Legend has it that Roy Ellsworth Harris, a farmer’s son, was born on February 12, 1898 - Abraham Lincoln’s birthday - in a Lincoln County, Oklahoma, log cabin. There is nothing to prove or disprove the claim, since Oklahoma was an undeveloped territory with few or no public records. Irregardless, Harris seems the fullest embodiment of America’s rural spirit in classical music. Figures like Aaron Copland and Charles Ives sought a thoroughly national consciousness in their work, but Harris was a composer who was truly one with the huge American expanse, in fact bound to the soil.
Harris moved with his family at an early age from Oklahoma to their farm in the San Gabriel Valley of California, where he worked the land and for a time owned shares of acreage. He attended high school locally and was an exceptional sportsman, even becoming a prospect for Major League Baseball. Harris was taught piano by his Welsh mother and eventually learned clarinet, but did not immediately aspire to become a musician; actually, Harris seemed to lacked direction in life until his mid-twenties. He served in the Army Training Corps during World War I, never seeing the front, after which he gave up his share of the family farm, began to earn income as a trapper, and later worked as a dairy deliveryman. His intellect steered him to liberal arts classes at California-Berkley and UCLA, finally deciding on a career in music. Harris’s theoretical knowledge at the time was raw, but he drew the interest of Aaron Copland in 1926, who recommended studies with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.
Though arriving late to musical training, Harris’s efforts paid off; he was successful as a composer, teacher, and theorist until his death in 1979. The bulk of Harris’s canon is made of symphonies and choral music, though he worked in numerous other forms. There are thirteen numbered symphonies in all, with his Symphony No. 3 being most famous in the United States and abroad. Harris wrote for large orchestras, using taut symphonic development and creating atmospheres that remind one of the vast American landscape. While music does not often convey ideas in a literal sense, Harris’s techniques inevitably make us think of valleys, prairies, and cattle. There is a certain ruggedness to the Harris sound, which has its technical shortcomings but frequently splendid moments.
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Harris’s Symphony No. 7 was one of numerous commissions made by Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Sergei Koussevitzky, whose Koussevitzky Music Foundation encouraged new works by composers such as Bartok, Copland, Varese, and Stravinsky. Koussevitzky, however, would never conduct or even hear this work due to the procrastination of Harris in arriving at his single-movement opus. Originally commissioned in 1946, Harris did not begin work on the symphony until 1952, one year after Koussevitzky’s death and the composer’s move to Pittsburgh, where he taught at the Pennsylvania College for Women.
Conducting duties shifted to Rafael Kubelik, a Czech who had recently become music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and already led performances of Harris’s Third and Fifth Symphonies. The work was first heard in late 1952; Kubelik expressed his admiration, but Harris was not completely satisfied and began a chain of revisions. The Seventh Symphony didn’t reach its final version until recording sessions with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy in 1955. The work ultimately won a Naumberg Foundation Award one year later.
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The one-movement form of Symphony No. 7 harkens back to Symphony No. 3 (1938), which is judged by critics as one of the greatest symphonic works by an American. No. 7, however, does not seem to function purely as a symphony; it is a work that is open-ended, gradually building upon variations of the introductory theme until it ends in a jazzy, almost riotous closing section with brilliant orchestral colors. The work seems, in fact, to border on a concerto for orchestra, instruments being used in complex ways to form a sprawling tapestry. This is no coincidence when examining other Koussevitzky-commissioned works such as the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra and the Hindemith Concert Music for Strings and Brass, written largely to exhibit the Boston Symphony’s virtuoso talents.
While impressively orchestrated, the work is not as successful as Symphony No. 3, in that it doesn’t boast a roundedness or completeness. The symphony’s later pages are a huge buildup of orchestral forces that ends abruptly on the work’s final chord. The work leaves us hanging, as if Harris didn’t want to go any further with the project. It would be interesting to see manuscripts of the symphony’s earlier versions, where it may indicate if Harris imposed cuts that actually handicapped its development. At any rate, the symphony is aurally challenging, demanding repeated listens to understand its complex structure. Harris carries the work through rapid stages of metamorphosis, toting matters from A to B in a startling 19 minutes.
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A budget CD recording from Naxos was available for this work, catalog number 8.559050. The fairly prolific National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, conducted by Theodore Kuchar, is featured in Harris’s Symphony No. 7, Epilogue to Profiles in Courage: J.F.K., and Symphony No. 9. An American orchestra is always preferable for American music, simply because domestic performers have (theoretically) a better feel for the idiom; the NSO Ukraine does quite well with their material, however, maintaining a strong rhythm and balanced orchestration. As proven by the frequent recordings of his music, Harris was quite prolific in his day and is still a force to be reckoned with. ~~~
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