.It took place in New York on March 6, 1933. The score calls for 41percussion instruments without definite pitch, thus excluding the timpani,with a coda introducing tone clusters on the piano and tubular chimes.There were also two sirens which provided running scales with atremendous crescendo. Varèse stipulated that the sirens should be theregular New York City fire sirens, manipulated by hand. We could notpersuade the fire department of New York City to let us borrow theirsirens, and we had to replace them by mouth sirens. Varèse was in Parisand I had to be in charge without Varèse’s monitoring supervision. Wehired percussion players from the New York Philharmonic, with someextras from other New York ensembles. Then disaster struck. At the veryfirst rehearsal, I discovered, to my utter disbelief, that the New Yorkmusicians could not reproduce the tricky groups of quintuplets in rapid


tempo, particularly when one of the five notes was replaced by a rest. Evenworse was the problem of effectuating the proper ensemble of quintupletswith the final 1/16th-note replaced by two 32nd-notes. There seemed tobe a general tendency to transform a quintuplet with an intercalatory restinto a symmetrical group of six beats with a rest in the middle. It was quiteimpossible to obtain a uniform rhythm under such circumstances. Thepercussionists were getting nervous and some of them said the music wascrazy and could not be performed the way the composer wanted it done.In desperation I turned to several composers who were following myrehearsals and asked them to substitute for the defectors. These com-posers never played drums and other percussion instruments, but theycertainly could count asymmetrical groupings. And so it came about thatthe great harpist Carlos Salzedo took the responsible part of the Chineseblocks, Paul Creston striking the gongs, Wallingford Riegger pounding theanvil, Henry Cowell playing the tone-clusters on the piano and youngWilliam Schuman pulling the cord of the exotic instrument known as thelion’s roar. Thirty-odd years later, William Schuman reminisced of theoccasion at his lecture at UCLA, where I was a member of the faculty. Hedeclared that I was responsible for launching him on his career as amusician when I hired him to play the lion’s roar, but apparently, he said,his performance was not adequate for I never hired him again.

Our attempt to put Ionisation on the radio met with an unexpectedobstacle; no sirens were allowed to be broadcast except in case of fire. Ayear after the public performance we managed to persuade the musicdirector of Columbia Phonograph Company to record the piece. Varèsewas back in New York and assumed charge of the production. And heachieved the impossible: he actually got the right kind of sirens from theNew York Fire Department, and he manipulated them himself for therecording. We had indeed stellar personnel, with Cowell again at thepiano, Salzedo on the Chinese blocks and Paul Creston, WallingfordRiegger and William Schuman at their posts. This was the first recordingof any Varèse piece, and as such had a historic value; the original releaseis a collector’s item.

Varèse applied for a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation seventimes during the 1930s and 1940s, and was rejected each time, despite theextraordinary array of sponsors for his application, including André Malraux,Minister of Cultural Affairs in the government of Charles de Gaulle. Aboutthe same time, Schoenberg applied for a grant; he too, was turned down.


Stravinsky commented wryly in regard to the Schoenberg rejection that justa few bars of Schoenberg’s unfinished cantata, Moses und Aron, which hehad intended to complete on the Guggenheim money, would be worth allthe music composed by all recipients of the grant since its inception.

Varèse discovered the power of electronic sound early in the 1930swhen he met the Russian creator of the first electronic musicalinstrument, Leon Theremin, who was working on his instrument in NewYork. In 1934 he wrote his first work that had the Theremin in itsorchestration, Ecuatorial, scored for a bass singer, the Theremin and aninstrumental ensemble. Varèse had a grand idea of engaging Chaliapin assoloist, but it was a chimera. Even if Chaliapin, now aging, could bepersuaded to accept this fantastic invitation, he would have never beenable to learn the typical Varèsian serpentine melodic part. We engaged aprofessional bass-baritone who had some experience as an opera singer,but he almost disintegrated when confronted with the sound of theTheremin performed by one of the few experts in the art, a Russianwoman of considerable musical abilities, Clara Rosen. After anotherrehearsal it became plain we would never be able to give even a passableperformance. Varèse, who was a helpless witness to my futile efforts toestablish some kind of workable result, suddenly stood up and shouted, “Jene permettrai pas de massacrer l’oeuvre!” We persuaded the musicians toarrange another rehearsal two hours before the concert. That there wasno major disaster at the actual performance was due to the fact that themusic was new and that neither the public, nor most of the musicians hadany idea what it was all about. I conducted the world premiere ofEcuatorial on April 15, 1934, in New York.

My last unofficial participation in a Varèse function was in his Déserts,scored for electronic instruments and percussion. Varèse asked me torehearse the percussion section, which was then taped; it was in 1954, justa few years after the technique of recording on magnetic tape was devel-oped. In 1957, Varèse received an engagement which must have been thefirst lucrative appointment in his whole life. It was Poème électronique,which was commissioned by the rich electric company of Philips for theWorld Exposition in Brussels in the summer of 1958. Varèse went there tosupervise the production. The broadcasting equipment was installed in thePavillon Le Corbusier-Xénakis. For once, Varèse was in his element. BothLe Corbusier and Xénakis were Varèse’s friends and associates. Varèseadmired the bold spatial designs of Corbusier’s architecture. What united



Varèse with Xénakis was their mutual belief that music could be returnedto its medieval antecedents in the scientific quadrivium. Here finally,Varèse’s sonorous geometry found its practical application. The Poemèélectronique filled the air at the Brussels Exposition with its mighty vibra-tions; some of the public fled from the almost physical impact of acousticalwaves. But Varèse was happy. And he did not have to worry about money;the Philips Company paid him generously for his participation. This wasthe birth of what Varèse called “organized sound,” a term that he used todefine the style, method and technique of his compositions: he took theinchoate element of pervasive sound and organized it into an integrated,self-sufficient entity. Intégrales, Hyperprism, Ionisation and the all-embracing Arcana were each in its own way, the edifice of an organizedsound. Sounding geometry was the totality of organized sounds. It wasonly logical that after all these monumental beginnings, Varèse wouldundertake the ultimate integration of organized sound in a work calledEspace, which was to achieve a union of sounding geometries in dimen-sions transgressing the mundane extensions of mathematical space. Varèsenever completed Espace, but a preliminary study of this concept achievedperformance.

On July 30, 1931, at the Mairie of the 16th arrondissment in Paris, Iwas married to Dorothy Adlow, a young American art critic. Varèse was mybest man. He brought flowers, and stood at attention when the Mairepronounced me and Dorothy man and wife. Almost immediately he passeda plate, intoning, “Pour les pauvres de l’arrondissment.” Varèse put in a 50-franc note; in 1931 it was a considerable sum of money. Then the Mairegave me a booklet which contained the specifics of our marriage and 16pages for names and dates of birth of 16 children. But we had only onechild, Electra, born shortly after midnight on August 16, 1933.

The physical appearance of Varèse was that of a stocky peasant. Andhe talked like a peasant. There was no artificial intellectuality about him;it would be very difficult to identify him in a crowd as a musical genius—he could have been taken for a manual worker, a miner or an electrician.He had large hands, and his cast of countenance was rough, with eyebrowshanging heavily on his eyes. He spent his childhood in Italy, where hisfather had a job; there Varèse learned to speak Italian. He spent his youthin Bourgogne, and received his musical education in Paris; he met RomainRolland, who advised him to go to Berlin, where he spent several years.His memories of Berlin were happy. He associated with young artists andpainters and he had an easy way with women. “Ce que j’ai eu comme


poule!” he reminisced many years later. Varèse was given to roughlanguage, particularly when speaking French. “Merde” was a familiarexpletive for him. He could describe people for whom he had little regardin pungent epithets, usually borrowed from genito-urinal vocabulary. “Elleest une pipi crystalisée,” he once remarked with reference to a womancomposer who wrote pieces of would-be modern music and who gavecourses in music history.

The Paris scene in the early 20th century was dominated by Debussy,Ravel, Satie, and on the theatrical side by Stravinsky and Diaghilev.Stravinsky was the cock of the walk. He was careful in selecting his friendsand he preferred the company of devoted admirers; however he deferredto the rich and to the socially important people. Varèse was outside ofStravinsky’s orbit and there were few if any contacts between the two inParis. Even in America, Stravinsky kept his distance from Varèse. But soonStravinsky began to show interest in the kind of music produced by peopleon the opposite pole of the artistic globe. He absorbed the doctrine ofSchoenberg and Webern and Berg when they were all safely dead. Andthen he made a pilgrimage to Varèse in his Greenwich Village home. Toutesproportions gardées, this was an historical visit. Stravinsky expressed hisadmiration for Varèse’s making a collection of New York noises, a strangeobservation since Varèse never was interested in picking up actual rawsounds in the manner of musique concrète. Then their conversation veeredto their common reminiscences of the Paris scene. Stravinsky quotedVarèse’s low opinion of Vincent d’Indy and Albert Roussel, whom Varèsedescribed not only as “cons” (the French word for the female organ ofgeneration), but “générals de cons,” generals of the “cons.”When an accountof this visit was published in Musical America, Varèse denied ever usingscatological language about his elders, but the expressions certainlysounded very much like Varèse. In the same account, Stravinsky somewhatimmodestly said about Amériques that Le Sacre du Printemps was writtenall over the score. Indeed, the use of solo wind instruments at the beginningof Amériques suggests the introductory bassoon solo in Stravinsky’s famouswork, but the thematic and rhythmic procedures are quite different fromStravinsky. Varèse himself told me that he was more influenced bySchoenberg than by Stravinsky. The plural in the title of Amériquessignified Varèse’s intention to embrace the entire Western hemisphere andreflect in the music the popular as well as the industrial motives.

The influence of Varèse on composers of the young generationincreased with every passing year. It is interesting to note that while Varèse

was still living the programs of international festivals of modern musicrarely if ever elected to put on any of his works. But after his death, in1965, his name became sine qua non in Darmstadt, in Amsterdam, inWarsaw, in Stockholm, and New York. Student percussion groups playedIonisation as if it were an exercise in solfeggio. Varèse received theultimate imprimatur from the most progressive and influential moderncomposer and conductor Pierre Boulez, who arranged special Varèseprograms in his afternoon series with the New York Philharmonic. Boulezalso became a prime propagandist of Varèse’s music when he assumed thedirectorship of the music division of the Pompidou Centre in Paris.Posthumously, Varèse’s music became a public attraction instead of arepellent. Zubin Mehta actually opened one of his seasons as conductorof the Los Angeles Philharmonic with Arcana, and he asked me to cometo the rehearsal as a consultant. During an intermission, a percussionplayer approached me with the score in hand and said, “Mr. Varèse, howdid you want to play this figure, all on the same dynamic level?” “I am notVarèse,” I replied. “Varèse died several years ago.” “Oh, I did not realizethat. I thought you were Varèse because Mr. Mehta kept asking youquestions during the rehearsals.” In sad remembrance I recalled myplaying Ionisation at the Hollywood Bowl some 40 years earlier, when Iwas nearly booted off the podium for daring to inflict such noise on thegenteel audience. Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis.

Perhaps the most extraordinary instance of Varèse’s pervasive influencewas his winning over of the celebrated rock-and-roll musician, Frank Zappa.He arranged a concert of Varèse’s music in New York and gave anintroductory speech about Varèse’s significance in music history. WhenZappa announces a concert, tickets sell out within a matter of hours. It wasno different with his Varèse program. But his audience was a young and arowdy crowd expressing their approbation with loud noises and whistles.Zappa had to remind his followers that Louise Varèse was present and thatshe was over 90 years old and had to be given some respect. Returning toLos Angeles, Zappa called me up to share his experiences, and he showedme some of his own symphonic scores, which bore the unmistakable signsof Varèse’s rhythm and melodic figurations. I asked Zappa where he wentto school and how he learned the intricacies of ultra-modern notation. I wassurprised to find out that Zappa learned music by reading scores and playingthe instruments without instruction. His scores were fantastically complex,and almost as difficult to conduct as Varèse’s music. He submitted his scores


to Mehta and other conductors but none of them expressed any interest.Then he tried to arrange performances in Europe, and in fact had a contractto produce one of them at Albert Hall in London. He undertook to meetall the expenses, but the project fell through when he sent the choral partsto the management in London. The title of the work was Penis Dimension;the tenor soloist confided his worry about the dimension of his organ. Achorus of adolescent girls tried to console him, complimenting him on hisanatomical excellence. No British chorus would sing such a text, the contractwas cancelled, Zappa instituted a lawsuit against the Queen of England ashead of the British government, but lost.

A thorough analysis of Varèse’s method of composition would requirea dissertation. Suffice it to say that he did not follow any establishedmodern techniques. His emphasis on melodic intervals of the tritone,major 7th, and minor 9th is similar to that of atonal music, but Varèsenever espoused Schoenberg’s method of composition with 12 tones relatedonly to one another; he never extended his thematic statements intoprecise inversions or reversions, and he never tried to integrate themelodic elements into a vertical harmonic structure. Varèse rejected theidea of a classical development of given subjects; indeed, he neverconnected melodic fragments into a sequential chain. Rather, eachmelorhythmic thematic statement stood alone in splendid independence;yet a Varèse line was not a non sequitur. Some analysts attempted todescribe Varèse’s melodic progressions by the word agglutination; althoughthe glue was invisible, the impression of continuity was observed. Perhapsthe purest illustration of Varèse’s melodic structure is found in his uniquework Densité 21.5, which he wrote in 1936 for the French flutist GeorgesBarrère. Barrère used a platinum flute and the density of platinum in theperiodical table of chemical elements is 21.5.

Like most scientifically minded artists, Varèse insisted on the preciserendition of rhythmic values in his music. In the score of Intégrales, thereis a spot in which one of the two trumpets ends the bar with a 32nd rest,and the other trumpet picks up the theme on the first beat of the next bar.Inevitably, the first trumpet would prolong the note so that for a briefmoment both trumpets would sound together, which was not what Varèseintended. I tried to persuade him to give the part to a single trumpet soas to avoid the unwanted doubling, but he refused. And he would not makesimilar adjustments in some brass parts in Arcana. The score includes apart for a double-bass trombone, which requires tremendous lung power



on the part of the performer. When I conducted Arcana with theOrchestre Symphonique de Paris on February 25, 1932, a catastrophethreatened: on the same evening at the Paris Opéra there was scheduleda performance of Elektra by Richard Strauss, which also required thedouble-bass trombone, and there was only one double-bass tromboneplayer in all Paris who could blow through that long tube without fainting.Varèse was running around from the Salle Pleyel where I conducted to theOpéra and back like one possessed, checking on exact schedules ofperformance. Elektra was a short opera and, luckily, the schedule allowedthe double-bass trombonist to arrive at the Salle Pleyel in time for Arcana,which was the last number on my program. Would anyone have noticedthe absence of that instrument? Varèse would, and that was the allimportant consideration for him, for me, and for all those who believe thata musical work must be performed in its integrity without any alterationor omission.

Varèse believed that he was born in 1885, and I had that year in theprogram notes I wrote for my Paris concerts. He was actually born onDecember 22, 1883, in Paris. His first name was spelled with a final d inhis birth certificate, and later in life he used to sign his name EdgardVarèse. But most of his compositions were published with the first nameEdgar, and this is the spelling I adopted in most of my own referenceworks. The centennial of Varèse’s birth is to be marked by “manifestationsVarèse” at a special festival in Strasbourg, at a concert in Washington andin Los Angeles. Varèse would not have been surprised by this homage. Theworld has finally caught up with him.

Varèse died in New York on November 6, 1965, of a combination ofcardio-vascular and pulmonary ailments. He whispered to Louise as hewas dying, “Jai peur!” This was the first time Varèse had fear.*

*An interpretation of these last words is supplied by Chou Wen-chung, who was pre-sent in Varèse’s hospital room. Chou had called out, hoping that Varèse would rec-ognize him, but there was no response. He was hallucinating, agitated, makingstrange sounds, then he said “j’ai peur.” Chou left the room and Louise was waitingoutside. He told her of the words, realizing that this was the last line of TheAstronomer, a major operatic work that Varèse never completed. The plot concernsan astronomer who deciphers a communication from Sirius. But other astronomers(read, musicians) think he is a crank. In the final scene, a shaft of light from Siriusreaches out for the hero. It is a deliverance. The stage goes dark and only a voice isheard: “j’ai peur.”—E.S.Y.

1. A V IS IT

The first impression of Rio de Janeiro is that it is a city that functions inan organized manner. Everything functions, elevators, buses, telephones,café waiters. The buildings in the center of the town are small-scale RadioCities, slick and modern. Skyscrapers are erected on new land secured bythe simple process of erasing a small mountain. Some real estate is beingreclaimed from the bay.

Music functions, too, and most vigorously, both kinds of music, theCarmen Miranda kind, and the Villa-Lobos kind. Incidentally, CarmenMiranda is much criticized for her ostentatious Americanization. In herpicture, That Night in Rio, the Brazilians say she uses a kind of double talkin Portuguese, to give an exaggerated idea of the explosiveness of Brazilianspeech and temperament. Even temperamental Brazilian ladies do nottalk like that, they say.

As to Villa-Lobos, he is well worth a trip to Rio to see. In fact, he isbecoming a sort of national monument, visited by every newcomer. WaltDisney, during his South American journey, looked up Villa-Lobos forsome music for his second Fantasia. He listened to records of Villa-Lobos,and picked up a Bachiana Brasileira, one of the five suites Villa-Loboswrote to express the spirit of Bach through the medium of Brazilian folksong. Disney thought the music would be very good for an animatedadventure of a choo-choo train.

There is nothing peculiarly Brazilian, savage or jungle-like, in Villa-Lobos’s appearance and behavior. In fact, he looks and acts very much likea professional musician, and speaks French with a characteristic Parisian

25. HE ITOR V I LLA-LOBOS

217

Ch. 25: Part 1 originally published in Musical America, October 10, 1941.


cadence. In his office, in a brand-new skyscraper near the Opera House,the door is always open, and people drop in without ceremony. Villa-Lobospresides at his desk, cluttered up with manuscripts, notebooks,photographs and miscellaneous objects. At another desk, his faithfulsecretary copies his music and answers telephones. At a third desk, a hugeoffice typewriter rattles along. Villa-Lobos is not disturbed by noises,whether jungle noises, or the noises of civilization. He can compose in themidst of a pandemonium. He proved it to me by composing right then andthere an enigma canon, with large squares in place of notes, signifying, sohe explained, the immoderate ambitions of the aggressor nations. Villa-Lobos is intensely conscious of the universality of politics, with a stronganti-fascist slant. “A perfect example of rubato is Mussolini,” he said, andthis expressed his contempt for all bombast whether musical or political.His artistic credo is paradoxical: “I am a sentimentalist by nature,” he says,“and at times my music is downright sugary, but I never work by intuition.My processes of composition are determined by cool reasoning.Everything is calculated, constructed.” Whereupon, he produced a curiousexhibit, a sheet of graph paper, with the chromatic tones marked in thevertical, and the rhythm values, a sixteenth-note to each square, in thehorizontal line. “This is how I compose,” he said. He does not have to waitupon inspiration. Any outline, any graph can serve him for a melody. Thus,he traced the outline of the Serra da Piedade, a mountain range near BelloHorizonte, transferred it on graph paper, harmonized it and signed“Milimetrada e harmonizada por H. V. L.” He has also “millimetred andharmonized” the New York Sky Line, arranged it for orchestra, and had itperformed at the broadcast on the occasion of the reopening of the NewYork World’s Fair on April 7, 1940.

Villa-Lobos is very fond of charts, formulas, neologisms. He has madea chart to indicate the position of Brazilian music in the world of art. Eachcountry is designated by a sort of zodiac sign, and arrows lead from onecountry to another, with Brazil in a whirlwind center of musical influences,but strong in its own primeval independence. Villa-Lobos is nationalistic.He says he places civic duties as a Brazilian musician even before theinternational fellowship of all artists.

Villa-Lobos has received an excellent opportunity to try his new-fangled ideas in practice. Eight years ago he was appointed the head ofmusic education in the district of Rio de Janeiro. He took up the task withenthusiasm. He has organized choruses of school children, and each year,on Brazil’s Independence Day, Sept. 7, he conducts an “orpheonic con-

Heitor Villa-Lobos 219

centration,” as he, with his love for neologisms calls it, a chorus of sometwenty thousand boys and girls of school age. He directs from a speciallyerected platform in the center of the largest stadium in Rio. He givesinstructions through the microphone, and signals entrances by means offlags representing the national colors of Brazil. He teaches children notonly to sing, but also to vocalize on given vowels or liquid consonants, with-out definite pitch. He calls such vocalization “orpheonic effects.” Whentwenty thousand children vocalize on the letter R, the impression is that ofan approaching earth tremor, and the hissing S sounds like a rushing wind.While vocalizing, the children sway to and fro, one row to the right, thenext to the left, which results in a fine undulating effect. As an introduc-tion, Villa-Lobos makes the children sing a chord in thirds, one note afteranother, to the following words, meaning respectively, Bounty, Reality,Amity, Sincerity, Equality, and Loyalty:

BondadeRealidadeAmizadeSinceridadeIgualidadeLealdade.

The initial letters of these words spell BRASIL.The catalogue of Villa-Lobos’s works is immense. It is hard to calcu-

late, however, just how many different compositions Villa-Lobos hasactually written, for the same music is used in several works under vary-ing titles. Some items in the typewritten catalogue do not exist at all. Forinstance, six symphonies are listed in the catalogue, but Villa-Lobos sayshe wrote only five. A clue to this symphonic spontaneous generation maybe found in the manuscript copy of one of his symphonies, originallymarked No. 4, but carefully changed to No. 3. Villa-Lobos says No. 4 isthe copyist’s error. He also denies that he ever wrote something calledPhilophonia. He says people just invent things about him. But he admitsthat the collection of simple songs, choruses and arrangements, nowknown as Guia Pratico de Musica (Practical Guide of Music) originallybore a more poetic title, Alma Brasileira (Brazilian Soul), which appearsin his catalogue.

Some of Villa-Lobos’s titles that look like misprints are not misprints.Villa-Lobos likes to telescope words. For instance, his piece for piano and

orchestra Momoprecoce is a fusion of two words, Momo, a child carnivalking, and Precoce, precious. Incidentally the musical material of this pieceis taken from his Suite Carnival of Brazilian Children, written ten yearsbefore. His formidable Rudepoema which, Villa-Lobos says, is the mostdifficult piece ever written for piano, means simply a Rude Poem. I askedVilla-Lobos why he does this, and he replied: “Why should I use twowords? One word is shorter.”

Most of Villa-Lobos’s orchestral scores, including the Choros, werepublished in Paris, but they are utterly out of print. But myriads of hispiano pieces are published by the local house Arthur Napoleão, and areavailable, to use a mixed metaphor, for a song. When I inquired why Villa-Lobos does not do something to move these piano pieces to the musicstores in the United States, so as to make it possible for American pianiststo get them without a pilgrimage to Rio, he replied characteristically: “Jene veux pas ça. J’ai peur d’être le meilleur du monde.” (“I don’t want to.I’m afraid of being the best in the world.”)

Villa-Lobos does not care where his manuscripts go, once he isfinished with his work. He says people just carry them away. Gone is thepiano version of the New York Sky Line Melody, uncopied, and apparentlylost for good. The orchestral score of the Melody is still on Villa-Lobos’sdesk, buried in its geological layers. His violin concerto, subtitled Fantasyof Mixed Movements, was recently performed in Rio de Janeiro. After theperformance, the original score mysteriously disappeared. Villa-Lobos saysit was stolen. But by whom? And for what purpose? One cannot very wellpawn a Villa-Lobos manuscript, and only a singularly masochistic violinistwould steal the Fantasy of Mixed Movements.

On one occasion a Villa-Lobos manuscript was stolen for sentimentalreasons. There is an item in Villa-Lobos’s catalogue, entitled Centauro doOuro, a Golden Centaur, composed in 1916. The score vanished longago. Then many years later, an officer of the Brazilian Army called onVilla-Lobos, and said he had found the score of Centauro do Ouroamong the papers of his father, recently deceased. He asked Villa-Lobosfor permission to retain the manuscript, which was very dear to hisfather’s heart, and said he would have it copied. Villa-Lobos, deeplymoved, agreed. He has not received the promised copy, but is convincedhe will receive it some day. “Anyway,” he adds in a conciliatory spirit, “thework is based on the pentatonic scale, and I do not favor the pentatonicscale now.”


Among things Villa-Lobos does not know about himself is the year ofhis birth. Friends of his family say, and are willing to swear to it, that hewas born in 1881, but Villa-Lobos prefers 1888. He is also experimentingwith the years 1886, 1887 and 1890. There is no chance of findingdocumentary evidence of Villa-Lobos’s age, for the registries of birth werenot established in Rio de Janeiro until the ’nineties of the last century. Thearchives of the Church of São José, where Villa-Lobos is supposed to havebeen baptized, have no record of him between the years 1880 and 1890.The musical lexicographer had better consult a numerologist.

Villa-Lobos has no children of his own, but he likes children andunderstands them. He has retained a capacity for childish excitement overspectacular things. When in 1936 he was invited to take part in theCongress for Musical Education in Prague, he flew the ocean in theZeppelin, and at the Congress could hardly speak of anything except thewonders of transoceanic travel by air. He enjoys practical jokes. He carriesaround with him a jumping coin, which he puts on a companion’s plate atdinner, and laughs heartily when the coin jumps unexpectedly into hisfriend’s face.

Villa-Lobos possesses an incredible store of physical energy. He cancarry on for hours, talking, playing, conducting, without showing signs offatigue. One afternoon, after a full day’s work at the office, he got out thehuge score of his as yet unperformed Choros number eleven, for piano andorchestra, and read it through, standing at his desk, gesticulating, imitatingthe instruments, barking out the rhythms. That evening, Villa-Lobos wasnot too tired to play, rather unpianistically, his pieces for the benefit of hisfriends and visitors, at his home. Villa-Lobos also plays billiards, quiteprofessionally, beating all amateurs hands down.

2. THE FLAMBOYANT CHANT ICLEER

“I am Folklore!” Heitor Villa-Lobos once declared during a discussion ofBrazilian folk music. “My tunes are as authentic as any created by mypeople.”

Now that Villa-Lobos has joined the immortals of music, his defi-ant assertion must be taken seriously. This flamboyant chanticleer ofBrasilidade—Brazilianism—was indeed a part of national folklore, a


Part 2 originally published in Show Magazine, November 1962.

legend in his own lifetime. He was a gregarious and convivial personwhose sharp mentality combined with candid sentimentality. He had manyfriends. Yet the hard facts of his life eluded even his most devoted admir-ers. It is doubtful whether Villa-Lobos himself was sure of his biography,for his power of imagination was richer than his memory. He did not evenknow in what year he was born.

When I was in Brazil 20 years ago on a mission to find out who’s whoand what’s what in Latin-American music, I examined the baptismalregistries in a Rio de Janeiro church where, according to Villa-Lobos, hewas christened, but failed to find his name. I asked his aged mother whenhe was born, but she only shook her head. No general registries of birthexisted in 19th century Brazil. When I returned to the United States, Ithought of one more resource. Villa-Lobos went to Colegio Pedro II in SaoPaulo as a child, and I addressed an inquiry to the registrar of students ofthat school. To my delight, I received a prompt reply: Villa-Lobos wasadmitted in Colegio Pedro II on the third of April 1901 at the age of 13,and he was born in Rio de Janeiro on the fifth of March 1887. When I metVilla-Lobos again, in Paris, in 1949, 1 told him when he was born. Heseemed delighted to learn the true date of his birth, and, in a sympatheticgesture, pulled slightly at my nose, complimenting me on my flair fortracking down unavailable information.

Even the catalogue of his works is an elastic uncertainty. There is init a symphonic poem entitled The Golden Centaur. The piece aroused mycuriosity, and I asked Villa-Lobos where I could find the music. Heshrugged his shoulders. “I never know what happens to my manuscripts.People just come in, pick them up and disappear.” And he told me themelancholy tale of a friend who was so enamored of this particular scorethat he persuaded Villa-Lobos to lend the manuscript to him. Years passed,and a young Brazilian army officer called on Villa-Lobos, introducinghimself as a son of the friend who had borrowed the score: could he keepthe score as a memento of his father, who had since died, the young manasked. Villa-Lobos was touched, and let him keep the music. “I have noregrets,” Villa-Lobos added. “The Golden Centaur is written in thepentatonic scale, and I no longer care for such literal representation ofIndian music.”

And he began to tell me, in his slightly tropical French, about his newestwork—a symphonic poem with a choral finale in the form of a polyglotquodlibet. “Strict polyphony in 14 languages!” he exclaimed. “Hebrew,


Greek, Latin—then the modern languages—guttural German—Bach,Buch, Gesund, Ersatz—rolling Italian syllables—mamma mia!—elegantFrench—Madame la Comtesse, je vous adore—classical Spanish—a susordenes—and Portuguese, of course, Brazilian Portuguese—saudades,saudades!—and English, British English—weekend, Milord—andRussian—otchy tchornya ...”

I was fascinated by this precise account, and concentrated onmemorizing the details. A medieval polyphonic medley, for that is themeaning of quodlibet in music, to the words in several languages incolloquial modern speech—at the hands of Villa-Lobos it could be amasterpiece! I could hardly wait to see the music. “The music?” Villa-Lobos said as though awakening from a dream. “My publisher Ricordi inSao Paulo has all my music.” Sao Paulo was on my itinerary, and my firstvisit there was to Ricordi’s office. The director met me cordially, and pulledout a long card file with the name Villa-Lobos on it. It seemed verycomplete. I rapidly looked up various items. There was even a card for TheGolden Centaur! I spotted a symphonic poem with a choral finale, whichmust have been the quodlibet in 14 languages, and asked to see the scores.“The scores?” the man asked in astonishment, “The Maestro has the scores.We keep only the card catalogue!”

I reported this episode to Camargo Guarnieri, a Brazilian composerof remarkable talent who made his home in Sao Paulo, when I went to visithim. Mario de Andrade, one of Brazil’s most eminent modern poets, wasalso there: their reaction to my story was unexpected. They burst out intoHomeric laughter. “You believed the Villa-Lobos catalogue!” CamargoGuarnieri cried, slapping my back in the Latin-American gesture offriendly sympathy. But even discounting the disembodied musicalphantoms, the productivity of Villa-Lobos was fantastic. His publishedmusic alone would make a pile taller than he was in life—compositions inevery genre, symphonic poems, string quartets, violin pieces, cello pieces,piano pieces, songs, choruses . . .

“But will this kind of music live?” ask the skeptics, using the familiarcliche of music appreciation. The answer is provided in a resoundingaffirmative by the continued performances and increased recordings ofthe music by Villa-Lobos since his death three years ago. Another criticalcliche states that a national art when expressed with great force oforiginality will obtain a universal acceptance. The music of Villa-Loboswins according to this criterion as well. His Brasilidade is uniquely


expressive. He created for his purposes two novel and compelling forms:the Choros and the Bachianas Brasileiras. The Choros is a band of streetmusicians, or, by extension, the dance music performed by such a band.Villa-Lobos adopted this native word as the title of 15 of his works, fordifferent ensembles ranging from a guitar solo to a huge orchestra withchorus. As for Bachianas Brasileiras, they express the spirit of Brazilianmusic in terms of Bach’s contrapuntal and fugal technique. Villa-Lobosattached a mystical significance to the identity of the initial letters in Bachand Brazil.

Brazilianism and Bachianism are neatly combined in the Chorale fromthe fourth suite of Bachianas Brasileiras for piano solo. It is a brilliantpiece, beautifully designed, dissonant but not too dissonant, abounding inpolyphonic inventions, with some enchanting bits of bird sounds in thehigh treble. Villa-Lobos explained to me that the persistent drone on a B-flat in the piece is the reproduction of the cry of the Brazilian jungle birdarapunga. There must have been an expression of incredulity on my face,for Villa-Lobos called in one of his assistants (the discussion took place inhis office in the Ministry of Education in Rio de Janeiro) and asked him:“What is the note that the arapunga sings?” “Si bemol!” the other replied,without a moment’s hesitation. Villa-Lobos gave me a triumphant glance,but summoned another young man, who was equally sure that the note wasindeed a si bemol.

