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3 - Liberalism, Race, and the American West in Roy Harris’s Symphony 1933

Boston – New York

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 January 2023

Emily MacGregor
Affiliation:
King's College London
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Summary

Chapter 3 shifts the focus to the US East Coast. Roy Harris was one of several young Americans who studied composition in Paris with Nadia Boulanger in the 1920s; Symphony 1933 was his breakthrough work after returning home. Commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky, who anecdotally asked for a ‘big symphony from the West’, Symphony 1933 teases out the relationships between those expansionist discourses associated with the symphony indicated by Paul Bekker (1918), liberal ideology, and the imagined spaces of the American West. Examining the reception of Symphony 1933 and its music, the chapter raises questions about how the discourse around Harris’s symphony and liberalism’s spatial narratives colluded in establishing the political hegemony of white Americans and the supposed naturalness of their right to occupy the West, an acute anxiety given the disenfranchisement of white working-class Americans during the economic collapse of the early 1930s.

Type
Chapter
Information
Interwar Symphonies and the Imagination
Politics, Identity, and the Sound of 1933
, pp. 83 - 113
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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