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246 AMER ICAN AUTOGENESIS AND THE THIR D SYMPHONY Marking the apex of Harris’s career was his Third Symphony. Though many listeners single out the Fifth or the Seventh as his finest symphonic achievement, it is the Third and only the Third that remains in the standard repertory. At the time of its first performances, it seemed to represent the fulfillment of all the quasi-messianic hopes that had been vested in the composer. Harris had at last achieved his manifest destiny , uniting his vaunted “personality” with technical innovation in the prestigious genre of symphonic writing. Critics have praised the symphony for its “American flavor” or its organic unfolding, but few have recognized that these two features were intimately linked in Harris’s mind through the theory of melodic “autogenesis.” Harris’s friends (Farwell included) waxed equally rhapsodic whether describing the natural beauties of his harmonic language, his intuitive mastery of counterpoint , or his scientific principles of orchestration. But it was Harris’s handling of melody that most consistently drew wider critical attention. Perhaps recalling Rosenfeld’s praise for Harris’s “lithe” cowboy gait or Farwell’s discovery of corollaries for Harrisian melody in the western landscape, Walter Piston remarked in 1934: “The continual change in length of the rhythmic units making up a melodic line imparts a sense of wandering and seeking which may account in part for the attempts to describe Harris’ music in terms of the great open spaces of the West, the American pioneer spirit, and even the distant outline of a mountain range.” Copland followed suit: “His melodic gift is his most striking characteristic. His music comes closest to a distinctively American melos of anything yet done—in 9 Manifest Destiny Manifest Destiny 247 the more ambitious forms. Celtic folksongs and Protestant hymns are its basis, but they have been completely reworked, lengthened, malleated.” Together, Piston and Copland allude to the two most important elements of Harris’s melodies : the continuous evolution of material and the presence of folklike qualities. When Harris himself isolated and described each of these aspects of his work, he was responding to the contradictory demands posed by modernism’s romantic roots. To cash in on the rhetoric of authenticity that had already marked his reception so prominently, Harris aligned himself with the natural; to maintain this reputation in an age obsessed with technological innovation, he aligned himself with the rational or scientific. The quandaries posed by this dilemma left their traces throughout writings by and about the composer. Take, for example, Slonimsky’s account of Harris’s melodic habits: “Harris has always emphasized that he is a Man of Nature. His melodic inspiration comes to him from communion with nature, during his solitary walks. . . . In this he is entirely a romantic, with this difference, that he translates his immediate moods into a rational and self-consistent language of rhythms and modes” (CC, 66). Harris’s insistence on the natural or intuitive inspiration behind procedures that might otherwise have seemed overly cerebral was at its most forceful in his descriptions of “autogenetic” melody. We are indebted to Harris’s student Sidney Thurber Cox for the clearest explication of Harris’s “autogenetic principle,” in a 1948 master’s thesis that includes examples provided by Harris himself. Among the features Cox cataloged are variously proportioned melodic arch figures, hierarchies in the placement of melodic climaxes, and the manipulation of interval content to suggest gradual expansion or contraction. All of these components work together to create a type of melodic development through variation that should, as Cox observed, “expand and extend the possibilities inherent in the original germ” in such a way that “the process will not strike the auditor as being too facile, or too reminiscent of traditional practice.” Distance from tradition was not the only—perhaps not even the primary—target for Harris’s autogenetic theorizing. Lest there be any confusion, Cox continued: “This is in direct contrast to the method of Stravinsky and his followers, who prefer to truncate and foreshorten melodic phrases rather than to expand them. They reiterate and vary, and piece together the mosaic bits so formed, and achieve a sort of development by sheer exploitation of the material, but it would seem that any process of diminution such as this could not be so aesthetically satisfying as one which expands from a germ, constantly generating new life from the old.” We find ourselves on a familiar battleground as Cox deploys the “mosaic” metaphor—a cousin of...

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