Villa-Lobos always insisted that he was a “child of nature.” When adegree of Doctor of Music was conferred on him by Occidental Collegein Los Angeles on November 21, 1944, he declared through a translator(despite his many tours as conductor in the United States he never learnedto speak even rudimentary English): “I learned music from a bird in thejungles of Brazil, not from academies.” “What kind of bird?” inquired astudent. “Let us say, it was a bird. Any kind,” Villa-Lobos said.

The poet Mario de Andrade wrote passionately of this music ofnature: “Compared with Villa-Lobos, the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony ofBeethoven and the forest scene in Wagner’s ‘Siegfried’ are educationalpieces for window display, nature which is commercialized, laundered anddressed up to meet the demands of civilization.”

As a child of nature, Villa-Lobos scorned the musical society ofcelebrities. His translator had to soften his remarks or censor them entirelyat a women’s club meeting in the private home of a California society



leader. “Please tell the Maestro that Toscanini and Rachmaninoff wereguests of honor in this club,” the hostess asked the translator. “I am notinterested,” Villa-Lobos replied with a smile. “He says it is most flattering,”the interpreter said. “Tell him that we like to hear his voice even thoughhe cannot speak English.” “I am not a parrot or a circus clown,” theMaestro shot back. “He is delighted to oblige,” the interpreter countered.Villa-Lobos was asked to play something of his own. He sat down at thepiano. “Tell the hostess that her piano is dreadfully out of tune—a real tinpan!” he said. Everybody smiled.

This display of rudeness was partly a natural repugnance against socialconventions, partly a mask to cover his sentimental regard for people of allclasses and conditions, even for members of women’s clubs. But it issignificant that one of his most formidable and impressive works for piano,dedicated to Artur Rubinstein, to whom he was greatly devoted, he calledRudepoema!

What little academic training in music Villa-Lobos had he receivedfrom his father, a college professor, a librarian and a gifted amateurmusician. He taught Villa-Lobos to play the clarinet and the cello, but hedied when the boy was only 12 years old. Left to his own devices, Villa-Lobos joined the street Choros that became the chief source of inspirationin his own composition. He learned to play the Brazilian guitar andentered thoroughly into the spirit of popular music; he earned a littlemoney by playing at weddings, baptisms and carnival shows. For a whilehe worked at a match factory. But soon the call of the jungle possessedhim. He sold his father’s library and went into the interior of Brazil, alongthe mighty basin of the Amazon River. Traveling in a primitive canoe, heand his companions in the adventure suffered many shipwrecks in therapids, but he saved his musical instruments by roping them to his body.He filled himself with quinine against the sweeping malaria. He listenedto the songs of tropical birds and to the drums of the Indians. When hecame back to Rio de Janeiro, he was greeted as a ghost, for he had beengiven up for dead, and solemn mass for his soul had been said in church.

But Villa-Lobos was very much alive, and he resumed his life incivilization with added zest. Even before going into the jungle, he becameengaged eight times to eight different Brazilian girls. Then, suddenly, hetook off for Trinidad with a British gentlewoman who was a singer of sorts,and appeared with her as an entertainer in nightclubs there. But he was

married only twice, the first time to a professional pianist and teacher, thesecond time, much later, to his secretary.

In Rio de Janeiro, Villa-Lobos could not make a living, and subsistedfor many years on subsidies of his friends. Francisco Braga, an influentialBrazilian composer and conductor, who believed in the greatness of Villa-Lobos, decided to appeal to the patriotic feeling of the government forfinancial help. On December 5, 1920, he circulated the followingstatement: “Heitor Villa-Lobos possesses an enormous musical talent.Amazingly productive, he has written works of merit, many of them of themost original quality. He is not only a promise, but an affirmation. I believethat the Nation will be proud some day of such a son.” This testimonialprecipitated a debate in the Chamber of Deputies and on July 22, 1922, asum of 40,000 cruzeiros was voted to enable Villa-Lobos to presentconcerts of his music. Alas, the response was discouraging, and theattendance was poor. “All this effort was fruitless,” a sympathetic reviewerwrote, “simply because Villa-Lobos was not born on the banks of the Volga,and his name is not Villov-Lobov.”

But there were also signs of a better fortune. In 1922, Villa-Lobosconducted his Third and Fourth Symphonies, respectively entitled Warand Victory, on the occasion of a visit in Brazil of the King of the Belgians,and was awarded the Croix de St. Leopold, the patron saint of the King.The patriotic sentiments were flattered, and a sum of money was raisedby eight Brazilian well-wishers to finance a trip to France for Villa-Lobos.

And so Villa-Lobos arrived in Paris, carrying with him his scores.Characteristically, he said in a public statement: “I am not here to study, Iam here to demonstrate my own achievements.”

For once, Villa-Lobos was defeated at his own flamboyant game ofaphoristic pronouncements and imaginative tales of adventure. A Frenchpoetess with whom he became friendly borrowed from him a curiousvolume he was reading, Veritable Histoire et Description d’un pays habitepar des hommes sauvages, nus, feroces et anthropophages, situe dans lenouveau monde nomme Amerique. It was a French translation of a luridaccount by Hans Staden, a German who made a voyage to Brazil in themiddle of the 16th century, was captured by the Amazon Indians andnearly eaten by them. The Latin edition published in Germany in 1592was profusely illustrated by woodcuts representing these “savage, nude,ferocious and anthropophagous” aborigines in the process of carving and


cooking parts of human bodies. Luscious nude women, with long blondetresses braided in the German style, chewed on human arms and legswhile the bearded Christian prisoner, himself a candidate for a similarrepast, expostulated with them by wringing his hands and imploring themto desist.

Shortly before his first Paris concert, the evening paper L’Intransigeantpublished an interview with Villa-Lobos signed by his poetess friend, andretailing in purple prose the story of his capture by cannibals in the junglesof Brazil, his attempts to assuage their appetites with music, his narrowescapes and his miraculous rescue. The details followed closely theexperiences of Hans Staden.

The article produced a sensation, and the sale of tickets for the concertpicked up considerably. But many Brazilians in Paris were outraged bywhat appeared to be a shameless piece of self-advertising at the expenseof the good name of their country. Villa-Lobos wanted to repudiate theinterview at once, but his manager persuaded him to wait a few days so asto cash in on the publicity. There was a reception for Villa-Lobos after theconcert, and a French demoiselle asked him whether he had ever eatenhuman flesh himself during his captivity. Why, yes, he said, and particularlyrelished the flesh of French girls, very tender when well done.

In Paris Villa-Lobos made his mark. Parisians of the 1920s were highlyreceptive to exotic art, even when practiced by composers and artists whonever traveled beyond Montmartre. Villa-Lobos was “un vrai,” a genuine“exotique” from the tropics. Even the titles of his works stimulated theimagination: Uirapuru, a symphonic poem made into a ballet by SergeLifar, picturing a multihued, multi-plumed tropical bird shot down withan arrow aimed at its heart by an Indian maiden, and transformed into ahandsome youth falling at her feet; the dances of the mysterious Macumbaritual; the musical panorama of Amazonas, populated by monsters whichcrash into an abyss in quadruple fortissimo; and the lyrical Saudades, anuntranslatable word which approximates the idea of nostalgic memory ofthings past but ever dear.

Regardless of his determination not to follow Parisian musical fashionsbut to lead them, Villa-Lobos picked up enough impressionistic savoir-faire to compose delightfully Ravelesque piano pieces and songs. It wasduring his Paris period that he wrote his most poetic Choros, the AlmaBrasileira (Soul of Brazil), now a perennial favorite of modern pianists.


Villa-Lobos regarded himself as a composer of nature, but he wasirresistibly drawn to “scientific” music. “I may be a sentimentalist,” he toldme in Rio de Janeiro, “but my processes of composition are determinedby cool reasoning, by calculation.” It is this spirit of scientific applicationthat led him to develop the method of melodic “Millimetrization.” Hedrew a curve on graph paper, assigned a millimeter or two from the graphto each semitone on the vertical scale and an eighth-note on the horizontalline, and thus obtained a rhythmed melody. In this manner he “composed”for the New York World’s Fair his dedicatory piece entitled The New YorkSky Line. He harmonized the melody, orchestrated it, and it wasbroadcasted from the Brazilian Pavilion on April 7, 1940.

But what would prevent Villa-Lobos from adjusting the graph so as tosatisfy his melodic and rhythmic sense, I wondered. Villa-Lobos assuredme that he never cheated in his “millimetrization.” Would he write themelody of my family at the breakfast table? He would. I gave him a groupphotograph of myself, my wife and our then small daughter. It was pastthe closing hour in his office at the Ministry of Education, but he sat downat his desk, traced the outline of the photograph on a piece of transparentpaper, transferred this outline onto a strip of graph paper, carefullymeasured the distances in millimeters, and notated the result on the staveof music paper. He worked on my family photograph more than an hour.And the result? The melody was hardly inspiring, but Villa-Lobos couldnot be blamed. Twenty years ago, my family was not photogenic.


P a r t I I I

MONOGRAPH

To Roy Harris—without whose infectious enthusiasm for the subject this book could

never have been written

1. H IS L IFE

Lincoln Day, 1898“When, at high noon, a gun released the rough homesteaders of theCimarron Rush, two determined men knew precisely where to go and howto get there fast. They were ‘Pony Express’ Broddle and his brawny son-in-law Elmer Ellsworth Harris. They staked out territory halfway betweenwhat is now Stillwater and Chandler, in Lincoln County, they cut downtrees and built a log cabin, and sent for the young wife, Laura BroddleHarris. In that log cabin, a twelve-pound baby boy was born at four o’clockin the morning on Lincoln Day, February 12, 1898. The frontier baby waschristened Leroy Ellsworth Harris.”

Thus the family chronicle describes the advent on the American sceneof Roy (né Leroy) Harris, American composer. Family legends tell of theexcitement attending the arrival in this world of a boy so uncommonlyhefty. Old Irish women walked two miles in the Oklahoma winter, lookedat the huge baby, and murmured: “Sure and somethin’ good will come of’im; he’s born under a lucky star.”

Ten years later Harris Sr. commented on Leroy’s luck: “You know thatfeller—if he’d fall in a creek, he wouldn’t get wet—he’d come out with apocket full-a-fish!”

Leroy’s paternal great-grandfather came from Ireland; his grandfather,“old man Harris,” came from Kentucky; he married a Scotch womannamed Cameron from Ohio. After the Civil War he became a “circuit

26. ROY HARRIS: C IMARRON COMPOSER

231

rider,” preaching salvation. He had a fine singing voice and a commandingpresence. He stood six feet three in his stocking feet and weighed 240pounds. At the age of sixty-three, he won a rail-splitting contest. A man ofgreat virility, he procreated thirteen children.

All the Harrises were powerful men. Elmer Ellsworth Harris weighed242 pounds in his prime. Leroy’s nine paternal uncles were all over six feettall, and his three paternal aunts weighed over 175 pounds apiece.

Maternal grandfather and grandmother left Wales when Laura was ayear old. By racial stock, then, Leroy Ellsworth Harris is half Welsh,quarter Scotch, and quarter Irish. But, he feels, the Irish predominates inhis character.

Little Leroy with his initial start at twelve pounds seemed to be wellin the sturdy line of the Harris family tree. But he caught typhoid fever atthe age of five, and his growth was stunted. Father used to look at him andmumble: “Is it possible that I sired a shrimp like him?”

The struggle for survival was hard in the Harris family, and those whowere physically unfit perished. Leroy had three brothers who died ininfancy; Carl (1896–97), Stanley (1901–03), and Glenn (1907–10). Hissister Irene, who was born in 1905, is the only other surviving child. Shesettled in Hollywood, where she married Julian Kahn, a cellist.

At the turn of the century the Cherokee Indians were bold. Thenearest white family was a mile and a half away. There was little protection.The Indians would come in and demand chickens, turkeys, and other food.Mother Harris would shrewdly tell them to take as many guinea hens—notoriously elusive fowl—as they could catch. After a couple of hours ofgrunting and ki-yi-ing, the Indians would ride off without the guinea hens.

The Harrises lived by barter rather than by monetary exchange.Mother would take a tin bathtub full of eggs to the town of Chandler andbring back a bolt of gingham dress goods.

Pioneer hospitality was a family trait. One night, during a violentstorm, there was a mighty knock at the door. “I wouldn’t turn away a blackman on a night like this,” Father Harris said. In walked a big black man.The Harrises put him up in the cotton bin, in the barn. The Negro wasfriendly. When the storm was over, he stayed on. It was months before hetook to the road again.

This hospitality remained in the life of Roy Harris. A typical Harrishousehold, whether in California, Princeton, New York, Ithaca, ColoradoSprings, Nashville, or Sewanee, includes a number of transients. There


was, for instance, a young married man who wanted to study composition,but had no money. His wife was a good cook, so Roy Harris suggested thathe would house them both in exchange for her services as a cook. It wasagreed; and when the couple arrived in Ithaca, where Harris was teachingat Cornell University, they had with them a friend of the young man’s wife,a girl poet. She remained there for a season; she could type a little, andbecame a temporary secretary.

When the Harrises lived in New York, one of his former pupilsdropped in unexpectedly. He was hungry and unshaven, after hitchhikingfrom the West. “My wife has left me,” he declared, “and I came to stay withyou.” He remained in the Harris household for over a year.

Andrew Rice, the founder of Black Mountain College, was taken intothe Harris household to write a novel for the Harper Prize. He stayed fora year, helped in the kitchen, washed dishes, and philosophized. He wrotehis novel and got the Harper Prize with I Belong to the EighteenthCentury.

Leroy to RoyThe Oklahoma days came to an end in dramatic fashion. In 1903, MotherHarris contracted malaria and was confined to bed. Pioneer familiesdepended for their very survival on the hard work of their womenfolk,fetching wood and water, baking, brewing, sewing, and mending. Indespair, Elmer Harris did something he had never done before. He tookhis savings to town and tried his luck in a gambling house in Chandler. Atthe end of the game, he was $500 to the good. Afraid to walk home withall this money in his wallet, he stayed the rest of the night in the saloon.When he returned home in the morning, he decided to move away. Heauctioned off the homestead, prepared a huge basket of fried chicken andsandwiches, and took his sick wife and the boy to California on the SantaFe coach.

When he arrived in California, he had $2,000, with which he boughta small piece of land which had been sheep grazing land of “Lucky”Baldwin, the notorious gambler who inherited the famous Spanish Grantof San Gabriel Valley. One of the last remnants of the Old Pioneer West,“Lucky” Baldwin lived like a feudal lord in the town of Arcadia, “the townof saloons,” now the home of the Santa Anita race track.

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Harris Sr. wanted his boy to be manly. When neighborhood childrenpicked on Leroy, who was shy and undersized, Father Harris urged him:“Defend yourself! Bite, kick and scratch! Put up a fight!” Leroy did.

At ten, Harris Sr. gave Leroy an acre of land and seed for a vegetablepatch. He gave him a placid horse and a wagon to deliver the products ofthe farm to nearby communities. When the boy was older, father and sonworked together in the fields from seven o’clock in the morning. Theytook an hour for eating, and then worked until six at night. Father Harrisused to whistle American tunes, and his favorite was “When JohnnyComes Marching Home.” When Harris became a composer, he made useof this tune in four of his symphonic works: The Overture from theGayety and the Sadness of the American Scene; When Johnny ComesMarching Home; a movement of American Portraits: 1929; and theFolksong Symphony.*

Father Harris would start whistling “When Johnny Comes MarchingHome” at a brisk tempo at the beginning of his morning’s work. Bysundown, the tempo was twice as slow, reflecting the exhaustion of theday’s work. In Roy Harris’s overture, When Johnny Comes MarchingHome, the tune appears at march tempo in the opening and is treated ina slower tempo in the development section. This augmentation was thelearned counterpart of the slackening of rhythmic pace in Father’swhistling tempo after a day’s work.

The Harrises led a rather isolated existence, as did all farmers in thosedays. They talked little and were suspicious of people who talked fast andeasy. Working hard in the fields, they had little time for reading. LeroyHarris did not learn the alphabet until he was seven. He read laboriouslyby the yellow light of the coal-oil lamp. His first book was about a horse,Black Beauty; his second, Robinson Crusoe. Then he discovered HoratioAlger and read his success stories voraciously. He instinctively identifiedhimself with the boy heroes of Alger’s American classics, determined toemulate their shrewdness and their wise ways with the world.

At the age of forty, looking back, Harris reminisced:

During childhood and youth, need seems to have been my bosomcompanion. I lived with the daily need to understand my invalid


*Roy Harris was not the first American composer to utilize this song in a major com-position. When Johnny Comes Marching Home, “military spectacular comic opera” byone Julian Edwards, was produced in Detroit on October 6, 1902.

mother—to absorb the inapproachable silence of my father at the endof a long summer’s day of work; need to understand the moods of thegreat mountains in sunrise flush, in hot naked noonday silence— inevening’s purple tints; need to know why the sounds of spring were somuch lighter and gayer than the sounds of summer, why the stars of clearwintry nights were so remote; need to express the impersonal patiencein the beautiful eyes of dumb animals; above all, the need to understandthis unpredictable tyrant who ruled me from within—whom I could notescape day or night, summer or winter, in country, mountains, desert,city, by the sea, alone, or with others.

At the age of fourteen, Leroy Harris enrolled in high school in Covina,California. He recalls those days in his autobiography, in third personsingular: “The teachers were always wanting him to do something he didnot want to do; things that didn’t make sense to him. And then there wastrouble. Fighting every day—sometimes he was sent home from school.”

In his home life, the greatest sensation was the acquisition of a piano:

It created a great stir. All the neighbors came in to see the piano—butonly his mother could play it. When she pressed certain keys, it soundedwonderful, as when he was alone under the sky. But when the boy playedit, everything seemed to quarrel—like all the kids at school.

The piano was a problem in his life. He was captivated with learningwhich keys to press—and then when he learned the right keys he couldplay a piece after he learned the Time. So his mother taught him. Latera teacher came in her buggy every week—and he had to play at thechurch at Christmas time and for graduation exercises. He used to loveto go into the parlor after supper and play his pieces in the pitch darkwith his eyes closed. It was like telling a secret to some one inside ofhimself . . . The kids looked at him in a strange, distant manner when heplayed the piano. They made him feel as though he were a traitor—orsome one who had the measles or the mumps.

Leroy proved his manhood conclusively when he broke his nose andhis left arm in football. He also jammed the fourth finger of his right handso badly that he had to abandon his piano playing.

Another sissified attribute had to be dropped. The embarrassinglypretty name of Leroy was changed to plain Roy. No longer was he TheKing, but just King.

Roy Harris 235

In First GearIn Covina, Roy and some high school friends organized the “Bachelors’Club.” The guiding spirit was a church organist, Alec Anderson, whodoubled as accountant for the Fruit Growers Association. The Bachelors’Club met on Sunday evenings at Anderson’s home. They discussed withgreat earnestness the problems of Free Will, Predestination, and UltimateTruth. They also listened to music. From Anderson’s large library ofphonograph records, they played recordings of Paderewski, Caruso, andKreisler. At one of their meetings, Roy heard Schubert’s UnfinishedSymphony for the first time. One day, Anderson took the boys to asymphony concert in Los Angeles.

Roy was no hide-bound intellectual. He excelled in athletics. He wasa local tennis champion in Covina and held the highest batting average inhis high school baseball league. He was a left-end in football, and rathergood at it.

Meanwhile, the Harris family had continued to prosper. In 1912 theybought their first car, an Abbott-Detroit. Roy learned to drive at fourteen.He became a typical American boy—dances, girls, cars. But no drinking.

At the driver’s wheel, Roy was always a speed demon. Once, pursuedby a motorcycle policeman on an Ohio highway, he stepped on the gas andoutraced the law at 100 m.p.h.

At the age of forty, reminiscing about himself (as usual, in third personsingular), Harris wrote:

There came a Saturday when he drove his horse up to the High Schoolto get his baseball suit and shoes and tennis racket. He was very sad. Hewept. He had graduated, and he knew that was the end of fun. He waseighteen years old. A man! Strong! He could plow the fields and loadbaled hay. His father had bought him ten acres of land. He owned horsesand tools. He had a bank account. He would get some of the stock of hisbank. He would become the Mayor of his town and sit on the SchoolBoard.*

Then came the War. Harris enlisted in heavy artillery; he was still intraining camp on Armistice Day. Out of uniform, he had to earn a living.


*Parts of Harris’s autobiography were published, in a bowdlerized and watered-downform, in American Magazine of Art, November 1939.

His farm was sold and the money spent. He took a job as a truck driverfor a dairy company. His daily load to deliver was three hundred poundsof butter and three hundred dozen eggs. His work began at the first gleamof dawn. This habit of early rising has remained with him throughout hislife. His best hours for composition are still between five and seven o’clockin the morning.

Harris drove the milk company truck, off and on, for four years, andhis experience has become part of the Harris legend. A Boston dowagerreading the program notes at a concert featuring a Harris work, was heardto say: “I don’t believe I want to hear this. How can an ex–truck driver writesymphonies?” When the BBC Symphony Orchestra broadcast Harris’sThird Symphony, an irate listener wrote to the London Radio Times: “RoyHarris should have stuck to truck-driving instead of insulting music-loverswith his senseless noise.”

In 1919, Harris entered the University of California at Berkeley asa special student and took courses in philosophy, sociology, and econom-ics. He also attended music courses. “Each new harmony—each newmelody—each composer discovered—milestones all!” he recalled. “But ashadow darkened those years. Our young composer couldn’t seem to getanywhere in life. His boyhood schoolmates were all acquiring wives,homes and respectable occupations—as farmers, doctors, lawyers, den-tists, automobile dealers. It was getting so that he dreaded to go home.What was he doing?—OH!!”

Haunted by musical ideas which he was unable to express, Harris wentto Charles Demarest, a capable organist and composer, who taught himthe rudiments of harmony and modulation. Later he took lessons fromanother organist, Ernest Douglas. Soon he was able to write simple music,and he succeeded in putting together a nocturne for piano, in feebleimitation of Chopin.

In Los Angeles, he studied with Hennie Charles Dillon, who wasespecially interested in bird songs. Another teacher to whom Harris wentfor elementary instruction was Henry Schoenfeld, a good musician whowrote good German-type music, mostly in the key of B flat major.

Having acquired the rudiments of music, Harris felt he needed ateacher-friend who could inspire him and give him formative advice. Hefound such a man in Arthur Farwell.

Harris was tremendously impressed by Farwell’s Eusebius-likeenthusiasm for new ideas. Farwell was equally impressed with Harris’s

Roy Harris 237

determination to scale musical heights. In the Musical Quarterly ofJanuary 1932, Farwell summed up his impression of young Harris in thesewords: “I was convinced that he would one day challenge the world.”

Under Farwell’s friendly tutelage, Harris wrote a set of variations ona southwestern Spanish-American folksong, Pueña Hueca, for chorus,violin, violoncello, and piano, and Farwell himself conducted it in 1920with the Pasadena Community Chorus.

There were other teachers and advisers. Modest Altschuler, theRussian conductor then living in Los Angeles, gave Harris lessons inorchestration. Harris also took some lessons with the British composer,Arthur Bliss, who was at the time residing in Santa Barbara. Harris wasinitiated by him into the mysteries of modern dissonant harmony.

Having absorbed the best California had to offer, Harris decided togo east. He had no funds, but he had faith in his lucky star—“If he’d fallin a creek, he wouldn’t get wet—he’d come out with a pocket full-a-fish!”as his father used to say. At forty, musing upon his youthful faith, he gavethe quality of luck a more philosophical definition as “the composite ofcircumstances and strong intuitions supported by emotional convictions.”*

Bumming rides in trucks and freight cars, Harris reached New Yorkwith a $5 bill in his pocket. In the big city, he eked out a meager livelihooddoing settlement work, teaching, and organizing school concerts. After ayear of struggle, he quit and went back to California, where he could atleast be sure of roofed shelter and basic food.

$2,500 Tea PartyIn California, the financial problems of Roy Harris continued to be acute.Farwell, always eager to help, made an outspoken announcement: “I knowof nothing that is likely to bring greater honor and achievement toAmerican music through the work of an individual than to support RoyHarris in every possible way.” He did his part by getting Harris a job asmusic critic with the Illustrated Daily News of Los Angeles and a positionas harmony teacher at the Hollywood Conservatory. He introduced Harrisinto the influential milieu of music patrons and patronesses in LosAngeles, among them Artis Mason Carter, the lady through whose efforts


*“At fifty-three, I believe that luck is the circumstance of being at the right place atthe right time with what people want.” R.H.

the Hollywood Bowl was built. Harris also met Mrs. Carrie Jacobs Bond,who advised him to write successful songs, and Elly Hey, the German-American pianist, who asked him to write a “real American piano concerto”for her. Alfred Hertz, then conductor of the San Francisco Symphony,looked at his scores and offered encouragement.

Harris Sr. watched Roy’s progress with misgivings. “If you get to beone of those musical fellers,” he grumbled, “you will have to hang aroundtea parties with a mess of women.” “Dad, I won’t be that kind of amusician,” replied the son.

Harris was forging ahead in his composition. He wrote a suite forstring quartet, Impressions of a Rainy Day: “Rain,” a set of impressionistictone pictures in four movements; “Lull Before the Rain”; “Evening Song”;and “From Over the Hill.” The work was performed in Los Angeles onMarch 15, 1926, by the Zoellner String Quartet, which subsequently tookit on a nation-wide tour.

Encouraged by this public presentation of his music, Harris embarkedon the composition of a full-fledged symphony, under the title OurHeritage.

Of this projected symphony, only the slow movement, Andante,survived. Harris sent it to Howard Hanson, director of the Eastman Schoolof Music in Rochester; he accepted it on the spot and performed it at afestival of unpublished American music, at the Eastman School of Musicin Rochester, on April 23, 1926.

Harris borrowed money and sped to Rochester to attend theperformance. This time he traveled by train as a bona fide payingpassenger—his bumming days were over.

Metropolitan critics were on hand for the Rochester festival. OlinDownes, of the New York Times, singled out the Andante as the best workof the program. “The greatest promise of the concert appeared to beinherent in Mr. Harris’s score,” he wrote. “Its essential quality isuncommon today—a quality of serene nature, a mood that is lofty and notsensuous, a music that has a deep breath.”

Another performance of the Andante followed the Rochester success,when Villem Von Hoogstraten conducted the score at Lewisohn Stadiumin New York in July 1926. He also played it at the Hollywood Bowl onAugust 6, 1926. The Angelenos took pride in the successes of their adoptedcitizen. The Los Angeles Evening Herald announced: HARRIS’ANDANTE PROVES L.A. COMPOSER OF STRONG TALENT AND

Roy Harris 239

SPIRITUAL DEPTH. Another Los Angeles paper proclaimed: FAMEFORESEEN FOR ROY HARRIS.

In the summer of 1926, Roy Harris went to the MacDowell Colony inPeterborough, New Hampshire, that unique settlement where musicians,artists, and writers sojourned for work and relaxation. There he met thecream of the crop of American talents and was stimulated to greatercreative effort.

Back in New York, Harris received an invitation to tea from AlmaWertheim, patroness of music, a sister of Henry Morgenthau. The direwarning of Elmer Harris Sr. that Roy’s fate as a musician would be to hangaround tea parties “with a mess of women” came alarmingly close to reality.

As Harris recalls the events of the tea party, Alma Wertheim offeredhim a trip to Europe for extended study, with all expenses paid. And shegave him $300 in cash to buy clothes. In Europe, Harris was to receive$2,500 annually, for a period of four years.

His destination was Paris, and his musical beacon was NadiaBoulanger. Her name, as a great teacher, was suggested to Harris by AaronCopland, who studied with her himself.

A Concerto in ParisFor his first lesson, Nadia Boulanger asked Harris to write twentymelodies. He brought in 107. Then she told him to write counterpoint ona given cantus firmus. He brought her a book of 128 exercises. NadiaBoulanger was impressed. “At this rate, you will be through withcounterpoint in two months,” she said. “But I do not intend to go onstudying counterpoint,” parried Harris. “There is no problem at all inwriting these exercises. It takes no talent whatsoever—any fool can writethis sort of thing. I want to write music, not lessons.” Nadia Boulanger lethim select his own independent work. He decided on a clarinet concerto,because he was thoroughly familiar with the technique of the instrumentfrom his school days, when he played in a band. In three months, betweenOctober and December, 1926, the Concerto for Clarinet, Piano and Stringquartet was completed.

The working schedule in France was hard for Harris. He lived in thelittle village of Juziers in Normandy, in a cottage owned by an old peasantwoman whose face was the spitting image of . . . Beethoven! Every Friday,he took the noon train to Paris, for his weekly lesson with Nadia Boulanger,


and went back to the country Sunday at noon. There he was working ten,twelve, even fourteen hours a day, studying Bach and Beethoven, andimprovising chords on a ramshackle upright piano.

In Paris he went to concerts. He heard for the first time the music ofFauré, Roussel, Honegger, Milhaud. He absorbed Debussy and Ravel. Heheard the first performance of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex. But, he recalls,he was always “an unpopular minority of one among the students ofBoulanger in regard to Stravinsky.” Among the Russians, only Mussorgskyimpressed him as a creative mind. He thought Rimsky-Korsakov wassuperficial; in Tchaikovsky, he admired the writing for wind instruments.

The Clarinet Concerto was presented to the Paris public in a galaspring concert of the Société Musicale Indépendante, on May 8, 1927, inParis. Nadia Boulanger herself played the piano part, with the RothQuartet and Cahuzac, the famous French clarinetist. In anticipation ofthe event, Harris had outlined the necessary tactics of dealing withmusicians at rehearsals. He notated on the back cover of the manuscriptof the Clarinet Concerto: “PRACTICAL PROBLEMS: Reading frommanuscript—lack of authority of the printed page. Changing any part inpresence of performer makes him less meticulous—leads him to beliefthat if parts can be changed, the music is arbitrary.”

Like all composers of intractable music, Harris had his troubles withperformers. “The last movement of the Concerto was so unorthodoxrhythmically that Cahuzac could not play it.” Harris recalls. “As a result, hebecame so upset that he did not appear at all for the last rehearsal. Wecalled up his apartment, and his wife said that he had left early thatmorning and had not come back. It was too late to engage another clarinetplayer, so we simply waited and hoped that Cahuzac would show up at theconcert. He did, but it was obvious that he had been drinking. However,he played his part without a single mistake—it was the most magnificentperformance a composer could possibly desire.”

There was another Paris performance of the Concerto, with a differentgroup of players. The musicians could not get the rhythms, and Harris wasworried. Virgil Thomson, who lived in Paris at the time, said to him: “Well,if you insist on writing masterpieces, you will always have trouble.” Butafter the concert, he beamed: “You should never hesitate to venture to doanything you want because the most daring things always come out best.”As Harris came up to join a group of people, Thomson observed: “Herecomes Roy Harris, who is going to be the great American composer and

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for whom they will put up statues for the dogs to sniff at!” According toHarris, Thomson used an earthier word.

Looking back to his Paris days, at the age of forty, Roy Harrisreminisced, always in third person singular:

The first year in France was torture to our composer. He was worriedand disappointed. He disagreed violently with his great teacher. He cameto get knowledge and discipline. She preached both. But her knowledgewas a detailed cataloguing of what had already been done; her discipline,a Royalist-Catholic negation of spontaneity. She taught the doctrine ofconservation—the tailor-made article designed from any material tomeet the needs of the time and place. He was in search of the machinerywith which to release and harness the wild horses within him.

He subscribed to a series of all the Beethoven string quartets. Hebought the scores and studied them in minute detail before and aftereach concert. Beethoven became his wise, confiding, copiously illustra-tive teacher. He saturated his days and nights with Beethoven’s dynamicforms—studied his idiom by planning out a form of his own with aBeethoven theme and then comparing his ideas of form. He turned toBach’s rich contrapuntal textures and long, direct forms. He learnedabout the passion and discipline of uninterrupted eloquence. He becamea profound believer in discipline, form, organic and autogenetic.

New York InterludeIn November 1927 Roy Harris went back to New York for a brief stay.There a pleasant surprise awaited him. He was awarded a GuggenheimFoundation stipend, $2,500 a year to study and work abroad. Also theLeague of Composers put the Clarinet Concerto on its program forFebruary 12, 1928, his thirtieth birthday. But on that day he was on hisway back to Europe, to fullfill the conditions of the Guggenheim grant.

