Unwound Spring

When working on a piece of music, says Roy Harris, "the composer must have hold of something that concerns him above all else. It must bug him, must wake him up at 3 in the morning." What bugged Harris as he was writing his Eleventh Symphony was "the restlessness, apprehension, frustration, anger, hate that permeate our world -- the sense that a new era is upon us. It is hard to describe in words."

Unfortunately, it is also hard to describe in music. Harris' symphony, given its world premiere in Manhattan last week by the New York Philharmonic, has many qualities that have made Harris, at 70, an important American composer: logical structure, transparent textures and a broad melodic sense. Yet in the performance of the somewhat underrehearsed Philharmonic--under Harris' unpracticed baton--the mainspring that should have wound the work into a powerful coil of tension remained slack. Only the opening section of the 20-minute piece, with its urgent string passages set off against barking brass, was fully effective. In the second section, an elegiac fugue turned slowly on itself, then began to meander.

Harris intended the final section to "get brighter, and end with optimism for the Great Society which we hope to get." Over crashing percussion, the music mounted in overlapping panels of winds and strings. But it all seemed pumped up; and the amplified piano vibrations that ended the work were like the rasp of escaping air as the climax, the theme of hope, and the listener's expectations all deflated at once.

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