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For more information on Roy Harris, visit Britannica.com.
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(b Lincoln County, ok, 12 Feb 1898; d Santa Monica, 1 Oct 1979). American composer. He studied with Farwell in Los Angeles and, after successful performances of his orchestral Andante (1926), with Boulanger in Paris. From the first his music was identified as distinctively American in its ruggedness, its expansiveness and its hymn-like modal melody: his early symphonies, particularly the Third (1937), were widely acclaimed and imitated, and he came to write much on patriotic themes. His large output consists mostly of orchestral and choral music, two of his 14 symphonies being choral; among the best are Kentucky Spring (1949) and Memories of a Child's Sunday (1945). He taught at various institutions in the USA, notably UCLA (1961-71) and California State University, Los Angeles (1971-6).
| Biography: Roy Harris |
American composer Roy Harris (1898-1979) was a leading figure of the "American" movement in music in the 1930s and 1940s; he composed over 200 works.
Roy Harris was born on Feb. 12, 1898, in Lincoln County, Oklahoma. He migrated to California with his parents while still a boy. After military service in World War I, he began serious musical study at the University of California at Berkeley. His mentor was composer Arthur Farwell, who introduced him to the poetry of Walt Whitman and encouraged him to develop a distinctive style. He also studied with Charles Demarest, Fannie Dillon, Henry Schoenfeld, and Modest Altschuler.
Harris's first orchestral composition, Andante, was performed by the New York Philharmonic in 1926. With the encouragement of Aaron Copland, Harris then spent three years working with composer/pianist Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Under her tutelage, he wrote a Concerto for piano, clarinet, and string quartet which established him in Paris as one of the premier young American composers. His return to the United States was followed during the 1930s by a rapid rise to prominence, with numerous performances, recordings of most of his major works, and many commissions. One of his best known works, The Third Symphony dates from this period.
Harris's name and music has been associated with a visionary view of the United States and is linked with poets Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg. He composed music for ballet, orchestra (including 16 symphonies), chamber ensembles, and one film. Some of his explicitly American themes are suggested by such titles as What So Proudly WeHail, Gettysburg Address, The Abraham Lincoln Symphony, Kentucky Spring, Epilogue to Profiles in Courage: JFK, and the well-known overture, When Johnny Comes Marching Home.
Harris's highly original style reveals constant development and cultivation, most characteristically expressed in his Symphony No. 3 (1938). His most frequently performed work, this symphony is classical in attitude, tonally organic, and intensely dramatic. Melodies spin out in long, free lines, evolving gradually into direct and affirmative motifs. The symphony has a sense of open spaces and harmonies, rugged rhythmic inventiveness, modal character, and hymnlike sections. It displays qualities considered American that are characteristic of many of his compositions.
Harris was associated with a number of academic institutions as a teacher of composition, as composer-in-residence, and as recipient of creative grants. During World War II he was chief of the Music Division of the Office of War Information. In 1958 he visited the Soviet Union as a cultural representative, becoming the first American to conduct his own symphony with a Soviet orchestra. His academic posts were at Westminster Choir School, Cornell University, Colorado College, Utah State Agricultural College, Peabody College for Teachers, Pennsylvania College for Women, University of Southern Illinois, Indiana University, the Inter-American University in Puerto Rico, the University of California at Los Angeles, and, as composer-in-residence, California State University, Los Angeles. Among his many honors was the title, Composer Laureate of the State of California.
Roy Harris died in 1979, in Santa Monica, California. The Roy Harris Archive is housed at the Kennedy Memorial Library, California State University, Los Angeles.
Further Reading
Biographical details, Harris's own remarks, and stylistic observations are in David Ewen, The New Book of Modern Composers (1942; 3rd ed. 1961); Major works are discussed in Ewen's The World of Twentieth-Century Music (1968); for an evaluation see Wilfrid Mellers, Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Developments in the History of American Music (1965); For recent works, see Dan Stehman's Roy Harris: An American Musical Pioneer (1984); and Roy Harris: A Bio-Bibliography (1991).
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Roy Harris |
| Artist: Roy Harris |

| Wikipedia: Roy Harris |
Roy Ellsworth Harris (February 12, 1898 in Chandler, Oklahoma, United States - October 1, 1979), was an American classical composer. He wrote much music on American subjects, becoming best known for his Symphony No. 3.