The Clarinet Concerto (programmed as a Sextet) had a mixedreception in New York. The reviews were tepid, and some of them openlyhostile. W. J. Henderson wrote in the New York Sun: “Of thematicinvention and rhythmic definition, the composition has only about enoughto nurse it through half an hour. This Sextet, we fear, will not have manyrepetitions.”


Henderson was wrong. The Concerto continued to prosper. Thescore was published in 1932 by the Cos Cob Press. In 1933, the Concertowas recorded by Columbia Phonograph Company. It was broadcast overthe Columbia network on June 14, 1933, with an introductory speech bythe composer.

The sturdiness of the Clarinet Concerto was attested by VirgilThomson who wrote in the New York Herald-Tribune of January 25,1949: “Roy Harris’s Concerto for string quartet, clarinet and piano, is still,twenty years later, real chamber music, perfectly real chamber music,with no more faults than are to be found in Brahms, and with all thevirtues.”

Paul Rosenfeld, “the happy voyager in the arts,” had become Harris’swarm friend and staunch champion. He wrote to Harris in Paris hisimpressions of the Clarinet Concerto:

I liked best the Scherzo and the Finale: they seemed more youyourself, more original and musically alive than the other twomovements; but the entire work was virile and necessary, and helpedfill the great spaces of this country with another live, independentspirit. I think you show symphonic breadth in your ideas, and a goodbalance between popularity and elevation. I think the two inseparablein you; I have the conviction that the more slangy you become inmusic, the more sturdy and elevated you will become. You belong inthe Whitman school; and it is as the first real Whitmanite (in the senseof Lindsay, Sandburg, Frost, Anderson) in American music that I saluteyou, old R. H.

Harris stayed in Paris but a few months, and in the fall of 1928 madea return trip to America. He was now working on a Piano Sonata, butfound himself ill at ease writing for piano, because of his habit of thinkingin terms of counterpoint. He could not very well adopt the conventionalharmonic texture of pianistic technique, and he compromised by usingwhat he called “chordal counterpoint.” In the early spring of 1929, theSonata was completed. Although it followed the Clarinet Concertochronologically, Harris designated the Sonata as op. 1, and the Concerto,op. 2, on account of revisions made in the Concerto at a later date. Afterop. 2, Harris stopped counting opus numbers—at least until fifteen yearslater, when his Fifth Symphony suddenly emerged as op. 55.

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The Sonata was published in 1931 by Cos Cob Press. Harris dedicatedit to Elly Ney, the pianist who had urged Harris to write a concerto for her.But when Harris sent the Sonata to her, and asked her to learn and play itin public, she replied evasively that the style of the music was unsuitablefor her purpose.

Harris gave the Sonata to Harry Cumpson, a modern-minded pianist,who gave its first performance in New York on March 3, 1929. There weresome cheers in the press, and also some boos. The Sonata received moreappreciation when Cumpson played it again on December 18, 1930. MarcBlitzstein wrote enthusiastically in Modern Music of January 1931,describing it as “a work teeming with vitality and spirit, large in dimension,and deep in meaning . . . muscular music, full of superb long-breathednesswith flashing chords descending in irregular metric intervals to the samebass chord.” The Musical Courier found in the Sonata “great force, vigorand vitality, robust poetry and scorn for outworn traditions.” Only MusicalAmerica was definitely antagonistic: “This Sonata might have come out ofMoscow,” said the review.

Three Broken VertebraeHad Harris consulted a crystal gazer before going back to France, hewould never have returned to the cottage in Juziers. In the peaceful ruralhouse presided over by the Frenchwoman with the Beethoven face, darkdangers lurked. Coming down the stairway on an August morning, Harrisslipped and fell and broke his spine. He was rushed to the Americanhospital in Paris, where he spent two weeks. He was discharged, but thepain continued. He went to the Rothschild Hospital. There he was put ina plaster cast, from the waist to the neck, and in this confined shape, wasshipped back to Juziers. A flea of a vicious French variety got under thecast the very first day and made his home on his belly, aggravating hismisery. “From now on,” Roy wisecracked, “any smartaleck critic can call mea flea-bitten composer.”

Lying on his back in his room at Juziers, Harris refused to stay idle. Adesk was placed on his chest, and on it, somewhat in the position ofMichelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he wrote a stringquartet—a manuscript of eighty-five pages. This work took him threemonths, from October to December 1929.

His recovery was slow. Harris became worried and then desperate. Hesent a dramatic cable to Henry Allan Moe, secretary of the Guggenheim


Foundation: “Advised my fractured spine will never properly heal. Wish toreturn to my native land.” The reply came at once, also by cable. TheGuggenheim Foundation offered to pay for the passage home and allmedical expenses.

There was no ambulance in the little town of Juziers, and Harris wasconveyed to Paris in a funeral hearse. His faithful landlady, the “Beethovenface,” brought out a bottle of old wine to take along. Drinking wine, whilelying on one’s back, in a hearse, was a difficult process, but Harris managedonly too well, and arrived in Paris slightly intoxicated. As he was taken outof the hearse and into the Hôtel de la Gare St. Lazare, the pious Frenchlined up on each side, bared and bowed their heads, and crossedthemselves. Nadia Boulanger and her pupils came to see Harris in hishotel room and wept copiously over him.

In December 1929, still in his plaster cast, Harris was carried aboardthe White Star liner Olympic and placed in the ship’s hospital. In NewYork, at the Polyclinic Hospital, a piece of the shinbone from his right legwas grafted into the spine, to replace the broken fragments of threevertebrae. The expenses, nearly $6,000, were generously taken care of bythe Guggenheim Foundation.

In keeping with his optimistic philosophy, Roy Harris thought that hismisfortune was not without benefits. He wrote: “A fractured spine, and sixmonths in a plaster-of-paris cast yielded a complete independence of thepiano. Release! The return home to an America, shrill with the clamor ofplenty! The heartache for the sanity of a small French village, whererespect was shown for the composer who had American money to spend.But always his lucky star led him through narrow passages to the next trailwith food and lodging and equipment there waiting, regenerating hisenthusiasms, confidence and energies.”

In 1931, Harris went back to California, to the family ranch nearGlendora. His health fully regained, he took long walks in the countryside,armed with an enormous notebook which was his faithful companion inFrance, New York, and California. In this notebook he jotted down hismelodies, and then “put them away to mellow.” On the cover he wrote:“Roy Harris—Thematic Material—Please Return—See addressesinside—Reward.” To make doubly sure, Harris wrote on the inside page:“Anybody finding this book will do me the greatest kindness to return it.The material which it contains represents the germs for years and years incomposition. Because of the sketchy manner in which these ideas arerecorded they cannot possibly be available to anybody else than the author.

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To him they are invaluable because they can awaken associations of moodin him which recall the mood (and ideas surrounding that mood) withwhich the sketch was made.”

The Stolen SymphonyIn February 1931, Artur Rodzinski, then conductor of the Los AngelesPhilharmonic, announced in the press his intention to perform a symphonicwork by Roy Harris, American Portraits: 1929. There was a flurry ofexcitement among Harris’s friends. But soon Rodzinski realized that thescore was too tough to handle without an unlimited number of rehearsalsand quietly shelved it. He asked Harris to write something easier. Harrisset to work, and in four days completed an Andantino for strings, clarinet,and flute—twenty-six pages of manuscript score, all told. The parts werecopied with equal speed, and the piece was successfully performed byRodzinski with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, on March 22, 1931.

Harris tried to salvage some of the material from American Portraitsand rearranged the first movement, under the non-committal title,Concert Piece. Like its parent work, it never got performed. The onlydistinctive technical device in this Concert Piece worth noting is a seriesof glissandos in strings, an effect which Harris has not used in any of hisworks since.

Rodzinski then asked Harris to write a larger work for the 1932–33season. Highly pleased, he wrote a Toccata, 139 pages in length. But, aftermuch discussion and negotiation, this work, too, was dropped. Harrisattempted to make the material of the Toccata into a piano concerto, butabandoned the project on page 22 of the manuscript.

Harris returned to New York from California in September 1931. Thistime he was able to drive in his own car, purchased with funds from theCreative Fellowship of the Pasadena Music and Arts Association, grantedhim for two successive seasons 1930–31 and 1931–32.

In New York, Harris unexpectedly hit the spotlight of front-pagepublicity—not for his music, but because somebody broke into his parkedcar and stole two brief cases containing scores and parts of AmericanPortraits and Toccata.

The World-Telegram of September 28, 1931, recounted: “ ‘Somebodyhas stolen my symphony,’ said Roy Harris. ‘Your what?’ asked the policesergeant. ‘My symphony,’ repeated the composer. ‘Also a Toccata I had justfinished.’ The sergeant called the captain, and the captain called several


detectives . . . They said they didn’t see much hope. I asked why, and theysaid whoever had stolen my property would probably throw it down thesewer.’ ”

The police guessed right—or almost right. Two days after the theft ofthe music, the unwelcome loot was found by two hotel bellboys in an opentelephone booth in the West 103rd Street subway station, where thedisappointed thieves had left it. But the parts of the Toccata were stillmissing and had to be recopied.

There was a hopeful sequel to the episode of the stolen music.Leopold Stokowski, then conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, readabout it and expressed interest. Harris went to see him, and Stokowskiagreed to try out the score of American Portraits with the orchestra.Harris attended the rehearsal and was shocked by the deficiencies in thescoring. Returning to New York, he decided not to have the work per-formed. He wrote to Stokowski: “Naturally, performances mean very muchto me in these early years of my creative life—but only if my music is soclearly conceived and formulated that it becomes an unequivocal entitywhen it is faithfully executed. I do not want a performance unless mymusic is formulated with mastery. It is only then that the orchestra caninterpret a work with precision of form end beauty of living tone. It is onlythen that the combined efforts of the composer and conductor can conveynew vital experience to the audience. If I cannot give you vital music today,I will do so tomorrow.”

In 1932, Harris wrote an Overture from the Gayety and Sadness of theAmerican Scene, designed to portray the two-fold nature of the nation. Heoffered the score to a conducting friend whose specialty was modernAmerican music. “How are things with you?” he wrote him. “Are you goingto conduct in Europe again? I have a fine Overture, ten minutes, for fullorchestra. Would love to have you introduce it.”

The Overture never got a performance in Europe. It was first heardin California, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, on December 29, 1932.The Angelenos did not take too kindly to this moody and, to sunkissed ears,discordant music, “To Harris’s Overture, the audience paid the tribute ofstrong partisanship,” wrote a reporter. “Hisses battled against cheers, witha flattering absence of lethargy.”

The Overture was played again, at the Hollywood Bowl, in thesummer of 1933. It was its last performance in the original version. Laterit was reincarnated in a new overture, entitled When Johnny ComesMarching Home, after its song theme. Trimmed down and disencumbered

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of strident layers of chordal counterpoint, it proved to be one of Harris’smost successful works and brought his name before a large audience. Thisnew version was written on commission from the Victor Company—thefirst American work commissioned by a recording company. It was firstperformed in public by the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, under thedirection of Eugene Ormandy, on January 13, 1935.

The success of Johnny brought another piece of luck to Harris. He gota publisher. “Schirmer’s has at last decided to take me on as a steadycontributor,” he wrote to a friend. “They bought three compositions andpaid me money—real money. Can you believe that?”

Genius with a Hat OnAt thirty-five, mezzo cammin della nostra vita, Harris was convinced that hewould triumph over the difficulties of the road of fame. “I hope to becomea really great composer,”he wrote to a friend in 1933. There were others whoshared Harris’s hope. Paul Rosenfeld was one of the earliest champions.Arthur Mendel joined the growing company of confirmed Harrisites. Heconfessed his partiality, when he wrote in the Nation of January 6, 1932: “Itwould be less than honest not to admit that the force of Harris’s personality,his entirely convincing sincerity, almost fanaticism, and my friendship forhim may have something to do with my respect for his music.”

None was more intemperately vocal in support of Roy Harris than hisold teacher, Arthur Farwell. In the January 1932, issue of the MusicalQuarterly, he delivered a ringing paean to Harris and his Muse.“Gentlemen, a genius—but keep your hats on,” he announced.

Although Harris’s Toccata had died at birth, Farwell hailed it as a“titanic work . . . one of the greatest emotional and intellectual achieve-ments of modern times.” He described Harris as “a sort of polytonalPythagoras, who has brought clear mathematical logic and purpose intothis highly valid latter-day concept. . . . He had discovered a new harmonicocean. . . . If there is such a thing as fourth-dimensional music, this is it.”

In conclusion, Farwell ventured a prophecy: “This insatiablecomposer has simultaneously reconstituted the scheme of all the physicalelements of music with firm intellectual power and purpose and in thesame breath has redirected the spiritual intent of music. . . . I predict forhim no mere vogue, but a wide, dynamic and enduring influence upon theart of music.”


There were also voices of cautious dissension. In an article publishedin Modern Music of January 1934, Walter Piston offered ironic con-gratulations: “Roy Harris must, first of all, be applauded and encouragedfor surviving the trying experience of having been hailed as a genius.” Hepaid tribute to Harris’s powers of persuasion: “To be shown a score byHarris himself is a real experience. His personality is contagiouslyenthusiastic, and his honest appreciation of the beauties of his own workis refreshing. His playing and singing both have that kind of sketchyinaccuracy one expects in composers, but one is somehow left with theimpression that a great work has been revealed.”

Eagerly absorbing praise, and brushing aside captious criticism, Harrisstepped up his musical production. The year 1932 brought out a Fantasyfor piano, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn, which was firstperformed at the Coleman Chamber Concerts in Pasadena, on April 10,1932. The same program in Pasadena included Roy Harris’s arrangementsfor flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn of four pieces by Couperin andthe Largo from the First Flute Sonata by Bach.

Harris’s String Sextet, also composed in 1932, is a far more ambitiouswork than the Fantasy. Subdivided into three sections, Prelude, Chorale,and Finale, it takes twenty-two minutes in performance time. (TheFantasy is a nine-minute work.)

The Sextet was played at the Yaddo Festival in September 1933 andwas performed again at a concert of the League of Composers in New Yorkin the spring of 1934. The work proved an important milestone in theprofessional career of Roy Harris, for it marked the beginning of hisfriendly association with that great patroness of modern music, ElizabethSprague Coolidge, to whom the score was dedicated. When in April 1933,Mrs. Coolidge went to Europe for the summer, she let Harris use herapartment in Washington.

In 1933, Roy Harris wrote his Second String Quartet subtitled ThreeVariations on a Theme. Taking a cue from the alphabetical whimsies ofSchumann, Roy Harris built the theme on the letters in the name ofElizabeth Sprague Coolidge: ES (for E flat), C, E, E, and again C.

The Second Quartet was played for the first time in Chicago, onOctober 22, 1933, by the Pro Arte String Quartet of Brussels, at theCentury of Progress Fair in Chicago. It was recorded by the VictorCompany in 1934.

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Gloomy GrandeurWhen Roy Harris appeared on the musical scene, young American musicwas in the throes of a radical fever. It was all skyscrapers, airplanes,locomotives, flivvers, robots, and jazz. George Antheil had just shaken therafters of Carnegie Hall with his “mechanical ballet”; the formidableEdgar Varèse was making scientific music, pre-empting the quality offourth-dimensional music (that Farwell had claimed for Harris) in suchworks as Hyperprism, that is, a prism projected into a space of fourdimensions. Henry Cowell was banging tone-clusters with fist and arm;Carl Ruggles impassionately scaled atonal heights, plumbed chromaticdepths, and proclaimed polychordal millennia. Chavez of Mexico was onhand with a ballet, HP, glorifying the horsepower of the modern machine.Aaron Copland had shocked Boston and New York with his “jazzconcerto.” George Gershwin honked the horn of a Paris taxi cab in AnAmerican in Paris and was contemplating the composition of a Rhapsodyof the Rivets.

Charles Ives had just been discovered, and his music that had antici-pated all kinds of modern techniques had a few belated performances. TheRussian scientist Leon Theremin and the Russian theorist Josef Schillingerwere seeking the musical philosopher’s stone with which to create scien-tifically perfect melodies, rhythms, harmonies, and tone-colors.

Some American musicians, Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, and others,sought modernity in neo-classicism. Howard Hanson asserted his faith inageless romanticism. Still others produced a fine blend of sophisticationand simplicity, as in Virgil Thomson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts, tothe words of Gertrude Stein, complete with the famous line, “Pigeons onthe grass—alas!”

In the midst of this world of sophistication and ultramodernism, RoyHarris, swimming against the tide, persevered in his assertion of musicalAmericanism. He wrote in Scribner’s Magazine for October 1934: “Thegood biological stuff in our blood and bone assures us that we willreconstitute our world with broader, more representative human values.In that reconstitution, music will probably play an important role, becauseit can most completely liberate and express those powerful, intangible,subtle feelings which motivate human impulses.”

This kind of talk annoyed his less high-flown contemporaries. In anarticle in Modern Music for November 1935, Marc Blitzstein voiced hisalarm: “The breath, the long-flowingness, the ‘go’ of his music—and Harris


still has them somewhere, in proportions unpossessed by any otherAmerican I can think of—have got clogged by misled and didacticratiocination. Can Harris do nothing about it? And can he do nothingabout the insistent mood of ‘Olympian’ ostentation which has crept in?How often, when a real contour and ‘face’ begins to appear in a movement,it becomes dimmed and blotted out by vague rhetorical repetitiousnessand posturing, gloomy-grand, or American-sinewy, or what-not!”

Virgil Thomson was goaded by Harris’s grandiloquent proclamationsinto a volcanic outburst of temper. Commenting on a Harris work with afightingly assertive American title, he wrote: “One would think to read hisprefaces, that Harris had been awarded by God, or at least by popularvote, a monopolistic privilege of expressing our nation’s deepest ideals andhighest aspirations. . . . He knows that musical material, even folklorematerial, is as international as musical form and syntax, that localism is nomore than one man’s colorful accent. He knows this so well that he avoids,as though it were of the devil, any colorful accent whatsoever. He puts hismusical effort on serious problems of material and of form. He does notalways get anywhere in his music; but it is serious music, much moreserious music than his blurbs would lead one to believe.”*

Roy Harris reacts to such rebukes with a vigorous Bronx cheer andconsecutive fifths to the nose. But when a particularly vicious attackappeared in a weekly magazine describing Harris as of a “musicalmentality with but a slight capacity for extended thinking,” he took pen inhand and wrote to a friend: “The enclosed is unjust. You know it perhapsas well as any. You examined my score with technical care to detail. Youhave heard it both on records and in concert. I call upon you to answerthis onslaught with your characteristic insight, both of technical detail andhistorical perspective (ancient and modern).”

Big Symphony from the WestIn the spring of 1933, Roy Harris met Serge Koussevitzky. He wasintroduced to the Russian conductor by Aaron Copland at a concert of theCoolidge Festival in the Library of Congress. Koussevitzky said: “You mustwrite something for me.”

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*“Well—the Boys always did bring their longest poles beneath the trees with the bestapples.” R.H.

“I would love to. What do you want?” said Harris.“I vant a big symphony from the Vest,” said Koussevitzky.Harris got to work at once. He wrote the score in Washington and in

California, where he was engaged for a course of eighteen lectures on“melodic idioms” at Mills College, through June and July. By November1933, the symphony was ready. It was entitled simply Symphony: 1933,and Roy Harris set it down as his first, disregarding the abortive AmericanPortraits: 1929. Koussevitzky looked at the score and hailed it as anAmerican masterpiece. Nonetheless he made a considerable cut—fifteenpages—in the first movement of the Symphony. Harris felt unhappy aboutit, but bowed to necessity.

The great day came, when on January 26, 1934, Koussevitzky unveiledRoy Harris to the Boston multitudes at Symphony Hall. Harris made ajourney to Boston to attend the rehearsals and hear the performance. TheFriday afternoon audience, the Cabots and the Lowells and the dowagers,still recalcitrant after nine seasons of Koussevitzky’s modern drive,received the new symphony with polite forbearance. There was, however,sufficient applause to bring Harris to the podium twice.

The next morning, the Boston Herald commented: “A Friday afternoonaudience gave the Harris symphony a Friday afternoon reception.” TheBoston Post carried the headlines: “SIBELIUS SYMPHONY HIGHSPOT—Harris New Work Receives Cordial Applause.” To the critic of theBoston Globe, Harris’s music recalled . . . Dvorak’s New World Symphony!

It was H. T. Parker, the gnome-like critic of the Boston EveningTranscript, who divined a new force in Harris. “MANIFOLD, ABUN-DANT, INDIVIDUAL,” proclaimed his headlines. “The Symphony of RoyHarris is Absorbing, Impressive, American Work.” In the space of twocolumns, written in Parker’s unique quasi-eighteenth-century idiom,H. T. P., as he always signed his articles (initials variously interpreted byBostonians as standing for Hard To Please, or Hell To Pay), he welcomedHarris. “There were those present who believe themselves ear-witnessesto an event in the course of American music,” he wrote.

Mr. Harris’s symphony is unmistakably American—American of the FarWest that nourishes itself rather than of the East that naturally andinevitably draws from Europe a part of its esthetic sustenance. . . . Mr.Harris writes clearly, concisely, even when he is busy with no inconsider-able webs of counterpoint. Nowhere, again, has he smoothed and


varnished tonal textures and surfaces. He does not exhaust himself inartful, recondite, sophisticated play with harmonies and timbres. . . .His melody, in turn, partakes of this irregularity, this unevenness. Nextto never does it proceed in measured sequences. From a germ histhemes broaden and lengthen in a fashion strange to the short-breathedmusical hour. From the themes develops melody long-lined, plastic, out-springing, upswinging, down-turning, unpredictable in its variety. Itkeeps amplitude, direction, a manifold diversity and insistence. Thosethat like to define a composer by his environment will discover Westernorigins ad libitum.

On and on flowed H. T. P.’s prose. “Mr. Harris is not only an American,but a notably individual composer, which is better, since music-making—thank God!—must remain personal, and not mass, accomplishment. . . .A music of dissonance rather than of concord he inevitably writes. Whoin these days does anything else?”

H. T. P. concluded his long essay by posing two rhetorical questions,to which he gave reasoned answers: “Has Mr. Harris discovered andreleased a new and rugged and American beauty? There are detectablesigns of it. Has he found the complementary power? He seems on the wayto it.”

Skepticism in New YorkKoussevitzky carried the Symphony: 1933 to Carnegie Hall, thatAmerican Colosseum, where the arbiters of metropolitan taste turnthumbs up or down on veterans and newcomers alike. Harris faced thisfastidious forum on February 2, 1934. He was called twice to the podiumto acknowledge applause—the same respectable number of bows as inBoston, but the reviews were tepid. In the New York Herald-Tribune,Francis D. Perkins said that the Symphony “did not always live up to thecomposer’s evidently lofty intentions, and did not set a landmark inmodern American music.” In the New York Sun, W. J. Henderson, nofriend of modern music, American or otherwise, proffered dry com-ments: “The symphony, being atonal, has no key signature, nor has it atitle, except the date 1933. . . . There is vigor in all of this score. Resolutionand energy are found everywhere, manifestations of a young andindependent talent.”

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Olin Downes in the New York Times turned thumbs down. “Much hasbeen written in recent years about Mr. Harris,” wrote Downes.

There are not lacking those who see in him a present white hope ofAmerican music. . . . It would be a pleasure to say that in vitality, color andexpressive power this music betokened such a new figure among us; andsome have said this. The structure of the piece, its map on paper, andsome of its motives, have the creative seed and offer good opportunitiesfor symphonic development. For this writer, the promise of thesymphony stops there. Its technical formulae are creditable enough, butthe music is labored and the thematic material very sparse. . . . There islittle genuine organic development in this symphony. It sometimesrepeats, but seldom progresses.

The most unkindest cut of all came at the end. With a side-kick atStravinsky in the Grecian mantle of Apollon Musagète, and an appreciativebow in the direction of Brahms, Olin Downes concluded his review withthese words: “The performance of the Brahms symphony broughtsubstantial relief from a program which had begun with a Europeanfutility and ended with an American ineptitude.”

Roy Harris was enraged. So were many of his friends. “The people inNew York are furious,” he wrote to a Boston friend. That earnest effort, hisfirst symphonic child to see the light of day—“an American ineptitude!”And this from Olin Downes who was the first to hail his modest Andanteseven years back! Harris and his friends decided to answer Olin Downesby an appeal to the Vox Populi. They had his review reproduced side byside with the prose poem of H. T. P., under the caption “Two Opinions ofa New American Symphony,” and had a thousand copies sent out tolibraries, editors, and musicians, so that the people could decide.

Echoes and repercussions of the controversy continued long after theconcluding tonic seventh chord of the Symphony had sounded off inCarnegie Hall. In a letter to the editor of the New York Times of February11, 1934, Arthur Mendel hit back at Downes, branding his lack of faith innew American music as the “merest inversion of chauvinism,” in itself “atoo familiar American ineptitude.” In an editorial rebuttal, Downespointed out that five-sixths of his review was given to Roy Harris, whereasStravinsky got three lines, and Brahms, five. His opinion, he asserted, wasbased on a preliminary study of the work, which he had an opportunity to


do with Harris himself, who explained “with admirable clarity andcomprehensiveness his aims and methods in the symphony.”

The Harris Symphony sent ripples far and wide. In some ways, it exer-cised a decisive influence on younger American talents, particularly whenthe Columbia Phonograph Company made available a recording takenduring the Carnegie Hall performance and distributed it commercially inits Masterworks Series. It was the first recording of an American sym-phony by a major phonograph company, a milestone in American musichistory. Roy Harris wrote enthusiastically: “The Symphony: 1933 wasrecorded, and we believe it will be a knockout. The head engineer said hehad never officiated over a clearer score—and that the balance was veryeven. We shall see. . . . I am busy writing a four-minute piece for stringquartet and flute to finish out the eighth side of the records.”

This extra piece was an effective work in a lyrical vein, which Harrisentitled simply Four Minutes and Twenty Seconds. In an accompanyingleaflet for the recording album, Roy Harris commented that “modernthoughts and feelings are becoming increasingly conditioned by exact timeconcepts.”

The appearance of the recording on the market gave the signal forfurther exchange of salvos and hoots in the press. In an article in TheAmerican Mercury, of April 1935, entitled “The American Composer Getsa Break,” Aaron Copland wrote: “Harris has had great success with therecording companies; much of his work is already on the ‘immortalizingdisc.’ This means that it is no hothouse music, but manifestly alive, fullflowing; for not only do the companies record it, the public buys it . . .There is something impressive in the progress of this former backwoods-man. What he writes, in general, is music for the ‘big public’; it has sweep,power, emotional breadth.”

Paul Rosenfeld wrote perfervidly in The New Republic of November21, 1934: “Three times within a year the young American composer haspresented us with new, authentic and notable pieces of music, and thelatest of them completely rekindles the enthusiasm aroused by its pre-decessors, the Concerto and the Sextet. The Symphony: 1933 is probablythe most momentous of them all.”

The boos came from Irving Kolodin, who published an article in theJanuary 16, 1935, issue of The New Republic, under the caption,“Wanted—An American Composer.” Discussing “the case of Roy Harris,who was hailed with the cry of ‘genius’ when he had composed scarcely

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any music,” Kolodin declared: “One still finds his a musical mentality withbut a slight capacity for extended thinking, displayed in a work whosematerial is of the thinnest, almost pathologically repetitious, possessing noroots in the orchestra, and, additionally, ineptly scored.”

Instantly, the Harrisites sprang into action. Two letters of protestagainst Kolodin’s article were published in The New Republic forFebruary 13, 1935 After this exchange of partisan sentiments, the turmoilsubsided. Harris, by now exploring new fields, was content to let hissymphonic dogs lie.

Harris Comes Marching HomeHarris craved an opportunity to teach, to lecture, to address audiences,to instruct young musicians. His first public lecture series, given in 1932at the Public Library of Los Angeles, was devoted to melodic writingbefore Bach. In 1934 he lectured on medieval music at the progressiveNew School for Social Research in New York. In the same year, he got ajob at the Westminster Choir School in Princeton. “Crazy about mySchool,” he wrote. “Have most interested vital group—they are likewolves—to devour knowledge. Typical Americans—interested in empi-rical knowledge—something they can use.”

At Westminster School, Roy Harris became interested in choralwriting, thanks to the presence there of the Westminster Choir, one of thenation’s most notable vocal groups. Harris had written some choral musicin his early days. There was Pueña Hueca for trio and chorus, a SongWithout Words for mixed chorus and orchestra, and the Whitman Suitefor women’s chorus and two pianos. Having heard the Westminster Choir,under John Finley Williamson, Harris was filled with a new enthusiasm forchoral sonorities and dynamics. He wrote an eight-part a cappella fantasyon The Story of Noah and a Folksong which he notated from the singingof John Jacob Niles, the ballad songster. Then in swift succession came anumber of a cappella works, “Sanctus, Hymn” (early American melody),“Johnny Comes Marching Home” (Harris’s theme song), scores ofreharmonized Protestant hymns, and later, “He’s Gone Away,” “Old BlackJoe,” “If I Had a Ribbon Bow,” “Way-farin’ Stranger,” “Little Boy NamedDavid,” “Birds’ Courting Song,” “The Shufflin’ Chant,” and the WhitmanTriptych for women’s chorus written especially for the Sarah Lawrencechorus, conducted by William Schuman. Many of Harris’s choral works


were inspired by Walt Whitman, whose keen sense of irregularsyllabization corresponded to Harris’s predilection for asymmetricalrhythmic periods.

Meanwhile, Harris was transcribing and editing a series of sixteenth-century choral music, published by G. Schirmer, and a series of choralmusic, Singing Through The Ages (compiled in collaboration with Harris’spupil, Jacob Evanson), published by the American Book Company. Thisseries was divided into three sections, dealing respectively with melody,harmony, and counterpoint.

By a special arrangement between the League of Composers of NewYork and the Westminster Chorus, Roy Harris was commissioned to writea vocal composition for a Russian tour that the Westminster Choir plannedto make during the summer of 1934. It was a time of great friendshipbetween the United States and the Soviet Union. American tourists weresolicited by Soviet agencies to visit “the land of the future,” and Americanartists were invited to Russia to give concerts.

With his eye and ear on Russia, Harris selected for his text “A Song forOccupations” by Walt Whitman. He dedicated the score “to the workers ofthe world.” The work was completed in May 1934, in time for the sailingof the Westminster Choir. Its setting was in the form of a cantata for eight-part chorus of mixed voices.

The Russian tour of the Westminster Choir was very successful; theHarris work was greatly appreciated by Russian musicians. Upon returnfrom Russia, the Westminster Choir presented A Song for Occupations ina program given in New York on November 27, 1934.

Roy Harris followed A Song for Occupations with another choral workon poems of Walt Whitman, a Symphony for Voices, to passages extractedfrom Leaves of Grass. Like a symphony, it was in four movements: “I HearAmerica Singing”; “Song for All Seas, All Ships”; “Tears”; and Inscription(“The Modern Man I Sing”). The movements were written non-consecutively; “Tears” was written first (it was completed on June 14, 1935)and “I Hear America Singing” last (completed December 15, 1935). TheSymphony for Voices was performed by the Westminster Choir, on May20, 1936, and was later recorded by the Victor Company.

The tone of the reviews of Symphony for Voices, in a number of citieswhere the work was performed, ranged from good to enthusiastic toecstatic. Adolfo Salazar, the Spanish musicologist, declared in his bookMusic of Our Time, that “Tears” “holds first place at the moment in

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American music.” The superlative reached its zenith in a review in theWashington Herald of November 12, 1936, which said: “Like all supremelygreat things, Harris defies classification. All that can be said is that in theSymphony for Voices he strikes that vein of lofty tragedy which we find inAeschylus, the Book of Job and King Lear.”

In 1934, Harris was commissioned by the Elizabeth Sprague CoolidgeFoundation to write a work for the Berkshire Festival of Chamber Music.He contributed a piano trio in three movements. He was not particularlyenthusiastic about the form. He wrote in a personal letter: “It’s a shame towaste such material on a Trio, mongrel of all forms—even worse than aviolin sonata.”

The Trio was performed for the first time at the Berkshire Festival, onSeptember 20, 1934, with no less a man at the piano than Alfredo Casella,the violin and the cello being played respectively by the maestri Poltron-ieri and Bonucci. They later recorded the work for Columbia, adding onemore item to the rapidly growing list of Harris’s recorded works.

