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10. The Composer as Folk Singer
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268 FOLK SONG HER ITAGE AND THE PROVINCIAL COWBOY At the same time Harris was experimenting with autogenesis in Farewell to Pioneers , he was also making forays into a more accessible musical language based on folk song. In response to a commission by RCA Victor—apparently the first American work commissioned specifically for recording—Harris produced the orchestral overture When Johnny Comes Marching Home (1935), which took one of Harris’s favorite tunes as its basis. This was not his first attempt at folk-based composition. Dan Stehman observes that ten years earlier he had used the tune “Peña Hueca” in his Fantasy for Trio and Chorus, almost certainly working from materials provided by Farwell. But When Johnny Comes Marching Home did give Harris his first chance to discuss folk song before a national audience. In explaining his reliance on borrowed material, Harris had to transmute his emphasis on organic, self-expressive melody almost completely. Folk songs could hardly be made to fit his autogenetic models (though Harris sometimes pretended that they could). More persuasively, Harris grounded his use of folk material in a different kind of naturalness—not the organic unfolding of autogenesis, but the authenticity of autobiography. Though not literally a folk song (it was published by Patrick Gilmore in 1863), “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” had honorary folk-song status for Harris , and its rousing tune was something like a theme song early in his career. Although his emerging western aura shed no special light on the song, Harris managed to wrest it from its original Civil War context and insert it into his own, as indicated in the program note appended to the score: 10 The Composer as Folk Singer The Composer as Folk Singer 269 I chose an American theme which is not only well known and loved but capable of extended development: “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” This was one of my father’s favorite tunes, and it was he who planted in me the unconscious realization of its dual nature. He used to whistle it with jaunty bravado as we went to work on the farm in the morning and with sad pensiveness as we returned at dusk behind the slow, weary plodding of the horses. These impressions have undoubtedly influenced me in determining the use of this theme; yet the same realization of the dual character of this peculiarly fertile theme might have been arrived at by observing that it is very minor in its tonality and gay in its rhythm. For Harris, it almost went without saying that the tune should be American. Beyond that, the best reasons for incorporating folk song were personal ones, grounded in biographical experience and (if at all possible) family history. The strange combination of agricultural and psychological vocabulary in this description—according to which this “fertile” tune was “planted” in Harris’s subconscious by his father—is less strange than what Harris neglected to mention at all: its Irish background and Civil War connotations. The tune’s more general military associations may well have added to the overture’s public appeal ; such associations certainly received ample attention from other quarters when Harris used the tune again in 1940 in the Folksong Symphony. But Harris did not mention them in 1935. Even during the 1940s, when it came to folk song, Harris preferred to let the personal overshadow the political. It was the plausibility of personal identification with folk song that continued to set Harris apart when American composers began turning to folk song in droves during the Depression. Harris’s most famous folk-based works appeared at precisely the time when American artists left and right (but especially left) were scrambling to acquaint or reacquaint themselves with American folklore. The New Deal was blanketing the country with populist propaganda idealizing rural life. The nation’s most intellectual flirtation with socialist thinking was making it respectable to aspire toward accessibility. Writers like John Steinbeck were valorizing the working man, Carl Sandburg was publishing Americana song and verse, and Charles Seeger was urging composers to leave the ivory tower and “discover America.” In 1934, Seeger had issued a challenge: “If . . . a composer is going to sing the American people anything new . . . he must first get upon a common ground with them, learn their musical lingo, work with it, and show he can do for them something they want to have done and cannot do for themselves.” Harris approached these tasks with a special kind of authority...