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He was born of mixed Scots, Irish and Welsh ancestry, in circumstances he sometimes liked to contrast with those of the more privileged East-coast composers: to poor parents, in a log cabin in Oklahoma, on Abraham Lincoln's birthday, one of five children (three of whom died early). A gambling win enabled his father to buy a small holding in California,[citation needed] where the boy grew up a farmer, in the rural isolation of the San Gabriel Valley. He studied piano with his mother, and later clarinet. Though he studied at the University of California, Berkeley, he was still virtually self-taught when he began writing music of his own, but in the early 1920s he had lessons from Arthur Bliss (then in Santa Barbara) and the senior American composer and researcher of American Indian (then called "Red Indian") music, Arthur Farwell. Harris sold his farmland and supported himself as a truck-driver and delivery man for a dairy firm. Gradually he made contacts in the East with other young composers, and partly through Aaron Copland's recommendation he was able to spend 1926-29 in Paris, as one of the many young Americans who received their final musical grooming in the masterclasses of Nadia Boulanger. Harris had no time for Boulanger's neoclassical, Stravinsky-derived aesthetic, but under her tutelage he began his lifelong study of Renaissance music, and wrote his first significant works: the concerto for piano, clarinet and string quartet drew praise from the seldom-impressible Frederick Delius.[citation needed]
After suffering a serious back injury, he was obliged to return for treatment to the United States, where Harris formed associations with Howard Hanson at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester and, more importantly, with Serge Koussevitsky at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. These associations secured performance outlets for the large-scale works he was writing. In 1934, a week after its première under Koussevitsky, his Symphony ‘1933’ became the first American symphony to be commercially recorded. It was his Symphony No.3, however, premièred by Koussevitsky in 1939, which proved to be the composer's biggest breakthrough and made him practically a household name.
During the 1930s Harris taught at Mills College—where Darius Milhaud would later teach—Westminster Choir College (1934-1938) and the Juilliard School of Music; he spent most of the rest of his professional career restlessly moving through teaching posts and residences at colleges and universities in various parts of the USA, ending with a long stint in California, first at UCLA and finally at California State University, Los Angeles. Among his pupils were William Schuman, H. Owen Reed, John Donald Robb, John Verrall, and Peter Schickele (best known as the creator of P. D. Q. Bach). He received many of America's most prestigious cultural awards, and at the end of his life was proclaimed Honorary Composer Laureate of the State of California.
Harris's sons Shaun and Dan performed with The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, a Los Angeles-based psychedelic rock band of the late 1960s (although Roy Harris did not approve of rock music).[citation needed]
Harris was a champion of many causes (he founded the International String Congress to combat what was perceived as a shortage of string players in the U.S., and co-founded the American Composers Alliance), a tireless organizer of conferences and contemporary music festivals, and a frequent radio broadcaster. He made several trips to the Soviet Union; his admiration for that country attracted adverse criticism during the McCarthy era.[citation needed] Harris was indeed in US terms a liberal on many social issues, and pugnaciously opposed to anti-semitism and racial discrimination.[citation needed] His last symphony, a commission for the American Bicentennial in 1976, was mauled by the critics at its first performance as a 'travesty of music' by a composer who had written himself out: but this may partly have been because it addressed the themes of slavery and the Civil War, and contradicted the required mood of national self-congratulation.[citation needed] In his last years Harris was increasingly depressed by the effects of the US's rampant materialism, discrimination against minorities and destruction of natural resources.[citation needed]
Although the rugged American patriotism of his works of the 1930s and 1940s is reflected in his research into and use of folk-music (and to a lesser extent of jazz rhythms), Harris was paradoxically obsessed with the great European pre-classical forms, especially the monolithic ones of fugue (which we hear in the Third Symphony) and passacaglia (as featured in the next most admired, the Seventh). His customary mode of discourse, with long singing lines and resonant modal harmonies, is ultimately based on his admiration for and development of Renaissance polyphony—and also antiphonal effects, which he exploits brilliantly with a large orchestra. Like many American composers of his time, he was deeply impressed by the symphonic achievement of Sibelius (who also drew on Renaissance polyphonic techniques).[citation needed] In Harris's best works the music grows organically from the opening bars, as if a tiny seed gives birth to an entire tree; and this is certainly the case with the Third Symphony, which joined the American repertoire during the same era as works by Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson. The first edition of Kent Kennan's The Technique of Orchestration (1952) quotes three passages from this symphony to illustrate good orchestral writing for cello, timpani, and vibraphone, respectively. The book quotes no other Harris symphonies. Few other American symphonies have acquired such a firmly-entrenched position in the standard performance repertory as has this one, due much to the championship of the piece by Leonard Bernstein, as well as to his several recordings of it.
His music, while often abstract, has a reputation for its optimistic, American tone. Musicologist John Canarina describes the "Harris style" as "exuberant horn passages and timpani ostinatos" (Canarina 1995[citation needed]). Harris so frequently composed prismatically modulating chords that a valid one-word description of his orchestral music would be chromatic. He also liked to write bell-like passages for tuned percussion. This is readily apparent not only in the famous Third Symphony but also in the Sixth "Gettysburg".[citation needed]
In all, Harris composed over 170 works, including many works for amateurs, but the backbone of his output was his series of symphonies. Harris wrote no opera, but otherwise covered all the main genres of orchestral, vocal, choral, chamber and instrumental music as well as writing a significant number of works for band. His series of symphonies is still his most significant contribution to American music.
Harris composed at least 18 symphonies, though not all of them are numbered and not all are for orchestra. A full list is as follows:
In addition there is a missing (and perhaps not completed) Symphony for High School Orchestra (1937) and the following unfinished or fragmentary works:
Naxos Records is in process of recording the 13 numbered symphonies with conductor Marin Alsop.[citation needed]
These include:
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