Casella took the manuscript of the Trio with him to Italy and gaveseveral performances of it in Rome and other Italian cities. He made apublic statement about Harris that “in producing a composer such as thisyoung master, America has placed herself in the front rank amongst thosenations who are building a music for the future.”

The Trio was published in the April 1936 issue of New Music, aquarterly of modern compositions founded by Henry Cowell. Theinclusion of a Harris work among New Music publications was significant:after some doubts among American musical left-wingers, Roy Harris wasfinally admitted into their inner sanctum.

In 1937 Harris met Mr. and Mrs. W. W. Norton, owners of the NortonCompany in New York, and became their advisor on the publishing ofbooks on music. Mrs. M. D. Herter Norton, a lady of many gifts, suggestedto Harris the idea of arranging Bach’s Art of the Fugue for string quartet.Together they set to work, and within a few months, the transcription wasready. It was published by G. Schirmer, and recorded for Columbia by theRoth String Quartet.

Meanwhile, When Johnny Comes Marching Home was making therounds of symphony orchestras from coast to coast. Otto Klempererconducted it with the New York Philharmonic in the fall of 1935. Thisperformance caused Lawrence Gilman to write an article “When Harris


Comes Marching Home,” published in his Sunday column of the New YorkHerald-Tribune of November 3, 1935. “Mr. Harris would qualify as thehero of an American Success Story,” he wrote. “Yet Harris’s Success Storydiffers from many others because it has been achieved without anysacrifice of the ideals and standards of a singularly high-minded, sincere,and uncompromising artist. So far as I am aware, Mr. Harris has neverwritten music in any way other than he felt like writing it . . . The melodies,the harmonies, the rhythms, the counterpoint, have lived their own waywith an independence and a power that bespoke the presence of thatrarest thing in art, a genuinely individual voice.”

Trials without TriumphsIn 1934, Harris decided to embark on a second symphony. He completedthe score in Princeton in 1935 and hopefully dedicated it to Koussevitzky,“with admiration, respect and warm affection.”

Koussevitzky accepted the dedication, but did not conduct the Sym-phony. He delegated the task to the concertmaster of the BostonSymphony, the admirable and musicianly Richard Burgin. While from amusician’s standpoint, Burgin’s performance at the pair of concerts, Feb-ruary 28 and 29, 1936, could not be excelled in precision and accuracy, theimpression spread abroad that Koussevitzky had in effect rejected thework. The destiny of the Second Symphony was inevitably affected by thisimpression.

When Harris’s First Symphony was announced for performance, hewrote to a friend: “Koussevitzky told me that he would not program mywork until the parts are in his hands. I am determined to have everythingready, so I can send him a telegram with a flourish. I want him to feelconfidence in my integrity.” The parts were excellent on that occasion—only two mistakes. But the parts of the Second Symphony, made by WPAcopyists, had over seven hundred mistakes. Burgin had to schedule anextra rehearsal to weed out this counterpoint of errors, and the musiciansgrumbled and quietly cursed Harris for his negligence.

Fortunately for Harris, he was away from Boston, attending theperformance of his Prelude and Fugue, which Werner Janssen wasconducting that week with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He was on hand,however, for the Saturday night performance of his Second Symphony on

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Leap Year Day, 1936, arriving in Boston just in time to catch the earlyeditions of the morning papers and to read the sour reviews in the BostonHerald, Boston Post, and Boston Globe.

The unique figure of H. T. P., the man who had greeted Harris withan expansive two-column salutation at the premiere of the First Symphony,had vanished from the Boston scene. He had died in the interval betweenthe two Harris symphonies and joined kindred spirits in the Elysian Fields.His successor as music critic of the Boston Transcript was Moses Smith,a progressive musician who was almost prejudiced in favor of modernmusic. He described Harris as “a talent amounting almost to genius,” butfound his symphony “intellectualized music.”

The Second Symphony had a modest New York hearing with amakeshift orchestra in 1939, and then slipped into limbo. The score wasneither published nor recorded.

Despite poor reviews, the music of Harris was continually in demand.Only a month after the Philadelphia performance of the Prelude andFugue, the same orchestra presented another new work by Harris, whenthe Mexican conductor, Carlos Chavez, conducted his symphonic elegy,Farewell to Pioneers, composed in the fall of 1935. The reviews were quitenasty.

In 1935, Harris became interested in the development of the FederalMusic Project in New York City, which was a part of the Federal WorksProject Administration. With Ashley Pettis, assistant director of WPA,Harris formed a Composers’ Forum-Laboratory, with a view of giving anoutlet to composers and performers in programs of contemporary music.The first presentation of the Composers’ Forum-Laboratory took place onOctober 30, 1935, in an all-Harris program. Two years later, the same orga-nization presented a concert of Harris’s orchestral music, comprisingPrelude and Fugue, Symphony: 1933, and three movements of Time Suite.

Time Suite was the logical development of Harris’s philosophy ofmusical time, as illustrated in his earlier score, Four Minutes and TwentySeconds. He had elaborated an objective system of tempo semantics. Thenormal speed for humans, he reasons, is that of the heart-beat, seventy-two to eighty beats a minute. If the musical motion is set at themetronome mark of more than eighty, the music will excite: if the tempois below seventy-two, the music lowers the emotional drive. For pastoralmoods, the metronome mark of the heart-beat is indicated— it is easy-breathing, neutral, normal, and natural.


Time Suite was commissioned by the Columbia Broadcasting Systemand was first performed on the Columbia radio network at three o’clockin the afternoon on August 8, 1937. The announcement from Columbiasaid: “Time, the essence of all things in general and of radio in particular,has been set to music by Roy Harris.” By an intentional whim of program-making, the companion number on the broadcast was another timepiece,the Clock Symphony of Haydn.

The six movements of Time Suite, entitled “Broadway,” “Religion,”“Youth,” “Communication and Transportation,” “Philosophy,” and “Labor,”were composed according to exact time measurement; the first movementlasted one minute, the second two minutes, the third three minutes, thefourth four minutes, the fifth five minutes, and the sixth, again four minutes.

Was Harris yielding to the mechanistic drive of modern times?Anticipating this suspicion, he wrote: “To the accusation that the work iscerebral and tailor-made, I have the following reply: every master wrotesome of his best pages to fit an exact form. That is part of the mastery ofthe art of composition, parallel to the accepting of given dimensionalspaces into which the mural artist must pour his creative poetry, theportrait painter his, the architect building functionally to serve the needsof society. Why shouldn’t contemporary composers try to accommodatetheir music to a precise Time in Space?”

Multiples of FiveRoy Harris has a lucky number—five. Ten being a multiple of five is alsolucky for him. Ditto number one, being ten minus the cipher. So he wastold by a learned numerologist.

One minute after midnight on January 1, 1913, a tiny (4 lb.) baby girl,named Beula Duffey, was born in Ottawa, Canada. The numbers of theyear 1913 add up to 14; the digits of 14 add up to 5. Beula Duffey wasgraduated in piano from the Canadian Conservatory at Ottawa at the ageof 10 (twice 5). At the age of 15 (thrice 5), she was teaching secondarypiano at the Juilliard School in New York.

One minute after midnight, on the tenth day of the tenth month of1936 (1 + 9 + 3 + 6 = 19; 1 + 9 = 10), in the town of Union (a symbolicword containing five letters), Union County, Oregon, Roy Harris and BeulaDuffey were married. They had driven to Union from the Harris familyranch in California.

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Even though the name Beula contained five letters, it provedinauspicious for subtler numerological reasons. Harris changed it toJohana (or, more intimately, Lady Jo) in honor of Johann Sebastian Bach.Johana was given only one n also for numerological reasons, which, Harrissays, a layman can penetrate as little as the most complex workings ofinvertible counterpoint.*

What more natural than that the first work of Harris on hishoneymoon should have been a piano quintet, scored for the lucky numberof instruments, and with a nice piano part for Johana? Johana’s agiletechnique, her ability to draw from the piano all the eighteen shades ofdynamics that the instrument is supposed to be capable of producing,inspired Harris to write the piano part in a bravura style new to him.

Johana played the premiere of the Quintet with the Roth StringQuartet in New York on February 12, 1937, on Harris’s thirty-ninthbirthday. The work was recorded by Johana Harris and the Coolidge StringQuartet by the Victor Company.

“At last, my terrible life is beginning to be organized before I am tooold,” wrote Harris from Princeton. “Am going to have a family and stayhere, and make a great social life within a modern Chapelle Royale.”

Still, even in Princeton, Harris retained his backwoodsman’s way andmanners. “No matter how much money you spend on clothes, hay will stillbe growing out of your ears,” Johana used to tell him. And he wasconstantly forgetting things. Once he sent a special delivery lettercontaining nothing but four blank sheets of paper. He habitually used hismanuscripts to jot down addresses or telephone numbers. Several of hisearly works have been irretrievably lost; other manuscripts have beensaved by anxious friends.

They tell about the French musician-statesman Edouard Herriot that,upon his arrival in Lyons, he wired his secretary in Paris, “Why am I here?”Roy Harris went Herriot one better, when he made an appearance beforethe Garden Club of Nashville and lectured for an hour on medieval music.When he finished, one of the ladies asked: “Will you now tell us something


*Bach, like Harris, was something of a numerologist. His number was 14, which repre-sents the sum of the letters in his name in the order of the alphabet; the letters of J. S.Bach (in which J = I = 9) add up to 41, transposition of 14. In his portrait of 1748, thereare 14 silver buttons on his coat. Bach waited for admission to the Society of MusicalSciences until he could be the fourteenth member.

about flower arrangements?” It developed that Harris had gone to thewrong club on the wrong day.

Johana bears such contretemps with philosophic equanimity. “Mostpeople think of my husband as a good-natured easy-going Westerner,” shewrote. “And so he is. But he is many other people as well. To me he is achild—always eager—always ready to believe in everyone, alwaysexpecting miracles to happen, always being hurt and enraged by the socialand economic injustices. And yet, he is an unquenchable optimist wholoves beauty in every phase of living.”

The Lucky ThirdIt is not infrequent that a musical work conceived for one medium, andthen recast and revised for another, attains a success beyond the fondestexpectation of the composer himself. Such was the destiny of Harris’sThird Symphony, which came as the second thought of his first ViolinConcerto.

This is how it happened. Jascha Heifetz was in search of a modernviolin concerto. The Hungarian pianist, Arpad Sandor, then serving asHeifetz’s accompanist, spoke to him about Harris and, as a result, Heifetzcommissioned Harris to write a violin concerto. Harris agreed. He workedrapidly and with gusto; in a few months, the piano score of the Concertowas ready. With Johana as a pianist, he took the Concerto to Heifetz in hisConnecticut country home. As Heifetz played over the violin part, withJohana at the piano, he kept saying: “Put a little sugar on it—my public isaccustomed to Mendelssohn!” Heifetz liked the melodies of the Concertobut not the harmonies. He also wanted more purely technical passagework. Harris felt he could not satisfy these demands and abandoned thecomposition.

The materials of the score were too good to be discarded, Heifetz orno Heifetz. Harris decided to incorporate the violin music in a symphony.The songful subject of the second section, the flowing cantilena of the lyricthird section of the new Symphony were shaped out of the material of theviolin solo in the concerto. In six weeks the score of a new Symphony, hisThird, was completed. It was originally intended for the NationalSymphony Orchestra in Washington, but Harris was doubtful whether thatrelatively young organization could cope with the difficulties of the score.Other orchestras, adequately equipped, showed little interest. Harris was

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enraged. On New Year’s Day, he published in the New York Times anarticle which was sure to antagonize the greatest number of managers andconductors, music critics, and symphony patrons. He inveighed against theconcert business, “a vast and intricate organization,” based on the premisethat “there are no American artists and certainly no American music.” Hederided public taste: “The melody must either be of the minor-majorsimpler folk materials (German, Italian, Slavic), or the symmetrical,sequential art type. The harmony must be either the diatonic, dominant-tonic type of triad harmony used by the Mozart-Haydn-Beethoven school,or the chromatic altered chords of the dominant family—Wagner-Wolf-Franck. The form should be slow-moving and repetitious—so the themeor motive is easily detected. The orchestration should be very colorful, orheavy and lush.”

Harris attacked the orchestras, the policies of their conductors, andthe attitude of symphony audiences. “After our music has grown somehow,some way, into lusty maturity, they will graft it on to the roots of the pastwith the calm assumption of responsibility fulfilled.”

Koussevitzky read the article and was furious: “I will never play onenote of your music again,” he told Harris. When he noticed that Harris hada large brief-case under his arm, he asked him: “What have you there?”“MyThird Symphony,” replied Harris. “I want to see,” said Koussevitzky. Theywent to a piano, and Harris played the Symphony as best he could. “Arethe parts ready?” asked Koussevitzky. “Yes!” “Good! I will play it nextmonth.” And he did.

Once more, Boston was the scene of trials and triumphs for RoyHarris; and again it was the month of February when Koussevitzkyconducted a Harris work. He was in his best form, directing the music withvoluptuous warmth at the pair of concerts, February 24 and 25, 1939. Theorchestra men were delighted with the perfect legibility of parts and gavethe new work an excellent performance.

The Boston critics were friendly. “A fine work,” “undeniablyimpressive,” “actually charming,” said the Herald. “By no means unagree-able,” conceded the Post.

Koussevitzky took the Third Symphony to New York, and conductedit in Carnegie Hall on March 11, 1939. Jascha Heifetz was in the audience.“Why doesn’t Harris write a violin concerto as good as this Symphony?” heasked a friend.


The New York critics were in an appreciative mood. Olin Downes waslate for the opening; but he liked the last three-quarters of the Symphonythat he heard. William Schuman, who studied with Harris at the time,wrote in a letter to the New York Times: “This symphony seems to me anextraordinary work. Its melodic material reveals once again Harris’sremarkable gift. The contrapuntal writing is explicit, the orchestration isoriginal and colorful. The harmonic texture is decidedly on the consonantside, although the combinations are largely polytonal. These materials aresuccessfully wrought into a form, autogenetic in character, wherein eachidea is brought to its logical conclusion. Beyond these considerations, theSymphony has dramatic fire and a definite sense of direction which givesit great power.”

Leonard Bernstein said in the March 1939 issue of Modern Music:“The Harris Third Symphony . . . is mature in every sense, beautifullyproportioned, eloquent, restrained, and affecting. . . . It greatly excited me.”

Koussevitzky took the Third Symphony on a tour and recorded it forthe Victor Company. Other American symphony orchestras, one afteranother, played it. The climax of this crescendo of success was reachedwhen, on March 17, 1940, Toscanini broadcast the work with the NBCSymphony Orchestra.

Harris had always regarded Toscanini as a great European musicianincapable of understanding original modern music. When Schirmer sentthe Third Symphony to Toscanini in Italy, Harris wryly observed that theyhad wasted a score. Great was his surprise when, in the fall of 1939, theNBC had announced that Toscanini had included his Third Symphony inthe programs of the forthcoming season.

Harris had dreaded the rehearsals; Toscanini’s volcanic temper waswell known. But he proved a gentle, patient, understanding musician; heasked Harris’s advice in the matter of tempi and balance. Harris wasenchanted.

He and Johana were present in the studio at the Toscanini broadcast.Next to them sat a prosperous looking middle-aged business manaccompanied by his solid spouse. At the rousing sound of the Fugue, theman remarked with a grin. “That was somep’n.” After the broadcast Harrisreceived a letter from the owner of the National League Pittsburgh Piratesbaseball team in which he said: “If I had pitchers who could pitch asstrongly as you do in your Symphony, my worries would be over.”

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In the first decade after its auspicious start on the road to popularsuccess, the Symphony had had over seventy performances. There werenumerous hearings abroad; Leonard Bernstein conducted it in Germanyand in Israel; it was broadcast by the Paris radio and by BBC in London;Belgian and Scandinavian orchestras played it; Eugene Goossensconducted it in Australia and Scotland. When the recordings of thesymphony arrived in Russia, Soviet composers devoted a special session toa detailed discussion of the work. During the London blitz, a letter in anEnglish magazine suggested that a set of one hundred records of the bestmusic of all times should be immured in a safe place for posterity in casethe world should go down in flames. The Third Symphony of Harris wasincluded in this list.

When Koussevitzky presented an all-American program at his NewYork concert with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, on January 16, 1949,he played the “Lucky Third.” Harris could celebrate a moral victory. OlinDownes, always skeptical about his stature as a composer (he once said toa mutual friend: “Will you, please, prove to me that Harris is a genius?”),wrote that the Third Symphony “towered highest” over the other works inthe program by the “spaciousness and idealism of its concept, itsseparateness from the passing scene, and its architectural purpose.” VirgilThomson, in the New York Herald-Tribune, characterized the Symphonyas “America’s most successful work in that form. . . . It is earnest, clumsy,pretentious, imaginative, and terribly sincere.”

Taking stock of the progress of “The Lucky Third,” Roy Harrisdeclares:

Look! Let’s not kid ourselves. The Third Symphony happened to comealong when it was needed. The first season it was greeted with the sameboos and bravos as have been all my works. Then because Koussevitzkywas completely sold on it, he took it on his Western tour where it wasmuch more warmly received by the public. So it was recorded. Thenwithin a few weeks it was featured by the Chicago Symphony, theCleveland Symphony, and broadcast by Toscanini over N.B.C. In thesame week Victor released the Koussevitzky recordings and Timemagazine hailed the work as the most important American symphony.From then on, the Third Symphony was in.


Moods in ModesHarris has always emphasized that he is a Man of Nature. His melodicinspiration comes to him from communion with nature, during his solitarywalks, “listening to bird songs, looking at the blue sky through the thickgreen foliage of summer trees.” In this he is entirely a romantic, with thisdifference, that he translates his immediate moods into a rational and self-consistent language of rhythms and modes. In Harris’s musical semantics,optimistic moods are expressed in modes with large open intervals at thetonic; the moods of sadness are translated into a narrow gauge of intervals.It is the old “ethos” of the Greeks in a new psychological—and logical—form.

This peculiar correspondence between states of mind and intervallictension is traceable in most of Harris’s music. He expressed it explicitly inhis Third String Quartet, a series of preludes and fugues in differentmodes, suggesting different moods. It was composed in 1937, performedfor the first time by the Roth String Quartet, and subsequently recordedby Columbia. Harris himself regards the Third Quartet as one of his mostimportant scores.

An amusing episode occurred when the Committee for a MusicFestival, to whom the publishers had submitted the Third String Quartet,found it monotonous if played in its entirety—the modes looked on papertoo uniform to an unpracticed eye. The Committee wrote to Harris askingpermission to perform only one movement. Harris’s reply was brief. Hewired two words: “Skip it.”

Other moods, in other modes, occupied Harris’s attention in the late1930s. As clouds gathered on the international scene, Harris felt the urgeto reassert his American birthright. Folk songs had always been a part ofHarris’s arsenal of melody, but now he thought of writing a choralsymphony based entirely on American melodies. It was to be a work whosespecific purpose was in Harris’s words, “to bring about a culturalcooperation and understanding between the high school, college, andcommunity choruses of our cities with their symphony orchestras.”

For authentic sources Harris made use of the collections of Americansongs by John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other Fron-tier Ballads, and American Ballads and Folksongs and The AmericanSongbag by Carl Sandburg. Harris’s original title of the new symphonywas Folksong Jamboree, but Carl Engel, musical director of the

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G. Schirmer Company, to whom Harris took the score, thought it soundeda bit too self-consciously folksy and suggested changing the title to Folk-song Symphony. Harris agreed. The Folksong Symphony became hisSymphony No. 4.

The Folksong Symphony had a fragmentary world premiere at theAmerican Spring Festival in Rochester, April 25, 1940, when HowardHanson conducted its four choral movements. The first completeperformance of the Folksong Symphony, which included two orchestralinterludes written by Harris to give the chorus a chance to rest, was givenduring the Convention of the Music Teachers’ National Association by theCleveland Symphony Orchestra, Rudolph Ringwall conducting, onDecember 26, 1940. Koussevitzky was slightly ruffled by the fact that theworld premiere of the Folksong Symphony was given piecemeal by others,but had the magnanimity to play it too. He presented it at the pair ofBoston Symphony Concerts, February 21–22, 1941.

The New York Philharmonic, under the direction of DimitriMitropoulos, performed the symphony on December 31, 1942, with achorus of several hundred youngsters selected from New York City highschools. This performance was recorded, and the recording broadcast “tothe shores of Tripoli” as the American Army entered that town during theAfrican campaign.

In 1940, the Folksong Symphony was awarded First Honors and a prizeof $500 by the National Music Appreciation Committee as an outstandingcontribution to symphonic literature. It also received in 1940 the Award ofMerit of the National Association of Composers and Conductors as the out-standing contribution to American music of the year.

In August 1940, Harris made an excursion into yet another field ofmusical activity. “I did a moving picture this summer,” he wrote to a friend.“Had to get up at four in the morning and have enough written by nine tokeep four copyists going. We got the score and parts out in ten days andrecorded it in seven hours. I made some money out of that, and enjoyed it.”

The moving picture was One Tenth of a Nation, a documentary film onthe rural Negro in the South, produced by the Rockefeller Foundation. It isnot in the nature of Harris’s talent to provide background; in his score, therewas too much independent music. There were no siren calls from Holly-wood: One Tenth of a Nation was Harris’s first, and probably last, film score.

In the darkest days of World War II, Harris wrote a work for bass solochorus and orchestra, characteristically entitled, Challenge: 1940, to the


text from the Preamble to the Constitution, with Harris’s own dramaticinterpolations:

We, the people of the United States—We are the people.In order to form a more perfect union—We must plan and work together.

Challenge: 1940 was written in four days and completed as Paris fell.On June 25, 1940, it was performed by Rodzinski with the New YorkPhilharmonic Orchestra and chorus, at a rally for democracy held at theLewisohn Stadium and attended by thirteen thousand people.

Another work of a similar nature was American Creed, commissionedby the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for its Golden Jubilee season andperformed by that organization with Frederick Stock conducting onOctober 31, 1940. Roy Harris wrote as a motto for this work “Free todream and free to build; free to hope, imagine, plan vast new conditionsfor our citizens and free to shape our civilization into a land of splendidopportunity and magnificent equipment for each according to hiscapacities—this is the American Creed!”

Still another work bound up with Harris’s ideals and beliefs, Ode ToTruth, was written on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of StanfordUniversity and was performed at Stanford on March 9, 1941, by the SanFrancisco Symphony Orchestra, directed by Pierre Monteux. The scorewas dedicated “to scholars in search of Truth.”

During World War II, Harris wrote a series of choral works, Songs forDemocracy, after Walt Whitman; he also set to music the ringing words ofArchibald MacLeish’s Freedom’s Land:

Stand, stand—against the rising nightO freedom’s land, O Freedom’s air.Stand steep and keep the fading lightThat eastward darkens ev’rywhere.

The setting of Freedom’s Land caused Harris great difficulties: “Iworked harder on it than I would have on a sonata,” he wrote. “Thepatriotic composition is a difficult one because it has to be simple, stirringand vigorous, all at the same time.”

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Of patriotic inspiration was also a chorus, Sammy’s Fighting Sons, toHarris’s own text:

We believe that we will see the dayWhen all can live as free men mayOn land and sea and airAll free men ev’rywhereOh, Sun and Moon and StarsShine for that day!

On commission from the Second Army Air Force, Harris arrangedSammy’s Fighting Sons for military band, and changed the title to Take TheSun And Keep The Stars, the Sun bearing reference to the Imperial flag ofJapan, and the Stars to the American banner. Harris conducted the piecehimself on the national radio hook-up from Denver on January 30, 1944.

Harris became more and more interested in writing for military bands,in which the violins give way to trumpets. He declared in an interview inthe New York World Telegram of October 15, 1941: “The trumpet isbecoming a lyric instrument instead of a cavalry charge. We are actuallydeveloping a brass tradition that is directly challenging the use of strings.”

His first work for band was a symphonic overture. Cimarron, writtenin the spring of 1941, on commission for the Tri-State Band Festival atEnid, Oklahoma. The score, dedicated to the State of Oklahoma, includesa ten-gauge shotgun to start the Cimarron Rush. Harris conducted the firstperformance himself and was greeted uproariously by the public; theOklahoma press played up his visit as that of a favorite son. About the sametime Harris wrote a Prelude for four trumpets with string accompaniment,in a characteristic polyphony of unisons and octaves, with a high trumpetnote on every beat.

During World War II, practically every American composer regardedit as his duty to write a symphonic war march. Harris’s own contribution,March in Time of War, was performed by the New York Philharmonic,Rodzinski conducting, on December 20, 1943.

After five years of fruitful comradeship, Harris and his publishers, CarlEngel and the Schirmer Company, parted company. When a Broadwaypublisher who nurtured secret ambitions to sponsor “highbrow” music,Mills Music, Inc., dangled high-denomination bills before his eyes, Harrismade his decision: “Sold!” To assuage his scruples, he explained that thenew publishers were closer to the “masses.” But certainly Harris’s music


was not their meat. When Morton Gould took one of the owners of MillsMusic, Inc. to Carnegie Hall to hear Harris’s Fifth Symphony, he listenedwith baffled attentiveness to the flow of Harris’s harmonies and thenturned to Gould and whispered: “Is this the stuff we are publishing?”

Counterpoint at Forty“His face is narrow, homespun and unremarkable under thinning sandyhair, except for a smile that’s contagious and a pair of brilliant greenishblue eyes filled with remembered wisdom and laughter. His figure is onthe gangling side, and he is a confirmed sprawler, never sitting up straightif he can help it. He loves to huddle by the hour in the corner of a couch,spouting philosophy and his theories on life; his legs spread out at anangle. A network of puckered lines transforms him suddenly into awizened old man.”

This word portrait of Roy Harris at forty was penned by a reporter, atthe time when Harris was teaching at Cornell University, where he hadmoved from New York. His official title there was composer-in-residence,which implied informality in teaching methods and in the teachingschedule. As usual, Harris’s students invaded his home as helpers, errandboys, and copyists, in return for which services they had the run of theplace and free access to food. It was a typical Harris congregation that PaulRosenfeld had affectionately described as a “Gay Guild.” Harris was theguiding spirit of the Guild, a Hans Sachs without a beard.

Without false modesty, Harris regarded himself as a master. “Can youname a single composer since Bach who could write such counterpoint?”he would ask with a beguiling smile. He was all the more outraged andchagrined when some critics described him as a home-grown talentwithout much technique. Fortunately, there were scholars, high in theprofession, who vigorously asserted that Harris was indeed an unexcelledmaster of modern polyphony. Among them was Knud Jeppesen, theDanish musicologist who visited America shortly before the outbreak ofWorld War II, and expressed a desire to meet Harris. The two spent manyhours together in friendly and scholarly intercourse, during whichJeppesen reiterated his considered opinion that Harris was a master ofmodern polyphony. Jeppesen and Harris found themselves in accord onmany musical matters. Both held Victoria as a master of great significance,placing him above Palestrina; both regarded the Northern Flemish schoolof sixteenth-century contrapuntists as superior to the better known

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masters of their day. Harris felt that in Jeppesen he found a friend of bothhis own work and his beliefs.

Among important chamber music works written by Harris during theperiod immediately preceding World War II was Soliloquy and Dance, forviola and piano, composed for a recording by the master violist, WilliamPrimrose. Another work with an important viola part was a Quintet for twoviolins, two violas, and violoncello, performed by William Primrose and theCoolidge String Quartet on April 14, 1940, at the Ninth Festival ofChamber Music, under the auspices of the Elizabeth Sprague CoolidgeFoundation at the Library of Congress.

Two works for violin belong at an earlier period: a Poem for violin andpiano, written in 1935, and the Violin Sonata. The Poem, a work of lyricnature, was recorded by Albert Spalding for the Victor Company. A reviewin The New Yorker said: “It sounds as if it might be the slow movement ofa sonata, and it has the odd charm of all of Mr. Harris’s gentler music.”The guess was shrewd; Harris made use of the melodic material of thePoem in the slow movement of his Violin Sonata. This Sonata wasoriginally published in separate movements under the titles, “Fantasy,”“Dance Of Spring,”“Melody”; the last, a Toccata, remaining in manuscript.A recording of the Violin Sonata was made for Columbia by Josef Gingoldand Johana Harris. The first performance of the Sonata was given at theLibrary of Congress, on October 30, 1942, by William Kroll and JohanaHarris. The work was awarded the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Medal fordistinguished service to chamber music.

In a fifty-two page score entitled Work, Harris set himself a task ofwriting counterpoint of rhythms. It is related in spirit to the movement“Labor” from Time Suite. Work was never performed; the score remainsamong the half a dozen stillborn compositions in Harris’s creativecatalogue.

A more successful solution of the problem of contrapuntal rhythmwas Acceleration, “an orchestral study in guided motion in 4/4 time.” It wasfirst performed by the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington,under the direction of Hans Kindler, on November 2, 1941. The score wassubsequently revised, and the new version performed on January 8, 1942,by the Indianapolis Symphony, conducted by Koussevitzky’s nephew,Fabien Sevitzky.

On August 26, 1940, Roy Harris wrote to a friend: “You will beinterested to know that I am doing a piano concerto for Johana for one of


the most famous concert bands in this country. You can imagine howexcited I am when you know that the personnel of the band is somewhatas follows: eight flutes, oboe, two English horns, E flat clarinet, sixteen Bflat clarinets, two bass clarinets, two altos, four bassoons, eight horns, fourFlugel horns, four drums, twelve B flat cornets, two euphoniums, eighttrombones, two bass tubas, percussion, and four double-basses. The workis to be in two movements—a prelude and fugue—about sixteen minutesin length.”

The “famous concert band” for which Harris wrote the concerto wasthat of the University of Michigan. The premiere took place at Ann Arbor,on April 14, 1942. Roy Harris, who by this time had acquired a modicumof efficiency in wielding the baton, conducted the performance.

The success of the band concert made Harris even more enthusiasticregarding band music. “I am now writing a piano concerto with militaryband,” he wrote. “I think it is going to be a nice work, a sort of fantasy aboutsixteen minutes in length, in one movement.” The score was finishedrapidly, and performed by the Harris team at the Fine Arts Conference inColorado Springs on August 15, 1943.

In the summer of 1941, Harris gave a course at Colorado College,situated at the foot of Pike’s Peak. He liked to be back in the West. In 1942,he left Cornell and moved to Colorado Springs as composer-in-residenceat Colorado College. Soon Harris became himself a landmark of thelandscape. When Life published a pictorial story of the state of Coloradowith pictures of the Garden of the Gods, Ghost Town, Indian Monument,it also featured a full-page portrait of Roy Harris at work at an immensetable. The caption read, simply: COMPOSER.

Salute to the SovietIn 1942, the Soviet Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countriescabled to Roy Harris, asking him for a message of greetings to the Russianpeople fighting their last stand at Stalingrad. Harris was moved: the causeof Russia was then the cause of democracy. He was in the process ofcompleting his Fifth Symphony, commissioned by Koussevitzky, anddecided to dedicate the work to the Russian people.

He telephoned Koussevitzky and told him about it. There was amoment of silence at the Boston end of the wire, and then Koussevitzkyreplied: “Roy, you are courageux. I vill also.”

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The Fifth Symphony was finished on Christmas morning of 1942. Thescore was marked op. 55. Harris had not used opus numbers since op. 2,and his designation of the Fifth Symphony as op. 55 was prompted moreby numerological reasons than by counting up the exact number of worksin the interim. There was a trinity of fives in this Fifth Symphony, op. 55,and five was Harris’s lucky number.

The premiere of the Fifth Symphony took place at the pair of BostonSymphony concerts, on Friday and Saturday, February 26 and 27, 1943,with Koussevitzky at the helm. The Saturday performance was broadcastby short wave all over the world, including Russia. In response to thisoffering, nine Russian composers, Gliere, Shostakovitch, Prokofieff,Miaskovsky, Khachaturian, Kabalevsky, Muradeli, Khrennikov, and Belysent this message: “Greetings to Roy Harris from the composers of theUSSR. We greet in your person young music of American people. Acrossseas and oceans we extend to you our hand in sincere fraternal handshake.Long live our victory!”

