Log Cabin Composer

Last week, for the first time this season, the New York Philharmonic Symphony played some music by a U. S. composer. For Conductor Otto Klemperer it was a matter of duty to give a hearing to native talent. For the man thus honored it was an opportunity to keep prominent company with Bach, Ravel, Brahms. The composer Conductor Klemperer picked was Roy Harris, whom admirers regard as the strong White Hope of modern U. S. music. Last week's offering was not Harris' most ambitious work but When Johnny Comes Marching Home, an eight-minute "American Overture," commissioned and recorded a year ago by RCA Victor Co.

Theme was the thumping old Civil War tune which sounded out rowdily at first, drove its way through elaborate orchestration, occasionally groaning, occasionally sighing, never quite reaching a definite conclusion. Composer Harris had chosen the tune because it was what his father had whistled in the mornings when he went striding out to his farmlands, in the evenings when he plodded wearily home. Intent was to keep the music "roughhewn, sinewy and directly outspoken." In his dry, blunt speech. Composer Harris makes much of his background, of the fact that he was born 38 years ago in an Oklahoma log cabin which his father hewed by hand, of his own early years spent farming in California's San Gabriel Valley. At the age when most would-be composers are hard at their technical training, Roy Harris was soldiering. When the War was over he went West again, drove a farm truck. He studied briefly at the University of California where his first interest was philosophy, which he deserted when he found it was just "word juggling." He turned gropingly toward music because for him it had an absolute value.

Even those who fail to appreciate him admit that Roy Harris has worked like one possessed. His first compositions were as crude as a schoolboy's but within three years he had written an Andante which was performed at the Philharmonic Stadium concerts. That was followed by a Guggenheim Fellowship which gave him two years' study in Paris. There he picked up sophisticated technique but he kept his drive and a bit of the ungainliness which he has never quite outgrown. Luck was with him when rich Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge sponsored his chamber music, when her imports, the Pro Arte Quartet from Belgium and the Roth Quartet from Budapest, decided that his was virile U. S. music which was well worth playing widely. Two years ago the Boston Symphony played Harris' Symphony: 1933.

The case of serious U. S. music remains a difficult one to try. In theory, audiences are eager to keep in touch with what is being written. In practice they usually seem bored or completely baffled by scores which they hear once and seldom ever again. Critics are of little help when they attempt to pass judgment. When Symphony: 1933 was played in Boston, the late Henry Taylor Parker said in the Transcript: "The first movement gives off an American eagerness and boldness and exuberance -- of the West rather than the East, where a too insistent gospelling about security has damned adventure and abundance. The finale, surcharged though it is with an inexhaustibly varied counter point, marches gallantly, confidently. . . ."

Said Critic Olin Downes of the New York Times of the same piece: "The music is labored and the thematic material very sparse. ... It sometimes repeats, but seldom progresses. . . ."

After When Johnny Comes Marching Home last week, Critic Lawrence Gilman of the Herald Tribune said: "[Harris'] is a brilliant, vivid, able and engrossing essay in the variation form. . . ." Said seasoned old William J. Henderson of the New York Sun: "One should not take such a composition too solemnly. 0

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.