If you’re looking for one composer that encapsulates the 20th-century American sound in classical music, you need look no further than Roy Harris. That wide-open, bright, brash, raucous but always melodious, and hopeful sound infuses all his music. There are those you could name in this group of composers — Aaron Copland, Howard Hanson, William Grant Still, Virgil Thomson, many others, each with a different voice and each with a different take on that American sound — but Roy Harris is arguably the exemplar of it. His Third Symphony was the most-performed American symphony at one time and is still up there, along with the Copland Third and Hanson Second, generations later.
Harris became a great influence on American music not only through the popularity of his works, but also through his teaching. His students include William Schuman, Florence Price, and that famous discoverer of P. D. Q. Bach, Peter Schickele. He taught at maybe a half-dozen places including Juilliard, Westminster Choir College, and UCLA, but Roy Harris himself didn’t come up through academia. He was born on an Oklahoma farm and grew up on a farm in California, and later supported himself as a truck driver.
He did study at UC Berkeley and took lessons with two Arthurs, the English composer Arthur Bliss, who was living in California at the time, and with Arthur Farwell, the composer who did so much to bring Native American–inspired music to the concert hall. And then, on an introduction from Copland, Harris studied for a few years in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, where he picked up a love for, of all things, Renaissance music.
Back in America he was championed by Serge Koussevitzky in Boston and by a conductor and an orchestra who arguably did more for American music than any other, Robert Whitney and the Louisville Orchestra. The groundbreaking series of premiere American recordings produced by Louisville, along with commissions to international composers, is astonishing and courageous, and Roy Harris was a favorite of Whitney.
In 1949 Harris composed Kentucky Spring for the Louisville Orchestra. The title may have been a friendly poke at Aaron Copland, who only five years before had written Appalachian Spring. But in any case, it’s a sprightly, imaginative, and surprisingly strong work. I will not be the first to spy the influence of Jean Sibelius on Harris. You’ll remember the Sixth Symphony of Sibelius from last month’s Fleisher Discoveries, and how the music grows organically within each movement and from movement to movement, how the germ of a musical idea blooms. There is no story that we know of behind Kentucky Spring, any more than there was a story behind the Sibelius 6, but after listening to it we feel as if we’ve been on a journey, and it’s been a trip worth taking.
We kick off our anticipation of spring on Fleisher Discoveries with Kentucky Spring by Roy Harris, Robert Whitney conducting the Louisville Orchestra. I was saying before that there isn’t any storyline behind this piece, other than that Louisville is in Kentucky and that this was written for Louisville and Robert Whitney. But I’m taken by the music, by its energy and charm. I have no idea what that ending means, but it put a smile on my face!
In music Mary Howe was first a pianist, and although she had a growing career performing as a soloist and as a duo-pianist, she came to love composing more. She was from Richmond, Virginia and attended the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. She traveled to Germany to study composition and to Paris, where, like Roy Harris and many other Americans, she studied with Nadia Boulanger. She married, had three children, and later returned to Peabody for a certificate in composition.
Not only did she compose, she was as active as could be in musical circles. She helped to found the Society of American Women Composers and the Chamber Music Society of Washington, now called the Friends of Music of the Library of Congress. She was the first woman to teach music at New York University. She was on the board of what is now the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and if that weren’t enough, Mary Howe and her husband in 1931 were among the co-founders of the National Symphony Orchestra.
In 1936 that National Symphony Orchestra, under its first Music Director Hans Kindler, premiered the Spring Pastorale of Mary Howe. It is a beautifully romantic short piece, deeply emotional, with elements of what to me sound like both sadness and hope. American impressionism, you might say. William Strickland conducts the Imperial Philharmonic of Tokyo in the Spring Pastorale of Mary Howe on our second track.
We finish with a work with a French title by the 19th-century German composer Joachim Raff, called Ode au printemps, or Ode to Spring. It’s for piano and orchestra. The pianist he wrote it for is Betty Schott — that’s her real name, Betty, and quite un-Germanic — but she was a well-known pianist, married to the publisher Franz Schott, the grandson of the founder of this influential classical music publishing house, headquartered in Mainz.
Like Mary Howe and her husband, the Schotts established an orchestra in Mainz, and supported much of the music-making in that city. The Schott publishing firm was influential in large part because it was focused on new music. They published Wagner’s operas. They published Hänsel und Gretel by Engelbert Humperdinck. And they published one of the leading German symphonists of the day, Joachim Raff. He also was big in new music circles, in what we might even call avant-garde circles, being a disciple of Franz Liszt, whose strange harmonies and wild one-movement tone poems were all the rage.
Put this Ode to Spring in that camp. It may sound very 19th-century to our ears, very pleasant, very suitable for a salon, but in 1857 this was music of the future. Instead of a logical processing and outworking of a theme, this music seems almost like an improvisation, the music thrown from piano to winds to strings and back in a way that reminds me of film editing. Imagine walking through the woods, with your eyes moving from a brook to the sky between the leaves, then to a bird flitting by, then to a branch snapping behind you. It’s a story played out in sound, and here, in music. Be caught up in the delight Joachim Raff must have felt in putting this all together.
The Ode to Spring by Joachim Raff on Fleisher Discoveries features the piano soloist Jean-François Antonioli, and the Chamber Orchestra of Lausanne conducted by Lawrence Foster. Three works on Fleisher Discoveries this month, by Roy Harris, Mary Howe, and Joachim Raff, to put a little spring in your step!