The Boston critics gave fairly favorable accounts of Harris’s SovietSymphony. Koussevitzky took it to New York and conducted the work atCarnegie Hall, on March 11, 1943. It failed to strike fire with either thepublic or the critics. Time, conscious of the socio-political import of theFifth Symphony, gave a feature story to the “twangy,”“rangy,”“lean,”“sandy,”“sober-sided” composer from Oklahoma. Gleefully, it picked up, from aBoston review, the sarcastic reference to some who would smell in Harris’smusic “the open prairies, the towering peaks, and the more intimate detailsof American agriculture,” and published a droop-jawed, loose-necktied pic-ture of Harris, under the caption: “In Boston, they smelt something.”

The Fifth Symphony reached Moscow in the spring of 1944 and wasperformed there, with great acclaim, by the State Symphony Orchestra, onMay 21, 1944. Gregory Schneerson, a foremost Russian musicologist,wrote in Literature and Art, May 27, 1944: “This is strong music, acutelydynamic, emotionally profound. In it are heard the echoes of Americanrhythms; in it breathes healthy popular speech.”

As a sort of postscript to the Fifth Symphony, Roy Harris wrote an Ode To Friendship, a symphonic overture “dedicated to sympathetic understanding, trust and friendship between the peoples of the UnitedStates and the Soviet Union.” He conducted it himself at the rally forSoviet-American friendship held at Madison Square Garden in New York,on November 16, 1944.


Puzzled and chagrined by the little success of the Fifth Symphony, andthe absence of performances after the premiere, Harris thought that, per-haps, the heavy and demanding orchestration had something to do with thereluctance of conductors to give it another try. He rescored the Symphonydown to the average orchestration. Still there were no takers. Why? Harrisoffers an explanation in the following statement made in August 1950:

If we are realistic we must admit that chance circumstances andcommercial manipulation play a much greater part in the developmentof our success than does the quality or quantity of our output. Forinstance, Koussevitzky, who knows my output well, my own wife Johana,a most astute musician, many of my musical friends, and all of my mostgifted pupils are agreed that my Fifth Symphony is more important inscope, materials and realization than my Third. But the Fifth is tenminutes longer, requires more rehearsing, and in consequence has notbeen published or recorded. So it remains unknown—is practically non-existent to Americans. Such circumstances attend the slow death of muchof America’s best music. It is buried with the sanctimonious apologia ofthe music merchants: “IT DON’T PAY.”

Fifty-seven varietiesOf Tin Can ImproprietiesMister—Sister—I love you—Sometimes hot and sometimes blue!

Of, By, and ForIn the spring of 1943, Harris received a commission to compose asymphony for the Blue Network. The president of the network deemedthe occasion of sufficient moment to issue a special statement on theimportance of being Roy Harris:

“As one of the millions of music lovers in this country, I feel that RoyHarris and his works have helped to create the pattern of the Americanscene. That there is an undeniable need for his music today has beenproved by the praise and appreciation received from service men all overthe world, our fighting men and those of our allies.”

Harris set to work. “The Sixth Symphony is taking shape in my mind,”he wrote from Colorado Springs on July 27, 1943. “I have outlined the slow

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movement and think I could write it in one week if I didn’t have anyinterruptions. I think it is going to be my best work up to date.”

At first the symphony had no program. Then came the enlightenment.The circumstance that Harris was born on Lincoln’s birthday, in LincolnCounty, exercised a profound influence on his state of mind. “The shadowof Abe Lincoln has hovered over my life from childhood,” he wrote. “Thiswas, I suppose, inevitable, for the simple reason that my birthday fell onthe national holiday honoring Lincoln’s birth, which meant that, on thatday, school was dismissed.” In a flash, he decided to make his SixthSymphony a Lincoln Symphony, the Gettysburg Address Symphony. “Onemorning I woke up at 3:00 a.m.,” he relates, “and I saw the GettysburgAddress divided into four logical parts, four movements of a symphony.They seemed exactly right. I heard bell-like harmonies suggesting theshout: Let Freedom Ring!”

By a remarkable coincidence, the Symphony was completed onLincoln Day, February 12, 1944, which was Harris’s forty-sixth birthday.

The four movements of the Gettysburg Symphony are designated“Awakening,”“Conflict,”“Dedication,” and “Affirmation,” a plan reminiscentof American Portraits and a still earlier symphony, Our Heritage, sketchedout during his truck-driving days. The score is marked op. 60 and wasdedicated “with respect, to the Armed Forces of our Nation.”

Harris gave the symphony to Koussevitzky, who duly performed it withthe Boston Symphony Orchestra on April 14, 1944. On the next day, whichwas the seventy-ninth anniversary of Lincoln’s death, the GettysburgSymphony was broadcast to the nation.

When an orchestra musician was asked how long a current Harrissymphony was, he replied: “Quite long. Almost as long as his programnotes for it.” Harris lived up to his reputation and supplied a lengthy socio-historic commentary on the Sixth Symphony for the program book. TheBoston critics grumbled. They were willing to swallow Harris’s harmonies,but they balked at Harris’s philosophy. Typical of this attitude was thecomment of Rudolph Elie in the Boston Herald. “As one who can be ledto the Harris fountain, but cannot swallow the waters thereof, I mustconfess I was unmoved by Mr. Harris’s latest determined go at creating theGreat American Symphony,” Elie declared. “What really sticks in the crawis that the composer believes he can force music of an abstract nature toexpress intellectual or ideological concepts if he tries hard enough. . . . He


would be well advised, I think, to confide his titles and his program notesto his intimates.”

The success with the Boston audience, both on Friday and Saturday,was fair, but Koussevitzky decided not to take the Sixth Symphony to NewYork. There were no further performances elsewhere; the score remainedunpublished.

Undaunted by the lack of appreciation for his important large-scaleworks, Harris reasserts his faith in the people, including symphonyaudiences. He summarizes his view of himself in the following statement:

“The best receptions of my work have been in California (wherepeople are both enthusiastic and progressive about everything) and in theSouth (where people are generous and predisposed to native culture).Certainly I owe the East every possible gratitude for performances,recordings, and publications, including this biography. Nor in justice mustI be less than genuinely pleased for all the fine performances accorded mein the big industrial centers of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, St.Louis, Cincinnati, and the festivals in Midwestern Universities andColleges. So, with characteristic optimism, I’d better conclude with ‘Myworks are enjoyed everywhere.’ ”

Greener PasturesFree to dream and free to build in the wide open spaces of the West,Harris lived on contentedly as composer-in-residence at Colorado College.Students of former days trekked after him to Holiday House, as he calledhis Colorado Springs homestead. Once more, the Harris householdbecame “a gay guild.”

Marshall Sprague, a convivial spirit dwelling in Colorado Springs,painted a lush picture of Holiday House: “If you visit the Harris house onits bluff facing Pike’s Peak, you can see that Mr. Harris has been paid wellfor his six symphonies, three string quartets, two piano concertos, threeballets, and dozens of cantatas, sonatas, motets and masses he has writtensince 1933. The sedan in the drive is new, swank and expensive. Therambling house is full of Navajo rugs, sun decks and plush furniture. A fireof pinon wood—at $30 a ton—blazes in one of the three downstairsfireplaces. Connected to the house by an arcade is the composer’s pine-paneled studio, complete with kitchen and upstairs bedrooms.” Sprague

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jotted down an impertinent sketch of Harris, the man: “Having declaredhimself a member of the homespun contingent, Roy plays the part to thehilt. His voice has the nasal timbre of one who has called many a hog inhis day. His suits of odd greens and blues fit haphazardly and theirconstruction suggests the mail order job. At local parties he is the last manin the room you’d pick for a celebrity. What he likes is to hide in a cornerwith a group around him listening to his famous sotto voce stories, toldwith an ingenuous wide-eyed air.”

“His manner in conversation is that of any cracker-barrel philosopherin any country store, and his technique as a promoter of his own wares ismarked by a thoroughness that would do credit to the homespun salestraditions of William Wrigley or the Smith Brothers. To ask how much ofthis homespun stuff is genuine and how much contrived seems academic.”

Harris was not satisfied to “get behind himself and push.” He pusheda lot of other people along and embarked on ambitious undertakings notdirectly related to his business as a composer. In Colorado Springs, heraised funds to engage four top-notch players from the East to form astring quartet. He inaugurated a series of concerts. And he induced anational radio network to broadcast these programs.

His productivity was not confined to music. Three children were bornto Roy and Johana Harris in Colorado Springs, all March children, a timingcalculated not to interfere with Johana’s participation in the summer musicfestivals. Patricia Duffey Harris was born March 28, 1944; Shaun DuffeyHarris on March 2, 1946; and Daniel Duffey Harris on March 19, 1947.Their Irish names and the coincidence of their birthdays near St. Patrick’sDay underscore the Harrises’ pride in their Irish blood. The blessed eventsfailed to disrupt Johana’s professional activities. The sole exception was herconcert with William Primrose which was scheduled for the day Patriciawas born, and so had to be canceled.

“Fecundity, I should say, is the determining factor of our lives,” wroteRoy Harris from Colorado Springs. “Our big garden is full of flowers. Mycontract with Fischer calls for four hundred printed pages per year. I havealready more than seventy opus numbers and, as you know, I didn’t getstarted studying until I was thirty years old.”

The reference to Fischer signalized another change of publishers.Harris had parted company with Mills Company and had gone over toCarl Fischer. The publishers were well content with the acquisition ofsuch elegant property and prefaced their advertisements of Harris’s music


in the trade magazines with the words: “We are proud to announce . . .” TheFischer contract expired in 1950, when Harris signed up, on veryadvantageous terms, with the Ricordi Co. of Milan and New York.

The Holiday House idyll was briefly interrupted in 1945, when Harriswent to New York to serve as chief of the music section of the Office ofWar Information, supervising music for short wave radio broadcasts toliberated Europe and distributing recordings to American agenciesabroad. He set down a policy of musical sugar and spice, fifty per cent jazz,twenty-five per cent folk music, and twenty-five per cent serious music.Just as his program began to unfold, the Office of War Information closeddown, and Harris returned to Colorado Springs.

“It is natural for me to write music, and lots of it, and quickly,” Harriswrote from Colorado Springs. “In other words, I am not a phoney who hasto go through unnatural experiences in his living, and torturous effort inhis writing, to produce music.”

Taking advantage of the presence in Colorado Springs of Hanya Holm,celebrated modern dancer who conducted a dance group every summerat Colorado College, Roy Harris each year wrote a ballet for her. Thelibretti were his, too. He also conducted the performances, with amakeshift orchestra of students reinforced by professionals.

The first ballet, From This Earth (1941), was the story of a miner. Thesecond ballet, What So Proudly We Hail (1942), was a series of unrelatedepisodes of the American scene. The third ballet, Namesake (1943), hadsomething to do with the recurrence of Christian names. Scored for violinand piano, the musical material of Namesake was later published in a suitelabelled Charming Pieces. The fourth ballet, To Thee, Old Cause (1944)for chorus, was reworked from Harris’s Songs of Democracy.

In the fall of 1945 Harris wrote a fanciful composition entitledMemories of a Child’s Sunday, in three tiny movements: “Bells,”“Dreams,”and “Play.” The score was dedicated “to little Richard Rodzinski, aged oneand a bit.” Harris conducted it himself on February 21, 1946, with the NewYork Philharmonic, whose musical director at the time was the dedicatee’sfather.

“Who can, does; who cannot, teaches,” said George Bernard Shaw. Theorganized teachers who had been chary of Harris’s music graduallyreconciled themselves to the fact that Harris was himself a teacher, eventhough he could compose music. They began to invite him to enliven theirsomnolent functions by peppy addresses, and they commissioned him to

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write music for their staid meetings. One of such pieces d’occasion wasBlow the Man Down, a fantasy for chorus, symphonic band, and a stringorchestra, which Harris composed for the national convention of theMusic Educators’ National Association held in Cleveland in 1946. Heconducted it there on April 22, 1946.

Harris had long since learned to bridle his musical passions and toshear his technical writing to the utilitarian necessities of an imperfectmusical world. When the Rochester radio station WHAM commissionedhim to write a work for piano and small orchestra with the stipulation thatit should not require too much rehearsal time, Harris complied. He wrotethe score in one week, between February 17 and 24, 1946, and called itsimply Radio Piece. Harris himself conducted it, with very littlerehearsing, over the WHAM station, on May 18, 1946.

One of the most important works in Harris’s creative catalogue is aConcerto for two pianos and orchestra, commissioned by the DenverSymphony Orchestra. It was written intermittently in the fall of 1946, ontrains, planes, and hotel rooms while filling engagements in Boston,Detroit, and Chicago. Johana Harris and Max Lanner gave its premiere inDenver, on January 21, 1947, with Saul Caston conducting the DenverSymphony. Although a blizzard raged that night, the audience receptionwas warm, and Denver music critics were most kind and appreciative.*

Harris’s energetic imagination can move mountains, grow palm treesin the desert, and conjure up lakes. His self-made oasis is often a mirage,but a mirage that miraculously quenches the thirst. When others fail to seethe imaginary vegetation amid cooling streams, Harris pities them: “Can’tyou see? It’s there!”

Such an oasis was Logan, Utah, a frontier post in the Mormon countrywhere Harris went in 1948 as composer-in-residence at the StateAgricultural College. Logan was no music center. But Harris succeededin raising sufficient funds for a high-grade summer music session. As inColorado Springs, he invited a top-notch string quartet and organized aseries of network broadcasts.

After a season of this Harris-in-Mormonland existence, the nourishingflow of funds from the State of Utah was cut off by an economizing gover-nor. The oasis vanished.


*“The Concerto went over big last night,” Harris reported to a friend, “six curtaincalls and lots of shouting.”

The Harrises found greener pastures in Nashville, Tennessee, wherethey joined the faculty of George Peabody College for Teachers. They alsotook time off to give weekly courses at the State College in Bowling Green,Kentucky.

In the summer of 1950, Harris instituted the Cumberland ForestFestival at Sewanee, Tennessee, with programs of classical and modernmusic presented there during the summer months, as well as on thecampus green at Peabody College, in Nashville. Again he had his visitingstring quartet, a student ensemble, which he conducted, and a series ofnation-wide broadcasts of chamber music.

Another change of scene came in September 1951 when Harrismoved to Pittsburgh, as composer-in-residence at the PennsylvaniaCollege for Women, and Johana Harris as Resident Pianist. The pressannouncement said: “Mr. Harris will compose, develop educationaltextbooks and assist in the development of major cultural projects inPittsburgh. In the field of textbooks, Mr. Harris will complete a theorymanual for the United States Navy and begin research on a five-volumehistory of musical materials.” A fund of $25,000 a year for this project wasgranted by the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust. Thecontract with Harris is for five years, until 1956.

High PitchThe most unusual composition in Harris’s entire catalogue is a Concertofor accordion and orchestra, which he conducted in a broadcast on June2, 1947, with Andy Rizzo as accordionist. Rizzo supplied his own utterlyun-Harrisian cadenza. Harris was at first a bit apprehensive at this ventureinto the realm of the low-brow, but gradually warmed up to the instru-ment, and publicly declared that high-brow recognition should be“accorded the accordion.”

In August 1947, two of Harris’s pupils were married in ColoradoSprings. For this blessed occasion Harris wrote a Wedding Song, scoredfor bass solo, violin, viola, cello, and organ. The violin symbolized the lyri-cal bride; the cello, the wooing groom; and the viola, droning in anunvarying pattern, the earnest preacher. The finale leads to a close strettobetween the bride and the groom.

In 1948, Harris received a request from a Texas widow to write anorchestral elegy in memory of her husband. Harris complied. The viola

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solo material was extracted from an earlier work, Lamentation, highlightedin a somber harmonic and orchestral setting. To this was added a secondsection, Paean. The work was performed by the Houston SymphonyOrchestra, Efrem Kurtz conducting, on December 13, 1948. In this scoreHarris introduced a special effect in the piano part, by having amicrophone suspended over the strings of a grand piano and the tonecontrolled by an electrical amplifier. The resulting tone color was that ofdeep gongs in the Elegy and sonorous chimes in the Paean.

In 1948, Harris undertook the composition of a violin concerto, hissecond try for the instrument. He wrote it for Josef Gingold, concert-master of the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra. The score was completedin Colorado Springs in July 1948, but Harris was not satisfied withthe results and revised it considerably during the summer of 1949, inLogan, Utah.

Harris has written music for several religious denominations. Therewas Israel, a cantata for tenor solo, mixed chorus, and organ, written in1947 for Temple Emanuel in New York and subsequently published in acollection of Jewish religious music. Harris also wrote an Easter motet formixed chorus, organ, and brasses for Grace Episcopal Church in ColoradoSprings, where all three Harris children were baptized.

In 1947, Harris received an assignment to write a Catholic Mass, a taskwhich unexpectedly got him into an appalling controversy. In the guise ofan interview with Harris, Marshall Sprague published an article in theNew York Times of February 15, 1948, captioned “Composing for Cash,”which purported to reflect Harris’s determination never to write any musicwithout being paid for it. Among paying commissions received by Harris,the story listed an Easter Mass for St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. Thiselicited an instant protest from the moderator of St. Patrick’s Choir whostated that the implication was “not only untrue but most distasteful,”adding that “at no time in the future will the Mass of Roy Harris beperformed in St. Patrick’s.”

The story behind the story of the Mass was this. While it is true thatHarris expected to be remunerated for his work on the Mass, the moneywas to come not in cash from St. Patrick’s, but from royalties for aprojected recording. Harris had made a thorough study of religious folksongs of the Southwest, especially New Mexico, to be used as basicmaterials for the Mass. The music director of St. Patrick’s suggested somechanges to conform to ecclesiastical usage. The changes were made, the


score revised, the parts extracted. All seemed to be in order for an Easterperformance at St. Patrick’s when the Times article appeared. Harris wasprofoundly distressed, but could not with decorum recount the involvedcircumstances of the case. He turned the Mass over for performance atthe Columbia University Festival, and it was presented by the PrincetonChapel Choir at St. Paul’s Chapel, Columbia University, on May 13, 1948.

In 1948, the state of California staged celebrations of the centenaryof the Gold Rush. Roy Harris was affectionately regarded by manyCalifornians as a native son, for his childhood was spent in California, andhis mother, after the death of his father in 1936, had retained the familyranch and was still cultivating their orange grove.

When the student body of the University of California asked Harristo write a band piece for their string festival, Harris was pleased andresponded with a richly scored panorama of descriptive music, Fruit ofGold, with a finale based on the hymn of the University of California, “AllHail the Blue And Gold.” Harris himself conducted the premiere at theUniversity of California on May 10, 1949.

Another musical bouquet tendered by Harris to a state of the Union,was Kentucky Spring, commissioned by the Louisville SymphonyOrchestra. Because Harris’s grandfather came from Kentucky, he felt acertain intimacy with Kentuckians. The score is perhaps the gayest Harrishas ever written, with musical birds in the woodwinds and spring breezein the strings.

Harris jotted down the materials for Kentucky Spring while flyingfrom Chicago to Salt Lake City, in February 1949; the score wascompleted barely in time for the premiere which Harris conducted withthe Louisville Symphony on April 5, 1949. The Louisville Courier-Journalgave Kentucky Spring a hearty welcome: “It is delightful and franklyenjoyable music, full of beautiful sounds. It captures the warmth andfragrance of a spring night. It won such instantaneous and decidedapproval that it was repeated.”

After twenty-five years as conductor of the Boston SymphonyOrchestra, Koussevitzky had departed from the scene. The new directorof the Boston Symphony, Charles Munch, was advised by Walter Pistonthat Roy Harris was a great American composer. Munch wrote to Harrisand asked him for a new work. Harris had nothing new to offer forthe moment, but suggested that he might come to Boston to conductKentucky Spring.

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On April 16, 1950, Harris made his Boston debut as guest-conductor.He received a cordial reception from the audiences and the critics, allexcept one, who remarked archly that Harris’s spring was a bit cold andcloser to Boston spring weather than that of Kentucky.

Harris never forgot the kindness of men who had helped him profes-sionally and personally in his early career. When a symphonic celebrationof Howard Hanson’s fiftieth birthday was planned by Koussevitzky, Harriswrote a set of variations on the timpani theme from Hanson’s Third Sym-phony and named it Celebration. It was performed by Koussevitzky andthe Boston Symphony Orchestra on October 25 and 26, 1946, a few daysbefore Hanson’s birthday.

In the concluding part of Celebration. Harris used the well-knowntune, “Happy Birthday to You,” harmonized, of course, in an unorthodoxHarrisian manner. No one realized that the song, written by a New Yorkschoolmarm about the time Hanson and Harris were born, wascopyrighted. As a result, a stern remonstration came from the publishers.It was unnecessary; the festive occasion having passed, there were nofurther performances of the birthday piece.

Optimi Ingenii VirRoy Harris is a common name. There are six Roy Harrises in Chicago, sixin Denver, and six in St. Louis; five in Kansas City and five in Los Angeles;four in Cincinnati and four in Dallas; three in Washington and three inNashville; two each in Cleveland, Baltimore, Houston, Detroit, San Fran-cisco, Detroit, New York, and Boston; one each in Brooklyn, Rochester,Seattle, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, and Atlanta.

But when people talk about Roy Harris, they mean one particular RoyHarris.

—Nice dinner.—Wasn’t it?—This, uh, this Roy Harris they were talking about—do you know his

music?—Just a little.—Uh——I’ve just heard some of it played.


Such a conversation is reported as taking place in the synthetic townof Grand Republic, Minnesota, in Sinclair Lewis’s novel, Cass Timberlane.This ought to justify the claim that Roy Harris has become a householdword.

Roy Harris is one of the American composers listed in the poem“Muse Americana,” by Irwin Edman, published in The New Yorker of July22, 1944:

At other times we’ll gladly hearThe strains of foreigner Beethoven.On Independence Day, it’s clear,We’re pledged to Gershwin and DeKoven,To Piston, Copland (very good),Deems Taylor, Barber and Roy HarrisToday what native he-man wouldHave ears for genius born in Paris?

Consecutive fifths to the nose to anyone who will say that Harris gotinto the poem because his name rhymes with Paris!

Among American musicians, Harris had for long been accorded aspecial niche. In his book, Bad Boy of Music, George Antheil quotes AaronCopland as saying that one can open any page of Harris’s music, and say:“Here is Roy Harris. His music is always written in his own style, nobodyelse’s.”

Harris was recruiting new admirers at an ever increasing clip, whilethe ardor of the faithful group of original Harrisites never cooled. Onerash musicologist went so far as to publish an article on Roy Harris in anewspaper of international circulation, unambiguously entitled “America’sComposer No. 1.”

Academic recognition came to Harris. In 1941, Rutgers Universityconferred on him an honorary degree of Doctor of Music. Harris couldnot read the florid Latin of the citation in which he was proclaimed optimiingenii vir, but the vellum diploma looked impressive, framed and hungon the wall of Harris’s studio.

Leroy Ellsworth Harris, the Cimarron frontiersman, was now Dr. RoyHarris. In 1946, the University of Rochester awarded another honoraryDoctor’s degree to him.

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On Harris’s fiftieth birthday, a flattering gesture came from the stateof Colorado, when the following declaration was issued:

In recognition of distinguished service in the art of music, I, Lee Knous,governor of the state of Colorado, do hereby bestow upon Roy Harris thiscitation for distinguished citizenship, for

As a citizen of Colorado, you have brought honor to our state andinternational recognition to our nation;

As a composer, you have given our schools, churches and concert hallsAmerican music which characterizes our people and our time;

As a teacher, you have spoken to the teachers and students throughoutAmerica of the worth and dignity of American culture, and you have, byyour example, given encouragement to them to create and play the vitalnew music of this free and democratic land.

Given under my hand and seal this twelfth day of February, A.D., 1948,upon the occasion of your fiftieth anniversary.

Lee Knous, Governor

The musical world at large was becoming aware of Roy Harris. When,after V-E day, an Allied Victory Concert was staged in London, Harris’sFolksong Symphony was chosen to represent American music on aprogram with Vaughan Williams’s London Symphony and Shostakovich’sFifth Symphony.

Tokyo Rose paid Harris the dubious tribute of featuring JohnnyComes Marching Home at one of her propaganda broadcasts. “Standfor democracy as Roy Harris does in his music,” she coaxed. “Go marchinghome!”

What Roy Harris thinks of Roy Harris is for him to tell. But here is astory:

Harris was having lunch with Virgil Thomson. He looked tired anddejected. “I am fifty years old,” said Harris, “and I don’t think I’ll make it.”

“Make what?”“Beethoven.”


2. H IS MUSIC

A jocular story is circulated among musicians that Harris was offered ahuge sum of money to write a work without a passacaglia or a fugue in it,and that he turned down the offer. It is indeed remarkable that a composerwho has been proclaiming his musical Americanism so insistently for solong should be so deeply attached to classical forms that even hisprogrammatic works of American inspiration invariably tend towardscontrapuntal forms of the past centuries. For Harris is convinced that oldcontrapuntal forms are the most suitable containers for American music.He has apparently succeeded in effecting this synthesis, for his music, builtalong classical lines, sounds unmistakably American, even to outsiders.Musical Opinion of London had this to say: “Roy Harris is a discovery.There may be other geniuses in America, but he is of stock deeply rootedin the soil.” The Musical Times of London comments on the expressivenessof Harris’s music: “His language is an essential part of something definitethat he has to say. It may be severe, inelegant, rough-tongued, aggressive,caustic and half-a-dozen other uncourtly things, but its manners, if notengaging, are part of a character that arrests and holds the attention.”

Gregory Schneerson, a Soviet musicologist, wrote in 1944: “On hisroad to fame, Harris never made any concession to the prevalent fashionand the tastes of the large public. His music is closely bound with thespiritual ideals of his nation, but it remains austere and somewhat uncouth,making it sometimes difficult to understand.”

The Americanism of Harris, passacaglias and fugues to the contrarynotwithstanding, is immediately perceptible to his fellow composers.Aaron Copland wrote of Harris: “His music comes nearest to a distinctivelyAmerican melos of anything yet done in the more ambitious forms. . . .Harris begins with this natural wealth of melody (he says he has enoughin his notebooks to last him ten years), and then it becomes his problemto combine, juxtapose, develop, elongate them—in short, to rework theminto significant forms.”

Harris himself has never doubted his destiny as a major force inAmerican music. As early as 1932, he wrote to a friend: “I hope to becomea really great composer.” Thanks to the fact that he had not undertakenformal study until relatively late in life, he was able to develop a personalidiom without the danger of succumbing to the powerful impact ofmodern European music. “I was not influenced by any modern composer,”he says in retrospect, “not even by Debussy. I have always felt a close

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kinship with Mussorgsky. On the other hand, Rimsky-Korsakov is quitealien to me. I have been influenced in my string writing by Beethoven, andin brass and woodwind writing by Tchaikovsky and American popular jazzbands. In form, I have been influenced by Bach and Beethoven. Mytechnique was cumulative.”

Allergies and IdiosyncraciesThe stubborn individuality of Harris’s musical language is the result of hisdeliberate rejection of a number of sanctified musical usages. If anauthor were to exclude familiar words from his vocabulary, and rule outcommon syntactical turns of the phrase, his style would inevitably assumea distinctive air. Similarly, when an artist compounds his pictures ofstraight lines, to the exclusion of all curved surfaces, his drawings gain indirect effectiveness. Of course, the mere act of jettisoning commonmaterials does not automatically result in the formation of original artforms. Something else is needed—a skill and a talent in using thevoluntarily limited vocabulary.*

Among time-honored musical usages rejected by Harris are thefollowing:

Melodic sequencesAppoggiaturasPassing notesChromatic progressionsWhole-tone scalesDiminished-seventh chordsAugmented triadsDominant-seventh chordsKey signatures

Harris explains his rejection of sequences: “Many melodies of the oldmasters are built on literal sequences, a technical device of academic


*Some years ago, a full-length novel was published in America in which the mostcommon letter in the English alphabet, the letter “e,” was never used in the wholebook. This created havoc with grammar and style, but the author of the novel failed toestablish an individual literary style by this ascetic renunciation, and the bookremained a mere curiosity.

industrialism. I found the literal sequence uncreative. Such a sequencestops the inventive continuity of the music.”*

Appoggiaturas are to Harris spurious devices, a mere ornament of nocreative value. In the Harris scheme of melody, every note must be self-sufficient. Similarly, he rejects passing notes qua passing notes. Auxiliarynotes, when they are used in the melodies of Harris, appear in a sort ofBrownian motion, in which every musical molecule has its individualplace and purpose. Chromatic lines are found here and there in Harris’smusic (notably in his Third Symphony), but with not more than threesuccessive semitones in the same voice.

Whole-tone scales are rejected by Harris as a melodic device becauseof their uniformity of steps, impairing the force of melodic progress.Other progressions by equal steps, as for instance arpeggiateddiminished-seventh chords or augmented triads, are shunned by Harrisfor similar reasons. But he does use melodies in perfect fourths andperfect fifths. Such intervallic series are divergent, which satisfy Harris’sfeeling for melodic spaciousness.

The Harrisian ban on melodic progressions by equal intervalsautomatically excludes all Wagnerian and Debussyan patterns of melody.

In the domain of harmony, Harris excludes chords built of equalintervals, such as the diminished-seventh chord and the augmented triad,for the same reasons that he rejects consecutive equal steps in melody.Of course, individual cases of augmented triads (and, rarely, diminishedseventh chords) occasionally occur in Harris’s music, in the process ofcontrapuntal development, but not as independent chords. Still moreremarkable is the avoidance by Harris of dominant-seventh chords, thefoundation stone of orthodox harmony. Harris regards the dominant-sev-enth chords as “a bastard harmony of a major triad mated with adiminished triad.” He describes the formation of his harmonic sense:

The classical use of consonances and progressions of chords did not sat-isfy me. They did not match up with the harmonies as yet unexpressedwhich I heard within me. The dominant seventh in particular offendedme. I could not accept a chord like G, D, B, D, F, B, D. But when Isuperimposed a B flat major chord in its second inversion, resulting in

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*Harris came nearest to using literal sequence in the trumpet-trombone duologue ofthe fugato section in the Third Symphony; but the sequence is there the product of acanonic development.

the formation G, D, B natural, D, F, B flat, D, the Diabolus in Musica,the tritone that is inherent in the dominant-seventh chord, was coveredup and neutralized. I got two straight harmonies, G major and B flatmajor.

“Bastard” harmony vs. legitimate harmony.

The exclusion of familiar chords from the Harrisian harmony does notimply that he is hell-bent on dissonance. Quite the contrary is true: in hisharmonic technique Harris leans heavily on triads and their inversions.Harris himself laughingly reports that advanced music students of theUniversity of California used to chant after listening to a recording of hismusic: “If at first you don’t succeed, tri-ad, triad again!”

The Harrisian tonality being in a constant state of flux, a key signatureis superfluous. Indeed, Harris has never used one. The only exception isthe key signature of six flats in one of the American Ballads. But these flatswere put in by the publisher, over the composer’s strenuous objections.When another publisher attempted to put a key signature into the proofsof the song Fog, Harris demanded that the edition be re-engraved, withthe key signature taken out. The publishers complied.

As a result of dispensing with the key signature, Harris’s notation inscale passages is enharmonic; there are no double sharps or double flats.Thus, in the entire score of Concerto for Orchestra (1954), there is onlyone double sharp ever used, to lend uniformity to the upper tetrachord ofF sharp major, and no double flats at all.

On the positive side the style of Harris reveals the following typicalusages:

Melody

1. Autogenetic formations of the melodic curve, subjectivelyrelated to the shape of a Gothic arch, with the melodic apex in


the middle, and subordinate melodic phrases generating sub-sidiary climaxes.

2. Inherent tonality of the melodic outline, with shifting tonal centers.

3. Melodic phrases based on alternating major and minor thirdsresulting in a constant oscillation between homonymous majorand minor tonalities.

4. Similar oscillations of major and minor seconds, with a prelimi-nary return to the tonal center.

5. Thematic validation of chromatic notes regarded as essentialparts of the melody, with not more than three consecutive semi-tones in melodic progressions.

6. Melodic passages of consecutive ascending or descendingfourths or fifths, with not more than five such intervals in suc-cession.

7. A sui generis twelve-tone melodic construction, with frequentreturns to the central tone, eventually taking in all twelve chro-matic notes in the melodic exposition.

8. Application of a special system of modal semantics, establishingvarying moods according to the magnitude of intervals from thetonic.

Rhythm

1. Asymmetrical rhythms, often embanked within simple metricalunits.

2. Rhythmic constructions in large note values overlapping thebarlines, with rhythmic and phrasal units indicated by slurs.

