Another aspect of our musical nationalism is just that _evocative_ tendency. It makes reference to a quasi-literary type in the theater, in texts of songs and other vocal works, or to “programs” in symphonic poems. Many Americans have made use of such reference in a self-conscious manner. However, the term is used here also to refer to an effort to achieve a musical vocabulary or “style” apt, in some manner, to evoke this or that aspect of American landscape or character. Howard Hanson, for instance, in his postromantic and somewhat conventional music, has tried to establish an evocative relationship with the American past as well as with the Nordic past of his Scandinavian ancestors. More ambitious and possibly more interesting was the effort of Roy Harris to achieve a style that could be called “national” in a less external sense. His point of departure was the evocation of American history or American landscape; but from these beginnings he goes on to technical and aesthetic concepts aimed toward defining the basis of a new American music. It cannot be denied that Harris accomplished some results. For a time during the years just preceding World War II, his music attracted the attention of musicians on both sides of the Atlantic and achieved considerable success. His ideas and concepts, however, must be considered quite by themselves; music and technical concepts belong to different categories: it would be an error to judge either in terms of the other. Harris’s ideas of technique often have little or nothing to do with specifically American motivation, but to a large extent consist of a strange brew composed of anti-European revulsion, personal prejudice, and the projection of this or that problem, or a solution with which he has become acquainted. What is lacking, as in the entire nationalist movement in our music, is awareness of the fact that genuine national character comes from within and must develop and grow of itself, that it cannot be imposed from without, and that, in the last analysis, it is a by-product, not an aim, of artistic expression.