Roy Harris chamber music
I've been listening to a recording by the Third Angle New Music Ensemble (Koch KIC-CD-7515) containing three of Roy Harris' finest chamber works, all from the '40s : the Piano Quintet, Violin Sonata, and String Quartet No. 3. It's nice to have modern recordings of these pieces. I think Harris has been unjustly neglected, and we won't know how unjustly until we get an integrale of the symphonies (esp. #11, said to be the most pessimistic). He's not a perfect composer, but he has a unique voice. These are capable performances, if a little laid-back.
The notes by Daniel Felsenfeld are pretty dreadful: "Influence of the Teutonic continent", "cross between a gentleman and a crank, between a maverick and a rube", "a high European sense of harmonic progression" (which, for all his root mobility, Harris really DOESN'T have, in the sense of directed harmonic function.). Then there's his list of "American symphonists": Schuman, Berger, Shapero, Diamond. He starts and ends well (Diamond may be our greatest American symphonist, at least of his generation.) But Shapero only wrote one symphony, and while it's a doozy, if one symphony makes a symphonist, then Beethoven was an opera composer. And Berger never wrote one at all, and precious little orchestral music; Sessions would be a better choice to fill that seat.
And the cover...why is it that "rural...open spaces" conjures up dilapidated barns? Is there something broken about Harris' music? Are we hicks too stupid and improvident to throw a coat of paint on our barns? How come when the "country landscape" is evoked, you never see a nice steel milking parlor with new silos, and a rust-free combine in the fields?
And while I'm ranting, what's with the sobriquet "the American ____"? Diamond has been called the American Bruckner, while Harris is the American Mussorgsky. It implies a second-handedness (why isn't Britten "the English Bernstein"?).And it doesn't even fit. The only Diamond piece I know which is remotely Brucknerian is the 2nd Symphony. But Harris has quite a lot in common with Bruckner, in rate of harmonic motion and in texture...but then not much with Mussorgsky. I know, it's marketing...but it's so limiting
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