3. Melorhythmic phrases of two notes in explosive crescendo, end-ing in a sforzando, and followed by a rest.

Counterpoint

1. A system of couplings and linkings, wherein a contrapuntalstructure in two parts annexes a third contrapuntal line, conso-nant to at least one of the voices; independent groups of two orthree voices each are treated as units and freely combine withsimilarly formed contrapuntal compounds, resulting in complexpolyphonic designs.

2. Extensive use of modern organum (progressions in fourths and

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fifths) and modern fauxbourdon (progressions in thirds andsixths).

3. Contrapuntal treatment of unions, octaves, and double octavesin a visual and aural pattern of rhythmic counterpoint.

4. Elaborate canonic developments of thematic phrases.5. Fugal developments in three categories:

(a) true fugue with real answers in the dominant or subdominant;

(b) fugato;(c) free fugal imitation.

Harmony

1. Tonal harmonization in freely interrelated triads and inversions.2. Treatment of seventh chords and ninth chords as overlapping

major and minor triads.3. Pandiatonicism, that is, free simultaneous use of any or all seven

degrees of the diatonic scale in harmonic structures, usuallywith a tonic-dominant fifth in the bass.

4. Bitonal harmonies built by the superposition, in proper spacing,of triads and their inversions in two different keys, with the tonics of the participating tonalities distanced by a minor or amajor third, so that a common tone exists between two triadsthus combined.

5. Chordal combinations of perfect fourths, not exceeding five-partconstructions; more rarely, similar formations of perfect fifths.

6. Harmonies involving more than two distinct tonalities, usuallythrough the retention of a common tone.

7. Marked preference for plagal cadences.8. Endings in unison, or in triadic chords, or tonic seventh chords

(always in major), or bitonal combinations of two triads withtonics distanced by a major or a minor third; or pandiatonicendings of five, six, or seven different notes.

Form

Classical formal constructions: preludes, chorales, fugues,passacaglias, toccatas, sonatas, and symphonies in cyclic constructions, with free recurrences of thematic material,avoiding literal recapitulation.


Orchestration

1. Initial statement of a theme in unison or in octaves, introducedby homogeneous instrumental groups.

2. Antiphonal treatment of instrumental groups in the develop-ment, each group appearing as a self-sufficient contrapuntal orharmonic unit.

3. Treatment of brass, particularly trumpets, as melody carriers, ona par with strings.

4. Incorporation of each instrument into the harmonic or contra-puntal scheme of the music, avoiding purely coloristic effects.

Vocal writing

Contrapuntal treatment of vocal ensembles a capella, withhomophonic structures reserved for chorale-like progressions.

The Gothic ArchFrom his earliest attempt at composition, melody was paramount toHarris. This melody was “autogenetic,” the term implying a natural for-mation and organic development of the melodic curve. He associatedsuch an autogenetic melody with a visual image of a slowly curving arch,a Gothic arch. Within this melodic arch, he conceived of several subordi-nate curves, with melodic climaxes and subclimaxes along the curve. Therhythmic articulation of the melody was part of the melody itself; themusical curve became an indivisible melorhythmic unit.

Musical form is to Harris such a Gothic arch of autogeneticallyexpanding melody, with melorhythmic arcades forming its superstructureand its substructure. Underneath these melorhythmic arcades teems thebiological stuff of Harris’s music, the contrapuntal commotion, the har-monic clashes, the rhythmic counterplay. The task of organizing thisself-breeding mass of music in the raw into an architectonically cohesiveform was the main preoccupation of Harris on his road to musical mas-tery. He described this struggle of musical forces within him in thefollowing words: “The moods which seem particularly American to meare the noisy ribaldry, the sadness, a groping earnestness which amountsto suppliance towards those deepest spiritual yearnings within ourselves;there is little grace or mellowness in our midst; that will probably comeafter we have passed the high noon of our growth as a people.”

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To express these spontaneous American moods, Harris sought newasymmetric rhythms. He wrote in the Symposium, American Composerson American Music:

Our rhythmic impulses are fundamentally different from the rhythmicimpulses of Europeans; and from this unique rhythmic sense aregenerated different melodic and form values. Our sense of rhythm isless symmetrical than the European rhythmic sense. European musiciansare trained to think of rhythm in its largest common denominator, whilewe are born with a feeling for its smallest units. That is why the jazz boys,chained to an unimaginative commercial routine which serves onlycrystallized symmetrical dance rhythms, are continually breaking out intosuperimposed rhythmic variations. This asymmetrical balancing ofrhythmic phrases is in our blood. We do not employ unconventionalrhythms as a sophisticated gesture; we cannot avoid them. The rhythmscome to us first as musical phraseology, and then we struggle to definethem on paper. Our struggle is not to invent new rhythms and melodiesand forms; our problem is to put down into translatable symbols andrhythms and consequent melodies and form those that assert themselveswithin us.

These changeable American rhythms are translated in Harris’s musicalnotation into changeable meters. In the Andante of his Piano Sonata,Harris uses time-signatures such as 13/4, 14/4, and 16/4, to keep pace with hisrhythm. In the first movement of the Second Symphony, he embanks themelo-rhythmic phrase in an expanding and contracting metrical series, 4/2,5/2, 7/2, 5/2, 4/2, with long slurs marking the thematic sections.Occasionally, Harris’s phrases fall naturally into metric divisions. Thus thefugal section of the Trio is in 10/8 time, which is also the dominatingmelorhythmic pattern of the theme. In other instances, Harris divides ameasure in 4/4 time into asymmetric sections in eighth-notes, 3/8 + 2/8 + 3/8= 8/8; or into asymmetric groupings of sixteenth-notes, as 3/16 + 3/16 + 4/16+ 3/16 + 3/16 = 16/16. In the First String Quartet, there are theseasymmetrical divisions of time signatures: 7/4 = 5/8 + 4/8 + 5/8 and 12/8 = 3/8+ 4/8 + 5/8.


Asymmetrical rhythms (3 + 3 + 4 + 3 + 3 = 16).

Asymmetrical rhythms (3 + 3 + 4 = 10 and 2 + 2 + 3 + 3 = 10).

To express Harris’s long-drawn themes in commensurate metricdivisions, time signatures of enormous length would be required. In theFifth Symphony, the theme of the first movement stretches out for 118measures in 4/4 time, which, if written out without interruption by barlines,would aggregate to the monstrous fraction 472/4. The “Gothic arch” of thisprotracted theme is shaped by a dynamic and rhythmic rise during theinitial fifty-five measures, culminating in a climactic period of ninemeasures, followed by the declination of the curve for fifty-four measures.The architectural plan of this theme is illustrated by Harris in thefollowing diagram.

In the Finale of his String Sextet, Harris attempted to solve theproblem of adequate meter by abolishing the time signature altogether.Instead, he posted on the staff a sign looking like a huge natural, which

9 measures

55 measures 54 measures

DominantPedal

inverted

accelerando - crescendo

with constant climbing of

pitch - level

Roy Harris 295

was to indicate a rhythmic pulse not confined to definite metric length.He kept the barlines for phrase groups, and he used dotted lines to delimitrhythmic groups. In addition, there were brackets to mark the extensionof thematic material. However, the plethora of lines and signs onlyconfused the players, and Harris dropped the whole idea.

Intervals and TonalityHarris speaks of the smallest common denominator in American rhythms.In his melodic writing, he applies the least common denominator oftonality. His melodic resources are basically tonal, but the melodic tonal-ity shifts quickly in modulations of asymmetrical periods. Often fulltriads are melodically outlined at the beginning and at the end of a the-matic section, with a Brownian motion of oscillating tonal elements inbetween. As likely as not, a Harris phrase would begin in a major keyconfiguration and tail off in minor, a sort of Picardy third in reverse. Thetheme of the slow movement of the First Symphony is an illustration ofsuch melodic construction. The component phrases begin in major andend in minor.

When Harris does not intend to commit himself tonally, he usesalternating major and minor thirds from the central tone, a melodic teasercalculated to establish a sense of unstable equilibrium. Such alternatingthirds appear in Harris’s op. 1, the Piano Sonata, in the opening measures.The procedure has been adopted by Harris in many melodic situations,so that it has become the distinguishing mark of his melodic technique,and has already found emulators and imitators among young Americancomposers.

Sometimes Harris refuses to commit himself tonally even to theextent of using alternating thirds. Instead, his “pitch design,” to use hisown term for the intervallic melody plan, zigzags in alternating major andminor seconds from the central tone, and builds up slowly to a recogniz-able tonal contour (an example occurs in “Speed”, the third movement ofAmerican Portraits: 1929). This type of musical tease leads to atonality.Indeed, in the early works of Harris, there are melodies that have a defi-nitely atonal flavor. Such is the theme of “Collective Force,” the fourthmovement of American Portraits: 1929. Out of the seventeen notes thatgo into the making of this theme, eleven are different. Significantly, themissing note is the dominant of the G that opens and closes the theme.The exclusion of the dominant is a characteristic procedure of orthodoxatonalists and, whether consciously or not, Harris was here following


atonal practice. In his later works he made use of all twelve differentnotes intentionally, but he was careful to emphasize the tonal element,and the dominant was always conspicuous by its presence.

The theme of “Collective Force” (fourth movement of American Portraits containingeleven different notes).

The Harrisian technique of composing in twelve tones differs fromSchoenberg’s method in that repetitions of essential notes are freely usedby Harris. Thus the Passacaglia theme in the Piano Quintet comprises alltwelve notes, but the last note of the series, C flat, is not reached until theforty-first note of the theme. This C flat is also highest in pitch in themelody, which is calculated to create a melodic climax.

Harris often resorts to intervallic progressions of fourths and fifths inmelodic structure, but he rarely uses more than four such intervals con-secutively. The subject of the fugue in the Trio begins with twoconsecutive fourths. The thematic material of the finale in the first ViolinConcerto is built entirely on progressions in fourths and fifths.

A very interesting example of tritone progressions is provided in thefirst movement of Harris’s Clarinet Concerto, where he stages a seven-parttritone-and-octave canonic stretto, which takes in every note of thechromatic scale.

Melodic thinking by interval building rather than by consideration ofkey is evident in some of Harris’s choral works, in which musical intervalsillustrate the words, a practice sanctified by Harris’s supreme musicaldeity, Johann Sebastian Bach. In his unaccompanied chorus, Red Bird in aGreen Tree, Harris illustrates the words “on the second day of Christmasmy true love gave to me two silver hens” by the interval of a second; whenthe gift is that of three white cows, the interval is a third; for the presenta-tion of four purple swans, there is a fourth, and so on until the eleventhday of Christmas when “my true love” makes her appearance in the com-pany of “eleven lads a-laughing.”Another instance of literal correspondence between the words andmelodic intervals is the Harrisian treatment of Tennyson’s poem inEvening Song, in which the singing line goes a semitone lower to illustrate“Sweet and low.”

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Opening measures of Evening Song.

At the time of the composition of the Third String Quartet, Harrisdeveloped an elaborate and self-consistent system of intervallicsymbolism. He proceeded on the assumption that wide intervals are“bright” and small intervals are “dark,” or, in psychological terms, optimisticand pessimistic. He then designed a spectrum of modes of varyingbrightness, according to the intervals from the tonic. Thus the Lydianmode is the most luminous because the intervals from the tonic are in thismode the largest possible in any mode (major second, major third,augmented fourth, perfect fifth, major sixth, major seventh). The Locrianmode is the darkest because the intervals from the tonic are in this modethe smallest possible in any mode (minor second, minor third, perfectfourth, diminished fifth, minor sixth, minor seventh). The spectrum ofmodes, from infra-dark to ultra-bright appears as follows in the Harrisianscheme: Locrian, Phrygian, Aeolian, Dorian, Mixolydian, Ionian, andLydian. On a psychological scale, this mode spectrum progresses from themost subjective mode (darkest, Locrian) to the most objective (brightest,Lydian). The Dorian mode is neutral, intervallically and psychologically,because it is equidistant from the darkest and the brightest modes. TheDorian mode is also the only invertible mode, its intervals being the samein ascending and descending. Modes equidistant from the Dorian aremutually invertible: Locrian and Lydian; Phrygian and Ionian; Aeolian andMixolydian.

This system of modes connects rather unexpectedly with the twelve-tone structure as practiced by Harris. The brightest and the darkest modescentered on the same keynote aggregate to fourteen notes, which includethe twelve notes of the chromatic scale plus two supernumerary notes.Reckoning from C, the Lydian mode is C, D, E, F sharp, G, A, B. TheLocrian mode is C, D flat, E flat, F, G flat, A flat, and B flat. All twelvenotes are present in this double mode, and there are two notes induplicate, C and F sharp (G flat).

In his Third String Quartet, a suite of four movements each composedof a prelude and a fugue, Harris uses the following modes. In the first


movement, the prelude is in the Dorian mode; the fugue in Dorian andAeolian modes. In the second movement, the prelude is in Lydian mode;fugue in Lydian and Ionian modes. In the third movement, the prelude isin Locrian mode; fugue in Locrian and Phrygian modes. In the fourthmovement, the prelude is in Ionian mode; the fugue, in the Mixolydianmode.

Despite the seemingly calculating nature of the modal semanticsunderlying the thematic contents of the Third String Quartet, it has gainedconsiderable popularity with audiences. Reviewing a performance of thework, The New Yorker of July 12, 1941, commented breezily: “The musicis all lyrical, except for the lively last movement, and you will find itagreeable listening even if you don’t care whether or not there are fuguesand modes present.”

Harris instinctively connects a given mode with a desired mode inmany other works. The music of his Little Suite for piano, which Harriswrote on Christmas morning of 1938 for a young girl piano student,translates psychological states suggested by the titles of separatemovements into corresponding modes. The first movement, “Bells” (basedon the melodic outlines of the traditional church tune “Joy to the World”),is cast in the brightest colors of the modal spectrum, in the Lydian mode;the second,“Sad News,” is set in the melancholy Locrian mode (incidentally,its melody is identical with the prelude of the third movement of the ThirdString Quartet). The third movement of the Little Suite, “Children at Play”,is alternately in the brightest Lydian mode and in the next bright Ionianmode; the last movement, “Slumber,” is in the Ionian mode.

The Sphere of HarmoniesThe Harrisian system of harmony has its own semantics, a blend ofacoustics and psychology. Harris derives his basic concepts of harmonyfrom the series of natural tones. He points out that fifths become moreconsonant at a wider range because they coincide with the third, sixth,twelfth, and twenty-fourth partial tones; on the other hand, fourthsbecome more dissonant when removed from the bass, because of theinterference with the major third, which is the fifth partial of the funda-mental tone. For similar reasons, major thirds are more consonant whenthey are spread widely from the fundamental tone and blend with the fifth,tenth, and twentieth partials, whereas minor thirds grow more dissonant

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with distance because of the interference of the fifth partial in the over-tone series. Major sixths are more euphonious at a distance, while minorsixths are more euphonious at close range.

Harris balances his consonances and dissonances—and consequentlyhis psychological moods—according to these acoustical concepts. Heextends these concepts also to complete chords. Thus the first inversion ofa minor triad in open harmony is in the Harrisian sphere of harmoniesmuch richer than the first inversion of a major triad, because the bass notein a minor sixth-chord generates a fifth partial that is part of the chord,while in a major sixth-chord, the middle note is not in the overtone series.

The major six-four chord in open harmony is more consonant than theminor six-four chord, because the major sixth present in the major six-fourchord is more consonant than the minor sixth. Changes in spacing affectthe degree of consonance of all chords, triads and their inversions, as wellas of compound harmonies.

In the Harrisian system of modulation, a single common tone issufficient to establish a link between tonalities. Thus, the C major triad isrelated through a common tone to A flat major, F major, F minor (commontone, C); E major, A major, C sharp minor (common tone E); G major, Eflat major, G minor (common tone G). It is linked by two common toneswith C minor, A minor, and E minor. The tonic, the subdominant, and thedominant triads of a given key can be linked in this fashion with everymajor and minor key except one lying at the interval of an augmentedfourth from the tonic. This is the medieval Diabolus in musica, which isalso the devil in the Harrisian sphere of harmonies.

In non-triadic harmony, Harris asserts, a single common tone willsustain the continuity of harmonic progressions however dissonant. Inexplaining the discords used in the ending of the Piano Sonata, Harris toldArthur Farwell that the common tone E holds the whole thing together.This binding power of common tones is the basic consideration in Harris’sharmonic writing.

In the Harrisian system, triads related by a common tone enternaturally into bitonal compounds. Major triads combine euphoniously withany triad, major or minor, lying at the distance of a major or a minor thirdfrom the keynote. Triads related by a common tone to the dominant or thesubdominant of a given key, from discords of varying degrees of sharpnesswhen superimposed on tonic triads.

Harris establishes several categories of harmonic concordance of suchbitonal chords. According to his tonal semantics, a major triad in close


harmony superimposed on another major triad in the keynote relationshipof a minor third (e.g., B major on top of D major) is “dark luminous”; anincomplete chord of A flat major (minus a third) on top of a D flat majorchord in open harmony is “bright luminous.” The G major triad without athird, superimposed on F minor in open harmony, is “dark”; G major onC major is “bright.”

Chordal semantics.

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A bitonal major chord, e.g., D flat major, placed on top of A major, is“savage bright.” A bitonal minor chord, with the tonics in the relation of asemitone, such as A minor superimposed on B flat minor, is “savage dark.”It is important to note that the underlying harmony in such bitonalcompounds is invariably spread out in open position, representing, in amajor key, the second, third, and fifth partial tones.

Because the triad lying at the distance of a tritone from the keynotecannot be brought into a common-tone relationship with the threeprincipal triads, the bitonal combination of the type C major plus F sharpmajor is never used by Harris. This is precisely the combinationpopularized by Stravinsky in Petrouchka, the “Parisian chord” that hasattracted a legion of modernists by its luscious sonority. The rejection ofthis chord emphasizes the utterly un-Parisian and austere sonority ofHarris’s bitonal harmonies.

Harris regards seventh-chords as bitonal combinations: “Whenever aseventh-chord or a ninth-chord occurs in my harmony,” he explains, “it isthe product of the overlapping of two triads, a major and a minor triad.By an extension of this principle, a ninth-chord in my harmony is never adominant ninth, but a sum of two major or two minor triads, never a majorplus a minor, or a minor plus a major. That does away with all augmentedor diminished intervals. A final chord for full resonance may be, forinstance, A major on top of D major, at a sufficient distance to justify theextra notes as high overtones of the chord. F sharp generating C sharp,and A generating E and supporting C sharp.”

It is interesting to note that Harris’s early works often ended onnominal dissonances, which are concords in the Harrisian sense. Theending of the Piano Sonata is the most polytonal of Harris’s cadences. Thefinal chord combines E minor and A minor with a high B flat, theharmonic complex reposing on the pedal point on C. The ending of thefirst movement of the First Symphony is the superposition of D major overE flat minor. The final chord of the last movement of the First Symphonyis a tonic major seventh. The subsequent symphonies had triad endings.The Second Symphony ends in pure B flat major. The Third Symphonyends on G minor. There are also several endings in unison.

In his later works Harris favors enhanced major triads, that is, majortriads with the addition of a major sixth and a major ninth, and lessfrequently a major seventh. Thus his orchestral work, Melody, ends on Gmajor plus A. In the Evening Song, the last chord is a major tonic seventh.The song Fog concludes on a major triad with an added sixth and a ninth.


The movement “Slumber” from the Little Suite for piano has an endingwhich includes all seven diatonic degrees of the Lydian mode on B flat.This is a type of pandiatonic technique that Harris has used increasingly inmusical situations in which an orthodox composer would use simple triads.

Pandiatonic ending of “Slumber.”

Simple major chords are to Harris only “calm” or “peaceful.” Harris isapt to use fairly long progressions of major chords, in root positions, toexpress the feeling of quiet determination. In such progressions, contrarymotion between the melody and the bass is employed. To lessen thefeeling of peace and calm, Harris may use major chords in the first orsecond inversion, or alternate major chords with minor chords. There arefew instances in Harris’s music of consecutive use of several minor chords.The second inversion of the triad is often used by Harris where anorthodox composer would employ a root position. It should beemphasized, however, that Harris’s six-four chords never imply thecadential quality of a tonic six-four chord as a gateway to the dominant.

The Modern ClassicismHarmony is to Harris a natural medium for the expression of moods. Butthe innermost core of his music is contrapuntal. Contrapuntal lines are toHarris living voices that do not lose their individuality when they combinewith other voices. Overlapping is frequent in Harris’s counterpoint; voicesconverge to a strong central position, or diverge widely according to thestrength and direction of the vital forces that bring them together or drivethem apart. A chosen pair of voices directs the motion; subsequent con-trapuntal development proceeds by a method of coupling and linking.The original pair of voices annexes a third, or else two independent con-trapuntal couples unite to form a more complex design. Such contrapun-tal units of two, three, or four voices may then enter into a partnershipwith another group. The first pair of voices is usually set in consonant

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intervals, but as the process continues, the resulting design may becomeextremely dissonant.

Canonic progressions, fugati and stretti, are autogenetic with Harris.Such canons are perhaps psychological substitutes for sequences in thesame voice, which Harris rejects. One of the most remarkable illustrationsof Harris’s canonic writing is the interlocking canon in eight parts in theopening measures of the Prelude for String Orchestra, which forms achain of descending triads.

In the Third Symphony free canonic imitation in the woodwindpresents a fanciful appearance to the eye:

Woodwinds from the Third Symphony.


So natural to Harris is the contrapuntal method of writing music thathe sometimes treats even unisons as contrapuntal progressions. Anillustration of such “counterpoint in unisons” is found in Harris’s FirstString Quartet. The entrance of new voices in unisons and octaves anddouble octaves creates the visual illusion of complex polyphony; aurally,too, the alternate strengthening and weakening of the homophonicstructure contributes sonorous variety of a contrapuntal nature. It isinteresting to note that a similar procedure was used independently fromHarris by Jaime Pahissa, a Spanish composer who wrote in 1926 anorchestral work significantly entitled Monodia, in which only unisons,octaves, double octaves, and triple octaves are used. This coincidence ofmethod demonstrates once more that novel aesthetic ideas may occursimultaneously to creative musicians of different backgrounds working indifferent countries.

The counterpoint of Harris is of an absolute type which can suit allinstrumental media. This universality of application occasionally resultsin unidiomatic writing for some instruments, such as the piano. Inunaccompanied choral works, the demands that Harris makes on thevoices are considerable. Equally demanding is Harris’s writing fororchestral instruments. Yet this supposedly unidiomatic writing forinstruments also makes Harris’s style extremely personal, and thereforeunmistakably identifiable as an individual manner. In this respect, Harrisis akin to Mussorgsky, whose idiomatic crudities had to be smootheddown by Rimsky-Korsakov. Times have changed, and nobody in his rightsenses would suggest that the idiosyncrasies of Harris’s technique shouldbe smoothed down by an American Rimsky-Korsakov. The shrewdobservation of Walter Piston, who said that the very awkwardness ofHarris’s idiom constitutes his strength, is very much to the point.

In his contrapuntal and harmonic technique, Harris is conscious ofthe links between creative methods of the 20th century and the formaldevices of the old contrapuntists. In his self-analytical program notes, heoften describes progressions in consecutive fourths or fifths as organum,and consecutive thirds and sixths as fauxbourdon.

The examination of Harris’s scores from the historical viewpoint isrewarding. There is an aura of the Ars Antiqua in the austere progressionsof choral masses in a typical polyphonic work of Harris, such as theSymphony for Voices, to Walt Whitman’s words. As the title clearlyindicates, the voices are treated as contrapuntal lines. The first movement

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opens, characteristically, in unison constructions, with voices picking upthe thread one after another, and then receding into silence, in the fashionof the counterpoint of unisons and rests used by Harris in the First StringQuartet. After the mood is established, the voices begin to link in pairsof consecutive fourths, and combine with new couples in consecutivefifths, and then proceed in contrary motion. A quartet of solo voices iscontrasted antiphonally to the rest of the ensemble, suggesting aconcertino group in a concerto grosso. There is a rhythmic intensification,with melodic phrases overlapping the metric time of 4/4. The ending isplagal, and the final chord is a major triad.

The second movement of the Symphony of Voices is a chanty. Oncemore, the opening is in unisons, evolving contrapuntally by coupling andlinking with new voices. A pedal point of the tonic and the dominantsupports the shifting upper structures based on thirds. Soon the pedalpoint itself begins to shift, first a semitone higher, then a fourth up. Therefollows a chorale in divergent major triads. The music halts. The rhythmis altered. A bass figure appears in an ostinato pattern, and a contrapuntalweb is woven upon it. There is a stretto, and the movement concludes inunison.

The third movement of the Symphony for Voices, entitled “Tears,” isremarkable in its polyphony. A triadic figure is formed by three voicegroups singing in open vowels in a canon by thirds, producing ashimmering fluctuation of major and minor keys. On this wordlessbackground, the sopranos embroider a melody built on converging figuresof narrowing intervals, while the tenors and the basses whisperpitchlessly: Tears! Tears! Tears! The triads glide and slide into oneanother; non-simultaneous entries create a strong illusion of polyphony.A rhythmic stretto leads to a chorale-like conclusion in major harmonies,followed by the inexorable whispers: Tears!


Symphony for Voices.

The fourth and last movement of the Symphony for Voices, titled“Inscription,” is fugal. There are three distinct subjects, which appearconsecutively in three distinct sections. Towards the end, the threesubjects coalesce in an artful polyphonic interplay. The final cadence iscast in the characteristically Harrisian progression of major chords arrayedin contrary motion.

Inscription from Symphony for Voices.

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The four movements of the Symphony for Voices follow a truesymphonic design: an Allegro, a Scherzo, a slow movement, and a fugalrondo.

Canonic devices and fugal developments are ever-present in thechamber music of Harris. His thematic materials unfold “autogenetically”by imitation, variation, ornamentation, diminution, augmentation, andinversion—in brief by all rhythmic and intervallic means except the crabcanon, which Harris rejects because of its inorganic nature, andalso because Bach never used it. Beethoven used it, almost half-heartedly,only once.

The better to unfold his thematic elements. Harris likes to state thesubject in the “white” notation of whole-notes and half-notes, at amoderate tempo. About midway in his composing career, Harris switchedover from this white notation to black notation in double metronome time.For instance, he originally notated the Passacaglia of the Piano Quintet in3/2 time, with the metronome mark set at 66 for a half-note, but changedthe notation for the published edition to 3/4 time, with note-values halved,and the metronome set at 66 for a quarter-note.*

Possibly, the constant criticism and derision of the anti-Harris ele-ments in New York City, who expressed annoyance at the visual monotonyof his scores (“It would seem that these fellows listen with their eyes,”Harris remarks), have played a role in this notational concession. Howeverthat may be, there is a curious parallel in the Harris case with the historicevolution of notation from the medieval hollow notes to the later type offilled-out notes. During a period of some two decades, Harris retracedindividually the course that the scribes of the past traversed collectively ina period of some two centuries.

The historic instrumental forms, the passacaglia, the fugue, thetoccata, undergo special treatment at Harris’s hands. Obviously, Harris isnot concerned with such fascinating conventions as the tonal answer in thefugue, the necessary resolution of discords, or the careful voice leading inscale passages and the cautious observance of the relationship of keys.The comes in a Harris fugue is always a real transposition, not a tonalanswer to the dux. Harris does place his fugal answers in the key of thedominant or the subdominant, and in this he follows the classical usage.


*The “white” version of the Passacaglia is reproduced in the article on Roy Harris inthe Musical Quarterly, January 1947.

His stretti are fairly precise. But beyond this polite bow to the ancientorthodoxy, he refuses to budge. The element of free fantasia intrudesboldly into the sacred precincts. The fugal materials are humanized andBeethovenized. There is, in Harris’s instrumental writing, no demarcationline between a passacaglia and a fugue, a toccata and a fantasia. Theseforms are classical only in a Harrisian sense.

Thus, the Passacaglia subject of the Piano Quintet develops as a triplefugue in a sui generis twelve-tone technique, with contrapuntal flashbacksto the severe organum and fauxbourdon. The aural effect is impressive aspure sound. Paul Rosenfeld described this Passacaglia as “a sort of flowinggranite,” not a bad simile for a solid classical form in a modern setting.

When Harris writes a toccata, he does not build its themes as aperpetual motion in percussive style, which the classical toccata issupposed to represent. To Harris, a toccata is merely a symbol of fluentcontinuity, with a Gothic symmetry of form, and asymmetric rhythmicproliferation of rapidly generated melodies and countermelodies. Hisearly orchestral Toccata is overlaid with stratified counterpoint: it is acomplex piece of writing utterly at variance with the simple homophonicprogress of the classical model. The Piano Toccata, which Harris wrotetwenty years later, comes closer to the classical prototype, but in it, too,the music bristles with polyphonically conceived countermelodies.

Harris is fond of variations. Once again, his variations are not mechan-ically contrived figurations, but neo-Beethovenian organic developments,in which the theme is the point of departure, not the stamping ground.Variations, passacaglias, toccatas, and fugues, all these are freely combinedin the Harris scores, and it is not always possible to classify them in well-defined categories. This, of course, is as it should be. If music isthawed-out architecture, then in the process of melting, the classical linesmust perforce become ductile, malleable, and elastic.

In less polyphonic works. Harris concentrates on the problem ofmelorhythmic animation. An illustration of such rhythmic homophony isSoliloquy and Dance for viola and piano. As the title suggests, Soliloquy isa melodic monologue. Its melody is interesting in that it begins with theoutline of the G minor triad and ends with a G flat major triad in the secondinversion, in a downward melodic unfoldment. Usually, Harris’s triadicmelodies begin with a major triad and end in minor. The relation of thekeys of the initial and final triads is also noteworthy: G minor and G flatmajor are remotely related, but in the Harris scheme of tonal relationship

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these triads are intimately linked by the common tone, B flat. The Danceis a jig in 6/8 time, alternately compressed into 5/8 and extended into 7/8.

The companion work to Soliloquy and Dance is the so-called ViolaQuintet, scored for two violins, two violas, and a cello. The first viola playsthe role of the soloist, accompanied by the string quartet. It is in fourmovements: Prelude, Melody, Interlude, and Grand Fugue. The GrandFugue is a triple one.

In his Poem for violin and piano, Harris continues his search for aneffective melorhythmic line. The reviewer of The New Yorker said that thePoem sounds “as if it might be the slow movement of a sonata.” The guesswas a shrewd one, for Harris used the melodic materials of the Poem inthe slow movement of his Violin Sonata. This Sonata was published inseparate movements with sentimental titles, suggested by the publisher inthe hope of attracting a wider group of customers: “Fantasy,” “Dance ofSpring,”“Melody.” There was still a fourth movement, a Toccata, but it wasnot published.

Concertos for a solo instrument with orchestras had not claimed theattention of Harris until a relatively late stage of his career. The ClarinetConcerto, op. 2, although titled as such, was a piece of chamber music forsix instruments, which afforded Harris an early opportunity to try his skillin counterpoint. His first true essay in this form was a Concerto for Pianoand Band written in 1940. It is cast characteristically, in two movements,a Prelude and a Fugue. Another Piano Concerto, with military band,followed. It was in one movement in the form of a fantasy. Later Harriswrote still another Piano Concerto, for a radio orchestra which includedjazz instruments. Then there was a Concerto for Two Pianos andOrchestra, in three movements, Toccata, Variations on a chorale theme,and Dance. The Toccata displays a considerable virtuosity for the twopianos. The second movement is a set of seven variations on a theme, withthe two solo instruments used in antiphonal sonorities. The Dance is adouble fugue, with a long introduction by the orchestra.

Even in his Accordion Concerto, Harris clings to classical forms. TheConcerto is in two sections, Passacaglia and Dance. The accordion istreated like a woodwind instrument in melodic passages, and like the organin the tutti.

