Frontier Figures by Beth E. Levy

Author:Beth E. Levy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

ENCOUNTERING THE COSMOPOLITAN

Although Harris made his identification with the rural West seem inevitable, he could have chosen other paths. There were more cosmopolitan influences in his background, but unlike Thomson, Harris chose to minimize their importance or, in some cases, to dismiss them altogether. Harris's earliest musical training was understandably provincial. After learning to play the piano from his mother and studying organ and clarinet with musicians in the Los Angeles area, Harris had a sporadic undergraduate education that was interrupted by his stateside service in the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I. During one of his semesters at the University of California, Berkeley, after the war, he made his initial attempts at large-scale composition resulting in an incomplete work for chorus and orchestra. Alfred Hertz, conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, suggested that Harris take the manuscript to Albert Elkus, a prominent Bay Area composer and teacher, but the latter was not encouraging to the late-blooming composer.

At last, when Harris was twenty-seven, encouragement, professional guidance, and long-l asting friendship came from Arthur Farwell, former Indianist (now Americanist) crusader. Harris had taken lessons from Fannie Charles Dillon, Farwell's friend and later associate in the founding of the Theater of the Stars, and she seems to have introduced the two men.5 As Harris's biographer Dan Stehman confirms, it is not clear exactly what kind of compositional instruction Harris received while working with Farwell (1924-25), yet, as we have seen, the older composer's influence is undeniable.6 They shared a mystic, missionary zeal and an unabashed commitment that the West was ripe for spiritual battle against the commercial and cosmopolitan forces that they saw dominating American musical life. Perhaps ironically, it was in part thanks to Farwell that Harris began to break free from the limitations of his provincial youth. Farwell helped Harris make professional connections, recommending him as a music critic to the Los Angeles Illustrated News and helping him secure a position teaching harmony at the Hollywood Conservatory, which enabled him to quit his job as a dairy truck driver. Farwell also provided introductions to such influential patrons as Artie Mason Carter (cofounder of the Hollywood Bowl) and Alma Wertheim, who would eventually finance Harris's study in France. By 1926, with Farwell's blessing, Harris had composed an orchestral Andante that won him an East Coast premiere under Howard Hanson and a visit to the MacDowell Colony. There he would meet the young Aaron Copland, who promptly encouraged the less experienced composer to follow his example by studying with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Harris set sail almost immediately.

How did Harris survive his three-year adventure in the early twentieth-century's cosmopolitan mecca? First of all, Harris chose to live outside the city, in the small village of Juziers (where Copland had also lived for a time), with a landlady whom he befriended by helping her pick cherries (OH, 302-3). In retrospect, Harris had a matter-of-fact explanation for this decision: “I suppose one of the reasons was that I was originally a country boy; I was brought up that way, and Paris was very strange to me.

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