The problem of the Violin Concerto preoccupied Harris for a longtime. After the failure of his first attempt to write a display piece forHeifetz, he wrote another Violin Concerto in 1948. It is conceived in one


movement with two clearly outlined sections, Elegy and Paean. TheConcerto opens with an animated orchestral introduction, leading to theentrance of the solo violin, which announces a passacaglia-like subjectcomprising seven sections of uneven length. The seven-fold subjectappears in five variations. A transition period in 5/8 leads to a dancemovement in fugal style. There is an interlude in a jig-like variation inharmonics for solo violin, suggesting a whistling tune. The dance is thenlaunched without preliminaries. There is an accompanied cadenza of thesolo violin, while the passacaglia of the first section appears in theorchestra. Then follows an unaccompanied cadenza ad libitum, to beimprovised by the player in such a manner as to lead with a proper melodictransition to the coda, in which the soloist is joined by all the violins. Inthe coda, the seven-fold passacaglia subject is restated with contrapuntalornamentations in the high register of the violins.

The SymphoniesIt is in his symphonies that Harris achieves the fullest synthesis of hismusical Americanism and formal classicism. His first real symphony wasone entitled American Portraits: 1929, but he discarded it after repeateddisappointments in trying to arrange performances. He dropped the adjec-tive “American” in his next symphony and gave it the matter-of-fact titleSymphony: 1933. Later on, the date was dropped from the title, and thework was listed in the Harris catalogue simply as First Symphony. In hisprogram notes, Harris explains the subjective sources of the music: “In thefirst movement I have tried to capture the mood of adventure and physi-cal exuberance; in the second, of the pathos which seems to underlie allhuman existence; in the third, the mood of a positive will to power andaction.”

The first movement of the First Symphony is an Allegro. It opens inthe wood-winds with a rhythmic pattern in quarter-notes in triplets and agroup of four eighth-notes. As subsequent pattern in the strings is acharacteristic rhythmic trademark of Harris: a series of explosive groupsof two notes each, the first of which is held, and the second cut offabruptly, with a forceful crescendo. These two patterns form the rhythmicmaterial of the introduction. Then the principal theme appears in theviolins. It is lyric in nature, and tonal in its outline, keeping well within thelimits of D minor. The music grows in intensity, concluding on a powerfulbitonal chord of D major on top of E flat minor.

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Ending of the first movement of the First Symphony.

The second movement, an Andante, opens with a pensive subjectstated by the violas. The end of the first melodic phrase is in minor; theinitial notes of the second phrase form the second inversion of D major;the end of this second phrase is again in a minor key. Such phrasalbeginning in major and phrasal endings in minor are the creative clichesof Harris’s melodies: psychologically, this procedure symbolizes the spiritof action and the spirit of resignation when action is completed.

The third and last movement of the First Symphony, Maestoso, is a setof spirited variations on a jig-like theme, derived from consecutive triadsof G minor, A minor, B flat major, and F major. The variations develop incanon and imitation, extending into what Harris terms an “autogeneticmelodic design of varying lengths and contours.”

The Second Symphony follows the formal outlines of the First. Thereare three movements marked Con bravura, Molto cantabile, and Maestoso.The first movement begins with an insistent rhythmic figure repeatedeight times, developing into a broad diatonic melody within the key of Bflat major. Harris explains the melodic plan of the first movement assimilar to that of the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, themelodic idea being a development of the first four notes. This four-notephrase occurs four times, once in canon and once in free imitation.

Second Symphony, first movement.

The second movement of the Second Symphony is of a meditativenature. The main theme is built on shifting minor triads, with interpolatednotes creating a quasi chromatic design. This theme is developed in


canonic imitation. There is a dirge-like episode characteristic of much ofHarris’s music. It leads to a close in A flat minor.

The third and last movement is built on a vigorous theme, in theframework of B flat major, with a typical intervallic spiral formed bydiminishing intervals converging on the mediant of the key. There is arhythmic diminution of thematic materials. The original theme is in dottedhalf-notes; presently the rhythmic pulse is quickened to form a progressionin half-notes, in quarter-notes, and finally in eighth-notes. There is a dirgewith dark, dry drum-beats accompanying the astringent strings in hardharmony. The tenseness of the music is increased by sustained fortissimoin slow tempo, passing through a typical rhythmic episode in alternatingminor and major thirds in a homonymous tonality of D.

Second Symphony, third movement.

Second Symphony, third movement.

It was the Third Symphony of Harris that proved the most durable.Virgil Thomson called it “America’s most successful work in that form . . .earnest, clumsy, pretentious, imaginative, and terribly sincere.” Roy Harriscomments: “Let’s not kid ourselves. The Third Symphony happened tocome along when it was needed. The first season it was greeted with thesame boos and bravos as have been all my works. That’s the way thingshappen in America, and there’s nothing anybody can do about it.” Harris’sown symphonic favorite is his Fifth Symphony, which he feels has beenunjustly neglected.

The Third Symphony, which is in one continuous movement, createsan impression of organic unity in a variety of moods. Yet, of all of Harris’ssymphonies, it is the least “autogenetic.” The first section is taken almostnote for note from the unhatched violin concerto that Harris wrote forHeifetz. The final section, the dirge-like incantation, was added after thefirst performance, for the New York showing. The rollicking D major

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theme of the fugato, which comes closer to a whistleable and hummabletune than any that Harris ever wrote, is struck in medias res, unprepared.The very suddenness of tonal assault contributes to its tremendouseffectiveness. Harris is not unaware of the mass appeal of this tune. Hesays with confidence: “I have heard this fugal subject whistled and sungand shouted at all hours of the day and night, from coast to coast, bystudents, taxi drivers, on streets, at football games, and in the subways. Isuppose that one of these days we will be hearing it blasted from thejukeboxes.”

Third Symphony.

Of the subjective meaning of the tune. Harris has this to say:

The fugal development in D major was a statement of democraticAmerica in answer to the insults hurled by the Hitler regime that wewere an effete society fearful of the future. I wanted the subject to beoptimistic, gay, and with rhythmic drive. I chose the fugal form, becauseI thought it was the form which has the strongest continuity. I wanted itto be within an octave so that all the instruments could play it with thegreatest of ease. I wanted this subject to be strongly tonal, so I built itaround the tonic, the dominant and the subdominant. The smallerrhythmic denominations accumulate as the subject progresses, whichgives the effect of funneling the rhythmic force towards greaterconcentration. Actually the subject combines the energy of dramaticintervals (disjunct) plus dance rhythms in concentrated denominations.All the materials of the fugal section are generated from the subject itselfso that it is a fugal form in stretto style.

Harris gave this general outline of the Third Symphony for the BostonSymphony program book:

Section I. Tragic—low string sonoritiesSection II. Lyric—strings, horns, wood-windsSection III. Pastoral—emphasizing wood-wind color


Section IV. Fugue—dramaticA. Brass—percussion predominatingB. Canonic development of Section II material constituting

background for further development of FugueC. Brass climax. Rhythmic motive derived from Fugue subject

Section V. Dramatic—Tragic.Restatement of Violin Theme Section I. Tutti strings in canonwith tutti wood-winds.Brass and percussion develops rhythmic motive from climax ofSection IV.

Materials: 1. Melodic Contours—Diatonic—Polytonal2. Harmonic Textures—Consonance—Polytonal

Later, Harris supplemented this outline by a more detailed analysis ofthe music:

The introduction of the Third Symphony is an autogenetic statement inthe cellos, joined by the violas, in an organum counterpoint.

In contrast, the cadence is in consonant fauxbourdon harmony, inmajor sixth-chords, in close position (Measure 42). Later, the double-basses, supported by the bassoons and colored by bass clarinet, continuethe organum harmony, leading to the statement of the first importantsubject in the violins (Measure 60). Still, the harmonies beneath theviolins continue the organum progressions. The violins complete theovertone harmonies proceeding from the organum underneath, whichconstitutes an organum color unit. The result is a two-part counterpointof colors, the lower voices being organum color in three parts, in octaves,fifths and fourths, and the upper voice a monody. Comments are heregiven by brasses in dramatic import (Measures 63–96). This leads to thesecond, lyric, section (Measure 97), which is part transition, partdevelopment. The subject just stated by violins is restated in thewoodwinds (Measures 97–137). Against this, the violins develop the lasttwo measures of the main subject (Measures 95 and 96). This lyricsection is a transmutation of the disjunct pitch design motive of the firstmovement of Beethoven’s Third Symphony. This being my ThirdSymphony, I wished to make a gesture of respect to Beethoven’s Third,which I regard as his most important symphony. The very first time Iheard Beethoven’s Third Symphony, I felt that the disjunct motive mighthave been developed differently. In fact, I had heard in my inner ear

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literally hundreds of transmutations of this disjunct motive. Thematerials of this section are direct fruits of this long gestation period.The statement of these disjunct themes begins in Measure 152; thecontrapuntal development (in eleven parts) begins in Measure 169 inwood-winds and strings, and continues to 194. There follows a melodicbridge (Measures 194–209), in first violins, with ornamentation in flutesand clarinets. These ornamentations constitute an introduction to themood of the next section, which I consider a pastoral section (Measures209–416). It has for a background two sets of double inverted canons, ineight voices, in the strings, producing a web of closely-knit harmonictextures (Measures 209–387). Then the wood-winds take over, inindependent free-running voices. This section is a study in the rhythmicand dynamic growth, from the barely audible pianissimo of a soft pastoralmood to the dramatic forte which opens the following fugal section(Measures 416–554).

The Third Symphony is the only work of Harris which he connects inany way with a personal experience, quite in an old-fashioned romanticvein: “My conception for this pastoral scene,” he writes, commenting on thesection preceding the final fugue, “is the remembrance of the experienceI had in the MacDowell Colony in the summer of 1926, during atremendous storm of lightning, wind, rain, and hail, which began from anominous calm, and grew in intensity to the greatest storm I ever witnessed.Many wood-winds playing loudly in all kinds of contrapuntal designs havealways represented to me the savagery of pantheistic nature, while loudbrasses and percussion expressed the savagery of human nature,proceeding from the military world.”

Then comes the “jukebox” fugato. Harris continues his story of the lastsection of the Third Symphony:

After the fugal section there is a bridge, which is a further developmentin brasses and timpani of the rhythmic characteristics of the firstmeasure of the subject, against the restatement of the first subject of thefirst section of the symphony (Measures from 555 to 634). This bringsus to the coda (Measures from 635 to 708), over a timpani pedal on D,which is a tragic summation of the melodic materials of the wholesymphony. It ends in G minor on the melody note D, which thesymphony began on. The minor harmony was chosen as a symbol of thedark future that seemed imminent. I had formerly ended the work on a


tutti concentration on a single note D, an octave higher than the note onwhich the symphony began. Koussevitzky felt that this was not dramaticenough, and insisted on a harmonic ending. This necessitated therewriting of the whole coda. This new coda began with the timpani solo(Measures 635 to the end). The symphony was scheduled for the NewYork premiere eleven days after the Boston performance. I had to writethe coda and copy all the parts in five days in order to have a rehearsal.I should say that the second coda is probably more effective, but lesssimple in content and form.

The Fourth Symphony, based on American folk songs, departs frompurely symphonic forms and is to be classified with Harris’s works ofexplicit folk song derivation.

The Fifth Symphony returns to pure symphonic design. Thecircumstance that it is dedicated to the people of Russia is adventitious,for there is nothing in its melodic content that would connect it withRussia, or with Russian music. In fact, the dedication was written in whenthe music was already well under way.

The Fifth Symphony is in three movements, Prelude, Chorale, andFugue. Harris describes the character of the movements in his self-analytical program notes:

The first movement is very martial in character, and according to its formmoves always forward without development sections.

The second movement is in singing choral style, yet it is not rhapsodic.After opening with a dark savage introduction which leads to the firstlong melody (bassoons, English horns), the violins take up the melodyand carry it upward to their highest registers, where they stay above athree-voiced chorale in brass and wood-winds. The violas and cellos singthrough this chorale from their low to their high registers, where theyjoin the violins. This marks the climax of the movement, from where allthe strings come slowly downward against brass and wood-windharmonies to a long chorale which opens antiphonally betweenfortissimo muted strings and sonorous brass and wood-wind passages.The whole orchestra gradually melds together to close the chorales ofhope and peace.*

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*This is the chorale in which Harris has written his “Gothic Arch” melody of 118measures.

The last movement is structural in materials and form. Thismovement is a triple fugue in three sections, A, B and C. At the sametime it combines the rondo principle in that the opening motive is usedfor strettos of the first section of the fugue, the subject of which isannounced after an introduction of motive 1.

The second section is in itself a double fugue, the two subjects ofwhich are generated from the opening motive. The last section furtherstates and develops the materials of section A and B, culminating in abroad climax.

The Sixth Symphony is the Lincoln Symphony. However, its referenceto the Gettysburg Address is no more germane to the music than thededication to the Soviet Union is to the Fifth Symphony.

The first movement of the Sixth Symphony, “Awakening,” is in thenature of a prelude; the second movement, “Conflict,” is a symphonicmarch, alive with strident rhythms and clashing harmonies. The thirdmovement, “Dedication,” is a long chorale, almost entirely homophonic instructure. The fourth movement, “Affirmation,” is fugal.

There is a Seventh Symphony, still in the making as of 1951. In it Harrissummarizes the cumulative melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic ideas whichare expressed in varying manners in the six symphonies now in being.

America Singing

The commanding impulse of Harris’s music is his subjective Americanism,his conviction that he is called upon by destiny, duty, and decision to writeAmerican music, in classical forms, and in a subjective manner which, byvirtue of his penetrative power, becomes objectively American music. Insome of his works, Harris openly quotes American folk tunes. OneAmerican tune that he has used time and again is “When Johnny ComesMarching Home.” Strictly speaking, it is not a folk song; its paternity candefinitely be claimed for Patrick Gilmore, the bandmaster who firstpublished it under the pseudonym of Louis Lambert. After many tentativeattempts— in American Portraits, in the Overture of the Gayety andSadness of the American Scene—Harris finally succeeded in writing a workbased on Gilmore’s tune, that was eminently successful. It was thesymphonic overture bearing the title of the song itself, When JohnnyComes Marching Home. In a letter to a friend, written at the time of the


composition of the Overture, Harris described its structure dia-grammatically: “It is eight minutes in length, presenting a marvelousarchitectural problem—how to divide the music into fast-slow-fastsections. It resolved itself as follows:

4 minutes 4 minutesA (2' 15"); B (1' 45") C (1' 45"); D (2' 15")

This is the form of the “Gothic Arch” so beloved by Harris, with itsperfect symmetry of climaxes and sub-climaxes, and asymmetricalrhythms underneath the melodic arcades. Harris wrote this description forthe published score of When Johnny Comes Marching Home:

The first half of the work expresses openly and directly the ribald qualityof the theme itself and its transformation into a slow, sad mood. Thesecond half opens with a rhythmic pattern parallel to the opening of thefirst half and then goes directly with the mood of suppliance. For thissection the traditional treatment of the contrapuntal chorale is used inwhich the theme in slower tempo becomes the bass. This resolves intothe last section which treats the mood of struggle for power and ends inan unresolved continuance of that struggle. All the material, throughout,is either a direct statement of the theme, or characteristic fragments ofthe theme, or variations of the theme, so that the work is abstract fromthe musicians’ point of view; i.e., it does not depend on programmaticideas for its form or its content. . . . In the treatment of the texture andthe orchestration I have tried to keep the work rough-hewn, sinewy anddirectly outspoken as are our people and our civilization.

In the Folksong Symphony, his Fourth, Harris once more returned toJohnny in the first movement fittingly subtitled “Welcome Party.” Thesecond movement, “Western Cowboy,” makes use of two folk ballads,“Lone Prairie” and “Streets of Laredo.” The third tune in the FolksongSymphony is the mountaineer’s love song, “I’m Goin’ Away.” The fourthsong is “De Trumpet Sounds It Within My Soul.” The finale of the Sym-phony includes melodic allusions to the song “The Gal I Left Behind Me.”

The treatment of these songs is, of course, emphatically Harrisian.The major thirds of the original melodies are metamorphosed into minorthirds and vice versa. Tonalities undergo a sudden sea-change; theharmonization shifts into alien keys. Yet the skewing melodic intervals do

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not offend; the Harrisian tunes roll on as easily as if they are strummedon a cowboy’s guitar.

Harris made use of western and southwestern folk songs in his pianosuite American Ballads, in which the movements bear the titles of theoriginal songs: “Streets of Laredo,” “Wayfaring Stranger,” “The Bird”(complete title is “The Bird’s Courtin’ Song”), “Black Is the Color of MyTrue Love’s Hair,” and “Cod Liver Ile.”

The harmonization of “Streets of Laredo” is peculiarly Harrisian. Forthe plain G major of the song, Harris uses several keys: D major (with theadded sixth and seventh), F major (with the added seventh and ninth), Gmajor (with the added seventh and ninth), E major (with the added sixth),and B flat major. The third is flatted in the G major melody toaccommodate the key of B flat major.

In several of Harris’s works of regional references there aresuggestions of folk tunes in the melodic material. In Kentucky Spring, theoutline of Stephen Foster’s song, “My Old Kentucky Home,” appears in thebeginning and at the very end of the score. The Negro song, “De TrumpetSounds It Within My Soul,” which underlies the thematic material in the“Negro Fantasy” of the Folksong Symphony, forms the background ofDark Devotion, a piece for band written in 1950.

In the score written for the Centennial of the California Gold Rush of1848, Fruit of Gold, Harris makes use of the hymn of the University ofCalifornia, “All Hail the Blue and Gold.”

Another sample of Harris’s employment of popular tunes is the use hemade of “Happy Birthday to You” (in Harrisian harmonization of course) inthe orchestral piece Celebration written for Howard Hanson’s fiftiethbirthday.

In the symphonic overture, Cimarron, thematic melodies are sugges-tive of cowboy chants and barn dances, but they are all of Harris’s ownmanufacture.

Traditional religious songs have been used by Harris when the natureof the composition called for them. Such is his Rock of Ages, a free fantasyfor chorus and orchestra on that old hymn tune; the Harrisian treatmentalters the contours of the melody but preserves its melorhythmic inflection.

For the composition of his Catholic Mass, Harris made a profoundstudy of religious songs of the Southwest, principally New Mexico. Owingto all sorts of misadventures, the Mass was not performed at St. Patrick’sCathedral, as originally planned, but Harris has reiterated since that thework had been written “for the Catholic people of America.”


For the disagreeable details, see TIME Magazine, May 24, 1948.Self-quotations and self-borrowing are frequent in the music of

Harris. In several instances he has transplanted whole sections of musicfrom one work into another, with such modifications as are necessary inorder to enable the plant to acclimatize in new instrumental conditions.The reincarnation of the Violin Concerto in the Third Symphony is aremarkable instance because of the dissimilarity of purpose of the twoforms, and further because of the irony that the Third Symphony shouldbecome so successful, while the Concerto did not get anywhere. In fact,the principal theme of the violins in the Third Symphony (measure 60) isa third inoculation, for it originally served as the slow movement of theFirst String Quartet. It is interesting to compare the rhythmic versions ofthe first incarnation of the melody in the String Quartet and its final formin the Third Symphony. The rhythmic line has been simplified andsmoothed down, but the pitch design remained unaltered.

In the lyric section of the Third Symphony, the melody was takenwithout changes from the corresponding part of the Violin Concerto, butthe static harmonies of the Concerto gave way to a diatonically descendingbass in the Symphony.

The subject of the slow movement of the First Symphony is takenbodily from the Fantasy for piano and woodwind instruments. The slowmovement of the Second Symphony is transplanted from the Piano Trio.The Poem for violin became the slow movement of the Violin Sonata. Thetheme of the third prelude of the Third String Quartet is identical withthe melody of “Sad News” from the Little Suite. The theme based on theinitials of Carl Engel and G. Schirmer (C-E; G-E flat), which Harris usedin his Viola Quintet as a gesture of appreciation for his first regularpublishers, went into the making of the double fugue in the last movementof the Fifth Symphony. The viola solo part of the Elegy and Paean isextracted from an earlier work, “Lamentation.”

Harris defends this practice of adjusting old materials for new needsby referring to the example of the great masters of the past. Then hewrote Time Suite, in which every movement is trimmed to exactduration, and was accused of being a cerebral composer. Harrispublished a communication to the Boston Transcript of August 7, 1937,in which he said: “Every great master wrote some of his greatest pagesto fit an exact form, such as ecclesiastical, dance, or occasions of state.That is part of the mastery of the art of composition, parallel to theaccepting of given dimensional spaces into which the mural artist must

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pour his creative poetry, or the architect building functionally to servethe needs of society.”

Mutatis mutandis, Harris can justify his self-borrowing by similarreasoning. And after all, why should a fertile musical idea be used onlyonce, in only one form?

Harris treats orchestral sonorities with the same functional regard asthe instrumentation of his chamber works. His orchestra is never colorfulfor the sake of color, or brilliant for the sake of brilliancy. The iridescentdisplays of the impressionistic palette and the luxuriant sonorities of theRussian orchestra are to Harris mere musical chromos. Yet Harris is notinsensitive to effects of sheer sound. The tonal shimmering of the pastoralsection in the Third Symphony comes close to impressionistic interplay;instrumental birds are fairly bursting into song in the score of KentuckySpring; many passages of the Harrisian brass betray a pleasurableinfatuation with the power of the fanfares. Harris even experiments innovel effects, such as the electrical amplification of the grand piano bymeans of a microphone suspended over the strings, which he uses in Elegyand Paean and Fruit of Gold, the band piece that Harris wrote for thecentennial of the California Gold Rush. There is percussion aplenty inHarris’s band pieces, including such opulent timbres as the vibraphone. Inthe score of Cimarron, he even includes a ten-gauge shotgun to start offthe musical squatters.

On the other hand, Harris treats his harps not as celestial arpeggiatorsbut as prosaic purveyors of glorified pizzicati. He favors pizzicato stringsfor their capacity of dry precision.

Harris prefers the austere quality of chaste violas to the more songfulexpressiveness of the romantic cello. He fuses sonorities freely, doublingthe cellos with the violas, or the violins with the woodwinds. He alsoresorts to frequent divisi in the strings, thus sparing the musicians thenecessity of playing double stops.

As far as the general plan of symphonic continuity is concerned,Harris likes to open a symphonic work in unisons and octaves and buildup sonorities by contrapuntal addition. The middle sections of his scorescontain dynamic ascents and descents in alternation; his endings arehomophonic, in rich triadic harmonies.

According to the computation made for Columbia University by PhilipGordon, Harris heads the list of American-born composers in the numberof symphonic works, number of publications, and number of recordings.According to this survey, made in 1950, Harris has forty-five published


works of orchestral and chamber music, and twenty-seven vocal andinstrumental solos. His total output is ninety works, including sixsymphonies, six concertos, twenty-five various orchestral works, from fiveto twenty minutes long, a mass, three cantatas, three ballets, and muchchamber and choral music. These statistics can be revised, upwards ordownwards, according to the method of listing of single movements frominstrumental works, published as separate items.

Titles undergo a sea-change from manuscript to performance, fromperformance to publication. Thus, the Variations on an Irish Tune becamethe second movement, “Contemplation,” of Harris’s Piano Suite;“Recreation” in the same suite was orchestrated and performed under thetitle “Children’s Hour.” In the Little Suite for piano, the movementpublished under the title “Children at Play” was captioned “HappyChildren” in the manuscript; the movement, “Sad News,” was originallytitled “Sad Children.” It must be said that these original titles are muchmore expressive, and it is regrettable that they were not retained in thepublished edition.

Three Pieces for Orchestra are made up of two orchestral interludesfrom the Folksong Symphony and a specially written movement, “EveningPiece,” which later was published separately. The assorted Whitman songshave served in many capacities, as parts of choral suites and ballets.

Whatever the validity of the claims made for Harris as America’s Com-poser Number 1, in productivity and/or quality, there is no doubtwhatsoever that his music, boldly individual and unmistakably American,has exercised profound influence on young American composers. Thisinfluence is geographically spotty. New York City is not a Harris strong-hold; neither is Boston despite the fact that five of Harris’s symphonieswere premiered there. But groups of young composers in Rochester,Chicago, San Francisco, and the states where Harris lived as composer inresidence, Colorado, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, are apt to produce worksredolent of Harris’s triadic harmonies, to mention the most easily assimi-lated characteristic of Harris’s musical language. In many instances,budding composers who have studied with Harris have become apostles ofHarris’s musical gospel, and carry it in turn to their pupils. In the mean-time, Harris drives unrelentingly on in his determination to createsubjective music of twentieth-century America. Harris had no doubts in1932 that he would one day become a great composer, and by 1952, manymusicians who have come in close contact with his onrushing personalityare inclined to agree with him that the promise has been fulfilled.

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3. CATALOGUE OF WORKS BY HARRIS

CompositionsPUEÑA HUECA for mixed chorus, violin, cello, and piano. A set of vari-ations on a southwestern Spanish-American folk song. Composed in 1920.First performance, Pasadena Community Chorus, Arthur Farwell con-ducting, 1920. Unpublished.

SONG WITHOUT WORDS for mixed chorus and two pianos. Composedin 1922. Not performed. Unpublished.

IMPRESSIONS OF A RAINY DAY, suite for string quartet in four move-ments: “Lull Before the Rain”; “Rain”; “Evening Song”; “From Over theHill.” Composed in 1925. First performance, Zoellner String Quartet, LosAngeles, March 15, 1926. MS.

ANDANTE for orchestra (from an unfinished symphony, Our Heritage).Composed in 1925. First performance, Rochester, New York, HowardHanson conducting, April 23, 1926. Unpublished.

CONCERTO for clarinet, piano, and string quartet, op. 2 (also known asSextet). Composed between October and December 1926. First perfor-mance, Nadia Boulanger, Cahuzac, Roth String Quartet, Paris, May 8,1927. Published by Cos Cob Press.

WHITMAN TRIPTYCH for women’s voices and piano. Composed in1927. First performance, Women’s University Glee Club, New York.Published by Schirmer.

PIANO SONATA, op. 1, in four movements: Prelude; Andante ostinato;Scherzo; Postlude. Composed in 1928–29. First performance, HarryCumpson, New York, March 3, 1929. Published by Cos Cob Press.

AMERICAN PORTRAITS: 1929 for orchestra in four movements:“Initiative,”“Expectation,”“Speed,”“Collective Force.” Composed in 1929.Not performed. Unpublished. MS in the Fleisher Collection.

CONCERT PIECE for orchestra. Extracted from first movement ofAmerican Portraits: 1929. Not performed. Unpublished.

FIRST STRING QUARTET. Composed in 1929. First performance, NewWorld String Quartet, New York, April 14, 1930. MS.

TOCCATA for orchestra. Composed in 1931. Not performed. Un-published. MS in the Fleisher Collection.


PIANO CONCERTO. Unfinished. Composed in 1931 on materialsextracted from Toccata. MS.

ANDANTINO for strings, clarinet, and flute. Composed in February1931. First performance, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Rodzinski con-ducting, March 22, 1931. MS.

FANTASY for piano, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn. Composedin 1932. First performance, Pasadena, April 10, 1932.

OVERTURE FROM THE GAYETY AND SADNESS OF THE AMER-ICAN SCENE. Composed in 1932. First performance, Los AngelesPhilharmonic, Nicolas Slonimsky conducting, December 29, 1932.

THE STORY OF NORAH for mixed chorus, a cappella. Composed in1933. Published by Schirmer.

SEXTET for strings in three movements: Prelude, Chorale, Finale.Composed in 1932. First performance, Yaddo Festival, September 1933.Complete score in the Fleisher Collection.

CHORALE FOR STRINGS, op. 3. Second movement of the StringSextet. Composed in 1932. First performance, members of the LosAngeles Philharmonic, Rodzinski conducting, February 22, 1933.Published by Harold Flammer. Recorded by Victor Company.

THREE VARIATIONS ON A THEME (Second String Quartet).Composed in 1933. First performance, Pro Arte String Quartet, Chicago,October 22, 1933. Recorded by Victor Company.

FIRST SYMPHONY (SYMPHONY: 1933) in three movements: Allegro,Andante, Maestoso. Composed in 1933. First performance, BostonSymphony, Koussevitzky conducting, January 26, 1934. MS. Score in theFleisher Collection in Philadelphia. Recorded by Columbia.

FOUR MINUTES AND TWENTY SECONDS for flute and stringquartet. Composed in February 1934 for Columbia PhonographCompany. First public performance, New York, Nicolas Slonimsky con-ducting, April 15, 1934. Published by Mills.

TRIO for piano, violin, and cello in three movements: Allegro con bravura,Andante religioso, Grave. Composed in 1933. First performance,Berkshire Festival, the Casella trio, September 20, 1934. Published byNew Music. Recorded by Columbia.

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A SONG FOR OCCUPATIONS, a capella chorus, after Walt Whitman.Composed in 1934. First performance, Westminster Choir, Moscow,summer 1934; first American performance, New York, November 27, 1934.Published by Schirmer. Recorded by Columbia.

WHEN JOHNNY COMES MARCHING HOME, symphonic overturefor orchestra. Composed in 1934. First performance, MinneapolisSymphony Orchestra, Ormandy conducting, January 13, 1935. Publishedby Schirmer. Recorded by Victor Company.

SANCTUS for mixed chorus. Composed in 1935. Published by Schirmer.

POEM for violin and piano. Composed in 1935. Published by Schirmer.Recorded by Albert Spalding for Victor Company.

PRELUDE AND FUGUE for string orchestra. Composed in 1935. Firstperformance, Philadelphia Orchestra, Werner Janssen conducting,February 28, 1936. Published by Schirmer.

FAREWELL TO PIONEERS, symphonic elegy for orchestra. Composedin September 1935. First performance, Philadelphia Orchestra, Chavezconducting, March 27, 1936. Published by Schirmer.

SECOND SYMPHONY in three movements. Composed in 1935. Firstperformance, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Richard Burgin conducting,February 28, 1936. MS. Score in the Fleisher Collection.

SYMPHONY FOR VOICES in four movements, a cappella, after WaltWhitman. Composed in 1935. First performance, Westminster Choir, JohnFinley Williamson conducting, Princeton, May 20, 1936. Published bySchirmer. Recorded by Victor Company.

QUINTET for piano and string quartet. Completed December 31, 1936.First performance, Johana Harris and Coolidge String Quartet, New York,February 12, 1937. Recorded by Victor Company (Johana Harris and RothString Quartet).

THIRD STRING QUARTET, a suite of four preludes and fugues.Composed in 1937–38. First performance, Roth String Quartet, Libraryof Congress, Washington, D.C., September 11, 1939.

TIME SUITE for orchestra in six movements: “Broadway,” “Religion,”“Youth,” “Communication and Transportation,” “Philosophy,” “Labor.”Composed in 1937. First performance, Columbia network, August 8, 1937.


Included in the Fleisher Collection. Three movements published bySchirmer as Three Symphonic Essays.

SOLILOQUY AND DANCE for viola and piano. Composed in 1938. Firstperformance, William Primrose and Johana Harris, 1938. Published bySchirmer. Recorded by Victor Company.

VARIATIONS ON AN IRISH THEME for piano. Composed in 1938.Published by Mills as “Contemplation” from Piano Suite.

OLD BLACK JOE for chorus, a free paraphrase. Composed in 1938.

RAILROAD MAN’S BALLAD for chorus and orchestra. Composed in1938. First performance, Brooklyn, February 21, 1941.

LITTLE SUITE for piano in four movements: “Bells,” “Sad News,”“Children at Play,”“Slumber.” Composed in December 1938. Published bySchirmer.

VIOLIN CONCERTO. Composed in 1938. Not completed. Part of thematerial is used in the Third Symphony. MS in piano score.

THIRD SYMPHONY in one movement. Composed in 1938. First per-formance, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Koussevitzky conducting,February 24, 1939. Published by Schirmer. Recorded by Victor Company.

MOOD for orchestra. Composed in 1938. First performance, SanFrancisco Symphony Orchestra, 1939.

SONGS OF DEMOCRACY for mixed choir, a cappella, after WaltWhitman: “Freedom”; “Toleration”; “Year That Trembled”; “To Thee, OldCause”; “Freedom’s Land” (to the words of Archibald MacLeish). Com-posed in 1940. Published by Mills.

ROCK OF AGES for chorus and orchestra. Composed in 1940. First per-formance, Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra and Chorus, 1940. Not published.

WAITIN’ for voice and piano. Composed in 1940. (Words by Harris.)Published by Mills.

A RED BIRD IN A GREEN TREE for chorus, a cappella. Composed in1940. First performance, Western Kentucky State Teachers College, JohnVincent conducting, December 15, 1940. Published by Mills.

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ONE-TENTH OF A NATION, music for a film. Composed in 1940. Un-published. Score in the Fleisher Collection.

QUINTET for two violins, two violas, and cello (also known as ViolaQuintet) in four movements: Prelude, Melody, Interlude, Grand Fugue.Composed in 1939. First performance, Coolidge Quartet and WilliamPrimrose, Coolidge Festival, Washington, D.C., April 14, 1940. Publishedby Schirmer.

CHALLENGE: 1940 for chorus and orchestra. Composed in June 1940.First performance, Lewisohn Stadium, New York Philharmonic SymphonyOrchestra and Chorus, Rodzinski conducting, June 25, 1940. MS.

WESTERN LANDSCAPE, ballet. Composed in 1940. First performance,Colorado Springs, August 1940.

EVENING SONG for voice and piano. (Poem by Tennyson.) Composedin 1940. Published by Mills.

LULLABY for voice and piano. Composed in 1940.

AMERICAN CREED for orchestra and chorus. Composed between June1 and August 11, 1940. First performance, Chicago Symphony Orchestra,Frederick Stock conducting, October 31, 1940. Unpublished.

FOURTH SYMPHONY (Folksong Symphony) for chorus and orchestra inseven movements. Composed in 1939. First complete performance,Cleveland Orchestra, Ringwall conducting, December 26, 1940. Publishedby Schirmer.

ODE TO TRUTH for orchestra. Composed in 1941. First performance,Stanford University, San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Monteux con-ducting, March 9, 1941. MS.

CIMARRON, symphonic overture for band. Composed in 1941. First per-formance, Phillips University Band, Tri-State Festival, Enid, Oklahoma,Harris conducting, April 18, 1941.

FROM THIS EARTH, ballet in eight movements: “Dawn,” “Work,”“Dusk,” “The Treadmill and Exhaustion,” “Retrospection,” “Marriage,”“Festival,” “Children at Play.” Composed in 1941. First performance,Hanya Holm Group, Colorado Springs, Harris conducting, August 7,1941, MS.


FOLK RHYTHMS FOR TODAY for band in three movements: Foxtrot,Blues, Rumba. Composed in 1940. Tune Rhythms in 1941. First publicperformance, Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, Mitropoulos conducting,January 29, 1943. MS. Score in the Fleisher Collection. Performed underthe title Fantasy on Folktune Rhythms by Stokowski with NBC Symphony,December 19, 1943. MS.

THREE PIECES FOR ORCHESTRA (two of which are taken from theFolksong Symphony, and a new movement, “Evening Piece,” added).Composed in 1940. First performance, New York Philharmonic, Barbirolliconducting, March 9, 1941. MS.

EVENING PIECE for orchestra (a separate movement from Three Piecesfor Orchestra). Composed in 1941. First performance, New York Phil-harmonic, Barbirolli conducting, March 9, 1941. Published by Mills.

SPRING-TIME for voice and piano. Composed in 1942.

FREEDOM’S LAND for chorus and orchestra. Composed in 1941.Words by Archibald MacLeish. First performance broadcast over theColumbia network, composer conducting, November 11, 1941. Alsoarranged for chorus a cappella and as a song for voice and piano.

AMERICAN BALLADS for piano: “Laredo,” “Wayfaring Stranger,” “TheBird,” “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” “Cod Liver Ile.” Com-posed in 1942. Published by Carl Fischer.

CHILDREN AT PLAY for piano. Composed in 1942. Published by Millsas “Recreation” in Piano Suite.

ACCELERATION. Composed in July 1941. First performance, NationalSymphony Orchestra, Washington, D.C., Kindler conducting, November2, 1941; revised version, Indianapolis Symphony, Sevitzky conducting,January 8, 1942. Published by Mills.

CONCERTO for piano and band. Composed in 1942. First performance,Johana Harris and University of Michigan Band, Ann Arbor, April 14,1942. MS.

VIOLIN SONATA. Composed in 1942 in four movements: “Fantasy,”“Dance of Spring,” “Melody,” “Toccata.” First performance, William Krolland Johana Harris, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., October 30,

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1942, Recorded for Columbia by Josef Gingold and Johana Harris. Threemovements, “Fantasy,” “Dance of Spring,” and “Melody,” were publishedseparately by Mills.

FANFARE for orchestra. Composed in 1942.

FOUR CHARMING LITTLE PIECES for violin and piano: “Mood”;“Afternoon Slumber Song”; “Summer Fields”; “There’s a Charm AboutYou.” Composed in 1942. Published by Mills.

WHAT SO PROUDLY WE HAIL, ballet in five movements: “What SoProudly We Hail,” “Girl I Left Behind Me,” “Western Cowboy,” “Rock ofAges,” “I’ll be True to My Love.” Composed in 1942. First performance,Hanya Holm Group, Colorado Springs, Harris conducting, August 9, 1942.MS.

NAMESAKES, ballet. Composed in 1942. First performance, HanyaHolm Group, Colorado Springs, Harris conducting, August 9, 1942.

FANTASY for piano and band. Composed in 1943. First performance,Johana Harris and Fort Logan Band, 1943.

LI’L BOY NAMED DAVID for mixed chorus, a cappella. Composed in1943. Published by Mills.

FIFTH SYMPHONY in three movements: Prelude, Chorale, Fugue.Composition completed on December 25, 1942. First performance,Boston Symphony, February 26, 1943. Unpublished.

CHORALE AND TOCCATA for organ and brasses. Composed in 1943.First performance, Columbia broadcast, E. Power Biggs at the organ,Harris conducting, September 24, 1944. Chorale had been performed atColumbia broadcast, E. Power Biggs at the organ, Fiedler conducting,September 26, 1943.

MARCH IN TIME OF WAR for orchestra. Composed in 1943. First per-formance, New York Philharmonic, Rodzinski conducting, December 20,1943. MS.

THE BIRDS’ COURTING SONG for mixed chorus, a cappella.Composed in 1944. Published by Mills.

WORK SONG for mixed chorus, a cappella. Composed in 1943. Publishedby Mills.


PIANO SUITE in three movements: “Occupation,” “Contemplation,”“Recreation.” Composed in 1944. Published by Mills.

DRUM TAPS for chorus. Composed in 1944.

WALT WHITMAN SUITE for chorus, string orchestra, and pianos.Composed in 1944. First performance, Radio Station KOA, Denver, 1944.Also as ballet, produced by Hanya Holm Group, Colorado Springs, August18, 1945.

TO THEE, OLD CAUSE. Composed in 1944. First Performance, HanyaHolm Group, Colorado Springs, summer 1944.

SIXTH SYMPHONY in four movements: “Awakening,” “Conflict,”“Dedication,” “Affirmation.” (Also known as the Gettysburg AddressSymphony.) Completed on February 12, 1944. First performance, BostonSymphony Orchestra, April 14, 1944. MS.

TAKE THE SUN AND KEEP THE STARS for band. Composed in 1944.Performed on NBC broadcast from Denver, composer conducting, July 15,1944. Originally scored for chorus and orchestra under the title Sammy’sFighting Sons. MS.

CHORALE for brasses and strings. Commissioned by Sir Henry Wood.First performance, Promenade Concerts, London, 1944.

LAMENTATION for voice (vocalizing without words), viola, and piano.Composed in 1944. First performance, Colorado Springs, August 18, 1944.

ODE TO FRIENDSHIP for orchestra. Composed in 1944. First per-formance, Madison Square Garden, New York, composer conducting,November 16, 1944. Published by Mills.

HALLELUJAH for chorus, brasses, and organ. Composed in 1945. MS.

VARIATIONS ON A THEME BY EUGENE GOOSSENS (Fanfare fororchestra; one variation only by Roy Harris) for orchestra. Composed in1945. First performance, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Goossens con-ducting, March 23, 1945. MS.

MIRAGE for orchestra. Composed in 1945. First performance, broadcastby members of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Efrem Kurtz con-ducting, June 19, 1945.

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CHILDREN AT PLAY for orchestra. Composed in 1946. First perfor-mance San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, 1946.

RADIO PIECE for orchestra. Composed February 17–24, 1946. Com-missioned by Radio Station WHAM of Rochester, New York. First per-formance, Little Symphony Orchestra at the Eastman School of Music inRochester, composer conducting, April 14, 1946. Published by CarlFischer.

FOG for voice and piano. Composed in 1946. Words by Carl Sandburg.Published by Carl Fischer.

CONCERTO for piano and orchestra. Composed in 1944. First perfor-mance, Johana Harris soloist, radio broadcast, Roy Harris conducting, June1944. First public performance, Janssen Orchestra, Hollywood, Janssenconducting, Johana Harris soloist, January 20, 1946.

MEMORIES OF A CHILD’S SUNDAY, suite for orchestra in threemovements: “Bells,”“Dreams,”“Play Hours.” Composed in 1946. First per-formance, New York Philharmonic, composer conducting, February 21,1946. MS.

BLOW THE MAN DOWN for chorus, band, and strings. Composed in1945. First performance, Cleveland Heights High School Chorus, Harrisconducting, April 22, 1946. MS.

MELODY for orchestra. Composed in 1946. Performed by High Schoolof Music and Art orchestra, Richter conducting, May 12, 1946. Publishedby Carl Fischer.

CELEBRATION for orchestra. Composed in 1946 for the fiftieth birthdayof Howard Hanson. First performance, Boston Symphony Orchestra,Koussevitzky conducting, October 25, 1946. MS.

CONCERTO for two pianos and orchestra in three movements: Toccata,Variations on a Chorale, Dance. Composed in 1946. First performance,Denver Symphony Orchestra, Saul Caston conducting, Johana Harris andMax Lanner pianists, January 21, 1947. MS.

CONCERTO for accordion and orchestra. Composed in 1947. First per-formance, NBC Symphony Orchestra, composer conducting, June 2, 1947.Unpublished.


MADRIGAL for chorus. Words by Harris. Composed in 1947. MS.

EASTER MOTET for mixed chorus, organ, and brasses. Composed in1947. First performance, Grace Episcopal Church, Colorado Springs, 1947.

ISRAEL, motet for tenor solo, mixed chorus, and organ. Composed in1947. First performance, Temple Emanuel, New York, 1947. Published ina collection of Jewish music.

WEDDING SONG for bass voice, violin, viola, cello, and organ.Composed in August 1947 for the wedding of a student. Unpublished.

QUEST for orchestra. Composed in 1947. First performance, IndianapolisSymphony Orchestra, composer conducting, January 29, 1948. MS.

MASS for men’s voices and organ. Composed in 1948. First performance,Columbia University Festival, New York, May 13, 1948. Published by CarlFischer.

ELEGY AND PAEAN for viola and orchestra. Composed in 1948. Firstperformance, Houston Symphony Orchestra, Efrem Kurtz conducting,Primrose soloist, December 13, 1948. MS.

CONCERTO for violin and orchestra. Composed in 1948–49. Not per-formed. Unpublished.

TOCCATA for piano. Composed in 1949. Published by Carl Fischer.

KENTUCKY SPRING. Composed in 1949. First performance, LouisvilleSymphony Orchestra, Harris conducting, April 5, 1949.

FRUIT OF GOLD for band. Composed in 1949. First performanceUniversity of California Band, composer conducting, May 10, 1949.

DARK DEVOTION for band. First performance, Louisville, April 12,1950.

CUMBERLAND CONCERTO for orchestra. Composed in 1951. Firstperformance, Cincinnati Symphony, Thor Johnson conducting, October19, 1951.

SEVENTH SYMPHONY. Composed in 1951. First performance, ChicagoSymphony, Rafael Kubelik conducting, November 20, 1952.

Roy Harris 333

Arrangements

BACH’S ART OF THE FUGUE for string quartet (in collaboration withM. D. Herter Norton, 1934; published by Schirmer). Recorded by theRoth String Quartet for Columbia.

FIVE ORGAN PRELUDES OF BACH transcribed for piano (in collab-oration with Johana Harris).

SINGING THROUGH THE AGES two volumes of choral music, editedby Roy Harris and J. Evanson, 1940.

THE STAR-SPANGLED BANNER arranged for string quartet. Firstperformance, Budapest String Quartet, Washington, D.C., April 8, 1941.


a cappella works, 256Achorripsis, 81Alaleona, Domenico, 104All in the Spring Wind, 144–145Altenberg Lieder, 68Altenberg, Peter, 68American Ballads, 320American music, 56–65; constructivist

composers, 61; Elliott Carter, 61;George Gershwin, 63; Gian CarloMenotti, 63; John Cage, 57–58;Leonard Bernstein, 63; Lukas Foss,63; Marc Blitzstein, 62; neoclassicism,64–65; Norman Dello Joio, 62;operas, 61–63; Peggy Glanville-Hicks,63–64; progress of American music,56–57; Randall Thompson, 62; RogerSessions, 61; romanticism, 59; shortsatirical operas, 62–63; utilitarianmusic, 59–60; Vincent Persichetti, 61;Walter Piston, 60–61

American Portraits: 1929, 246Amériques, 213Amiable Conversation, 112And the Fallen Petals, 140, 145Antheil, George, 15–16, 58, 112Antoniou, Theodor, 79Araújo, Gomes de, 31Arcana, 206, 216Ardevol, Jose, 10Arte dei rumori, 70atonality, 158

Babbitt, Milton, 95–96, 96–97, 113–114Bachianas Brasileiras, 29, 224Ballet mecanique, 112Banshee, The, 149Barbacci, Rodolfo, 28, 38–39Barber, Samuel, 58, 111Bartok, Bela, 115, 129–133Bembe, 8Berg, Alban, 54, 68Berger, Arthur, 97Berio, Luciano, 118Bernstein, Leonard, 63, 111–112Black Maskers, The, 200Blackwood, Easley, 64Blitzstein, Marc, 62, 250–251Bloch, Ernest, 200–201Blow the Man Down, 280Boero, Felipe, 42Boogie-Woogie Suites, 192Boor, The, 179Boulanger, Nadia, 110–111, 240Brant, Henry, 92–93Brown, Earle, 114Burbank, Richard, 125

Cage, John, 57–58, 88–89, 113, 114Canaro, Francisco, 26Carrillo, Julián, 29–30Carter, Elliott, 61Casella, Alfredo, 17–18Castagnone, Riccardo, 21Castañeda, José, 25, 32–33Castro, José María, 43

INDEX

335

Castro, Juan José, 42Caturla, Alejandro García, 8–9, 25,

134–137Celebration, 284Centauro do Ouro, 220Challenge: 1940, 268–269Chanler, Teddy, 13Children of Pireus, The, 80Chilean composers, 24, 25Chorikon, 80Choros, 224Chou, Wen-chung, 138–147; And the

Fallen Petals, 140, 145; form ofwork, 143; Landscapes, 140,144–145; linear movement motivesin, 142; rhythm in work, 143; SevenPoems of Ta’ng Dynasty, 146–147;Soliloquy of a Bhiksuni, 146; tempoin work, 143; tonality in work, 142;vertical amplification, 142–143; TheWillows Are New, 145–146

Christmas Tree, The, 99Christou, Jani, 74–77Cimarron, 270Concord Sonata, 110, 166–167constructivist composers, 61Copland, Aaron, 59, 111Coronela, 46Cowell, Henry, 15, 60, 112–113,

148–152; New Music, 152;Polyphonica, 151; Rhythmicana,150; Synchrony, 150–151

Craft, Robert, 66Creston, Paul, 59Crumb, George, 89–90, 114Cuban instruments, 6Cuban music, 6–11; Alejandro García

Caturla, 8–9, 25, 134–137; AmadeoRoldan, 7–8; Jose Ardevol, 10; MariaMunoz de Quevedo, 10–11;orchestra, 6; Pedro Sanjuan, 9–10;Philharmonic Orchestra, 10; Rumba,6

Dallapiccola, Luigi, 18–20, 54Daphnis et Chloé, 71

Debussy, Claude, 100Delgadillo, Luis A., 23Della Joio, Norman, 62Déserts, 211Desiccated Embryos, 69Desir, 100Diamond, David, 59Dichotomy, 197Disney, Walt, 217Dodecaphonic music, 50–55; Alban

Berg, 54; Anton von Webern, 54;Arnold Schoenberg, creator of,50–54; arranging twelve tone rows,51–52; disciples of ArnoldSchoenberg, 54–55; dissonances andconsonances, 53; Ernst Krenek, 54;Fartein Valen, 55; Franz Liszt, 53;Fritz Klein, 53; Josef MatthiasHauer, 52; Klavierstück for piano,55; Luigi Dallapiccola, 54; twelve-tone composition method, 51–52

dodecaphonic system of composition,170

Dorian mode, 298Duffey, Beula (Johana Harris), 261–263

Ecuatorial, 211Edman, Irwin, 285Elektra, 216environmental music, 121–122Espace, 212euphonious dissonances, 102–103Evocation, 85–86

Farwell, Arthur, 237–238Feldman, Morton, 91Festin de l’Araignée, Le, 71–72Five Orchestral Pieces, 67folklore, 116, 118folk songs, 116Folksong Symphony, 267–268, 319Forest Play, 154Fortner, Wolfgang, 80Foss, Lukas, 63Four Nocturnes for Violin and Piano

(Night Music II), 89–90

Index336

Four Saints in Three Acts, 62Fourth of July, The, 162Freedom’s Land, 269Fruit of Gold, 283“furniture music,” 118Futurist movement, 70–71

Galeano, Ignacio Villanueva, 30–31Galliard, John Ernest, 4Gavazzeni, Gianandrea, 21–22Gazouleas, Stephanos, 79Gershwin, George, 63, 116, 116–117Gettysburg Address symphony, 276Glanville-Hicks, Peggy, 63–64Glass, Philip, 119Glinka, Mikhail, 122Golden Centaur, The (Centauro do

Ouro), 47, 220, 222graphic notation, 114Greek music, 73–84; Anestis

Logothetis, 83; Arghyris Kounadis,80; Arnold Schoenberg, 73–74;Dimitri Levidis, 78; GeorgeLeotsakos, 83; Georges Poniridis, 77;George Tsouyopoulos, 82–83; IanisXenakis, 81–82; Jani Christou,74–77; Manos Hadzidakis, 80;Metatropes, 74; Nikos Mamangakis,82; Nikos Skalkottas, 73–74;Patterns and Permutations, 74; PetroPetridis, 77–78; StephanosGazouleas, 79; Stochastic music, 82;Theodor Antoniou, 79; YannisIoannidis, 79; Yiannis Papaioannou,78; Yorgo Sicilianos, 76–77

Hadzidakis, Manos, 80Hale, Philip, 72Hanson, Howard, 58, 153–156Harris, Johana, 261–263Harris, Roy, 12–13, 59, 111, 231–334;

$2,500 tea party, 238–240; Americasinging, 318–334; broken vertebrae,244–246; Colorado Springshomestead, 277–281; comes home,256–259; concerto in Paris,240–242; counterpoint, 291; form,

292; genius of, 248–249; gloomygrandeur of, 250–251; harmony,292; high pitch in work, 281–284;intervals and tonality, 293–296,296–299; and Leroy Harris,233–235; Lincoln Day 1898,231–233; lucky number five,261–263; melodic inspiration andmoods of, 267–271; melody,290–291; modern classicism,303–311; New York interlude,242–244; Optimi Ingenii Vir,284–286; orchestration, 293;rhythm, 291; salute to SovietSociety, 273–275; skepticism in NewYork, 253–256; sphere of harmonies,299–303; stolen symphony of,246–248; symphonies, 251–253,311–318; symphony for BlueNetwork, 275–277; trials, 259–261;vocal writing, 293; work for JaschaHeifetz, 263–266

Hauer, Josef Matthias, 52, 104Hindemith, Paul, 104Hyperprism, 206, 207

I Got Rhythm, 117imagery, musical, 141Impressions of a Rainy Day, 239Intégrales, 215intervallic specialization, 121Intonarumori, 70Ioannidis, Yannis, 79Ionisation, 13, 115, 209–210Italian futurists, 69–70, 112Italian music, modern, 17–22; Adone

Zecchi, 20–21; Alfredo Casella,17–18; Franco Margola, 21;Gianandrea Gavazzeni, 21–22; GianFrancesco Malipiero, 17–18; GianLuca Tocchi, 18–20; Giulio CesareSonzogno, 21; Goffredo Petrassi,18–19; Ildebrando Pizzetti, 17; LinoLiviabella, 20; Luigi Dallapiccola,18–20; Ottorino Respighi, 17; Renzo

Index 337

Rosselini, 21; Riccardo Castagnone,21; Riccardo Nielsen, 21

Ives, Charles, 57, 71, 72, 109–110,157–169; as musical prophet,165–169; as musical rebel, 157–165

jazz, 100, 117Jeppesen, Knud, 271–272Johnson, Tom, 120Jonny spielt auf, 117

Kalomiris, Manolis, 77Kay, Ulysses, 170–179; best works of,

173; dramatic expression of, 179;first works of, 172–173; harmoniesin music, 177; modernism of, 170;musical memories of, 171–172;polyphonic writing, 176; use ofinstrumentation, 178; use of melodicline, 174–175

Kentucky Spring, 283Klein, Fritz Heinrich, 53, 113Kounadis, Arghyris, 80Koussevitzky, Serge, 251–252, 264,

273–274Krenek, Ernst, 54

Lady Macbeth of the District of Mtinsk,123

Landscapes, 140, 144–145La Rebambaramba, 8Latin American composers, 23–49;

Alejandro García Caturla, 8–9, 25,134–137; Alfonso Leng, 25; andAmerican critics, 28–29; Andres Sas,opinions of, 36–38; Chileancomposers, 24, 25; copyrighting ofmusic from, 26; corresponding with,39–40; in Ecuador, 26–27;Francisco Canaro, 26; in Guatemala,33; Guillermo Uribe Holguin, 25;how earn living, 24–25; JoséCastañeda, 25, 32–33; judgment ofvalues of, 34–35; Julián Carrillo,29–30; Luis A. Delgadillo, 23;musical violence in Argentina,

27–28; obtaining manuscripts from,40–48; political complexion of,48–49; prizes awarded, 23–24;purchasing published music of, 48;Raoul de Verneuil, 38; RodolfoBarbacci, 38–39; self-appreciationof, 30–31; Universalism andIndigenism present in music from,29

Lees, Benjamin, 180–189; Adagiomovement, 186–187, 188, 189;Allegro movement, 186, 188–189;Concerto for Chamber Orchestra,186; concertos by, 184–185;contrasts in music, 181; FourthPiano Sonata, 188–189; Gestalt,187–188; Medea in Corinth cantata,182; rhythmic percussion in work of,180–181; Spectrum for orchestra,187; Spiritoso movement, 187;symphonist, 183; Third Symphonyof, 184; tripartite symmetry,185–186; The Trumpet of the Swansymphony, 182–183

Leng, Alfonso, 25Leotsakos, George, 83Levidis, Dimitri, 78Liszt, Franz, 53Little Suite, 299Liviabella, Lino, 20Locrian mode, 298Logothetis, Anestis, 83Lux Aeturna, 154Lydian mode, 298

MacDowell, Edward, 109–110Mahler, Gustav, 124Malipiero, Gian Francesco, 13, 17–18Mamangakis, Nikos, 82Mann, Thomas, 105Man of Aran, 15Margola, Franco, 21Mayer-Serra, Otto, 44Medea in Corinth, 182Memories and Commentaries, 66Mennin, Peter, 90

Index338

Menotti, Gian Carlo, 63Merry Mount, 156metamathematical music, 67Metatropes, 74Miaskovsky, Nikolai, 123Micropaedia, 89Mignone, Francisco, 28, 48–49modernist composers, 12–16; Edgar

Varèse, 13–15; George Antheil,15–16; Henry Cowell, 15; RoyHarris, 12–13

modern music, overview, 3–5Monologue, 82Morsima-Amorsima, 81Munch, Charles, 283Munoz de Quevedo, Maria, 10–11musical imagery, 141Music for Percussion, 82–83Music Since 1900, 125musique concrete, 118

Nancarrow, Conlon, 190–193neoclassicism, 64–65Newman, Ernest, 67New Music, 152New Musical Resources, 113Nielsen, Riccardo, 21Nocturne, 89

Obouhov, Nicolas, 104Octandre, 207Ode To Friendship, 274Ode To Truth, 269One Tenth of a Nation, 268open-end composition, 114operas, American, 61–63Orff, Carl, 116Overture from the Gayety and Sadness

of the American Scene, 247

pandiatonicism, 101Papaioannou, Yiannis, 78Parisian chord, 302Parker, H.T., 252–253Patterns and Permutations, 74Penis Dimension, 215

Persichetti, Vincent, 61Petrassi, Goffredo, 18–19Petridis, Petro, 77–78Petroushka chord, 101Phoenix Music, 75Pierrot Lunaire, 66–67Piston, Walter, 60–61, 94, 111, 194–195Pithoprakta, 81Pizzetti, Ildebrando, 17player piano, 191Poème électronique, 211–212Polyphonica, 151polyphonic writing, 176polyrhythmy, 158polytonality, 18, 101, 158Ponce, Manuel, 26Poniridis, Georges, 77Porgy and Bess, 63Pratella, Balilla, 70Prokofiev, Sergei, 3, 123Proletarian Organization of Musicians,

122Prometheus Bound, 75Quombex, 93

Ravel, Maurice, 71rectograph, 46Reger, Max, 104Reich, Steve, 119Respighi, Ottorino, 17Revelation of the Fifth Seal, The, 77Revueltas, Silvestre, 46rhumba, 6, 137Rhythmicana, 150rhythmicon, 150Riegger, Wallingford, 59, 87–88,

196–198Rimsky-Korsakov, 115rock music, 117Rodzinski, Artur, 246Roldan, Amadeo, 7–8romanticism in American music, 58, 59Romantic Symphony, 155Rosenfeld, Paul, 243Rosselini, Renzo, 21Roussel, Albert, 71–72

Index 339

Rumba, 6Russolo, Luigi, 70–71

Sacre du Printemps, Le, 66, 68–69Sadko, 115Sahl, Michael, 91–92Sammy’s Fighting Sons, 270Sanjuan, Pedro, 9–10Sas, Andres, 36–38Satie, Erik, 69, 118–119satirical operas, 62–63Schillinger, Joseph, 117Schönberg, Arnold, 50–55, 66–67, 72,

73–74, 104–108, 129–133Schuman, William, 59Scriabin, Alexander, 100–101Second Piece for Violin Alone, 93–94Serenade for Orchestra, 177, 178Sessions, Roger, 61, 94–95, 107,

199–203; biography of, 200–202;Concerto for Violin and Orchestra,203; use of rhythm, 203

Seven Poems of Ta’ng Dynasty,146–147

Shapey, Ralph, 85–87Shostakovich, Dmitri, 123–124Sicilianos, Yorgo, 76–77Six Synthetic Poems, 10Skalkottas, Nikos, 73–74Slonimsky, Sergei, 121Soliloquy and Dance, 272Soliloquy of a Bhiksuni, 146Sollberger, Harvey, 97–98Solos, 98Sonata Concertante, 90Sonatina, 88Sonzogno, Giulio Cesare, 21Spectrum, 187Spiritoso, 187Sprechstimme, 67, 114Stratégie, 82Strauss, Richard, 53Stravinsky, Igor, 3, 65, 67–68, 101–102,

103, 108Streets of Laredo, 320Symphonie pathetique, 115

Symphony for Voices, 257–258,305–308

Synchrony, 150–151

Tanagra, 76–77Tender Melody, 73Theremin, Leon, 211Thompson, Randall, 62Thomson, Virgil, 119–120, 251Three-Page Sonata, 163Three Places in New England, 158, 162,

165Time Suite, 260–261Tocchi, Gian Luca, 18–20tone clusters, 112, 149Tone Roads, 169Toscanini, Arturo, 265total serialism, 113tritone, 102, 204Trumpet of the Swan, The, 182–183Tsouyopoulos, George, 82–83twelve-tone music, see Dodecaphonic

musictwentieth century music, 99–125;

Aaron Copland, 111; AlexanderScriabin, 100–101; ArnoldSchoenberg, 104–108; Bela Bartok,115; Carl Orff, 116; Charles Ives,109–110; Claude Debussy, 100;computerized music, 120; DmitriShostakovich, 123–124; EdgarVarèse, 115; Edward MacDowell,109–110; environmental music,121–122; Erik Satie, 118–119;euphonious dissonances, 102–103;folklore, 116, 118; folk songs, 116;French Six (Les Six), 119; FritzHeinrich Klein, 113; GeorgeAntheil, 112; George Gershwin,116–117; Heitor Villa-Lobos, 116;Henry Cowell, 112–113; IgorStravinsky, 101–102, 103; intervallicspecialization, 121; jazz, 100, 117;John Cage, 113, 114; Josef MatthiasHauer, 104; Joseph Schillinger, 117;La Monte Young, 119; legislating

Index340

musical style, 122–123; LeonardBernstein, 111–112; Luciano Berio,118; Max Reger, 104; medievaluniversities music, 102; MiltonBabbitt, 113–114; music in space,121; Nadia Boulanger, 110–111;Nicolas Obouhov, 104; NikolaiMiaskovsky, 123; Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, 115; noneuphoniousdissonances, 103; objets trouvesmethod, 118; pandiatonicism, 101;Paul Hindemith, 104; Philip Glass,119; polytonality, 101; ragtime, 100,117; Richard Burbank, 125; rockmusic, 117; Roy Harris, 111; SamuelBarber, 111; Sergei Prokofiev, 123;Sergei Slonimsky, 121; serialism byappointment, 121; Sprechstimme,114; Steve Reich, 119; VirgilThomson, 119–120; Walter Piston,111

Uribe Holguin, Guillermo, 25utilitarian music, 59–60

Valderrama, Carlos, 39Valen, Fartein, 55Varèse, Edgar, 13–15, 115, 204–216;

Amériques, 213; applying for grants,210; compared to Perotinus Magnus,204; criticism of Arcana, 206; deathof, 216; faith in himself, 207;Hyperprism, 206; income of, 208;influence after death of, 213–214;influence on Frank Zappa, 214–215;Ionisation performance, 209–210;methods of, 215; Octandre, 207; andPhilips Company, 211–212; physicalappearance of, 212–213; Poèmeélectronique, 211–212; rendition ofrhythmic values in music, 215–216;review of Hyperprism, 207; successin 1950’s, 208–209; use of electronicsound, 211

Verneuil, Raoul de, 38Villa-Lobos, Heitor, 116, 217–228;

Bachianas Brasileiras, 224;birthdate, 221; Centauro do Ouromanuscript, 220; and children, 221;Choros, 224; on folklore, 116; headof education in Rio de Janeiro,218–219; history of, 225–227;manuscripts of, 220; medievalpolyphonic medley in music of,223–224; and nature, 224–225;physical energy of, 221; scientificmusic of, 228; telescoped words, useof when writing, 219–220

violinists, music for, 85–98; ArthurBerger, 97; George Crumb, 89–90;Harvey Sollberger, 97–98; HenryBrant, 92–93; John Cage, 88–89;Michael Sahl, 91–92; MiltonBabbitt, 95–96; Morton Feldman,91; Peter Mennin, 90; Ralph Shapey,85–87; Roger Sessions, 94–95;Stefan Wolpe, 93–94; WallingfordRiegger, 87–88; Walter Piston, 94

von Webern, Anton, 54

Wedding Song, 281Wertheim, Alma, 240When Johnny Comes

Marching Home, 234, 247–248,318–319

Willows Are New, The, 145–146Wolpe, Stefan, 93–94Work, 272

Xenakis, Ianis, 81–82

Yamba-O, 9, 135–136Young, La Monte, 119

Zappa, Frank, 214Zecchi, Adone, 20–21

Index 341

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1941

.

With John Cage, March, 1982. (Copyright Betty Freeman.)

NS in Havana, Cuba, 1933.

l to r: Virgil Thomson, Anita Ellis, NS in New York on June 8, 1987.

NS with Roy Harris in Nashville, Tennessee, 1951.

1932 program flyer from Paris, marked by NS “A memorable program.”

Another 1932 concert in Paris.

Bloch and Frost sign NS’s guest book.

Virgil Thomson’s entry in guest book.

Entry from Aaron Copland.

Entry from Leonard Bernstein.

Entry from Lukas Foss.

Entry from Henry Cowell.

Entries from Edgar Varèse and Morton Gould.

Entry from Roy Harris.

nicolas slonimsky nicolas slonimsky writings on music music of the modern era 2004

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