Roy Ellsworth Harris (February 12, 1898 – October 1, 1979) was an American composer. He wrote music about American subjects, and his most famous work is Symphony No. 3.

Life

Roy Harris was born on February 12, 1898, in Chandler, Oklahoma. His family background included Scottish, Irish, and Welsh heritage. In 1903, his father used money from the sale of their Oklahoma home and his winnings from gambling to buy land near Covina in southern California. The family moved there, and Roy grew up as a farmer in a quiet, remote area. He learned to play the piano with his mother and later the clarinet. Although he studied at the University of California, Berkeley, he mostly taught himself how to compose music. In the early 1920s, he took lessons from Arthur Bliss and Arthur Farwell, both respected musicians. Later, he sold his farmland and worked as a truck driver and delivery person for a dairy farm. Over time, he connected with other young composers in the East. With help from Aaron Copland, he spent 1926–1929 in Paris, where he studied under the famous teacher Nadia Boulanger. Though he did not agree with her musical style, he began studying Renaissance music and wrote his first major work: the Concerto for Piano, Clarinet, and String Quartet.

After suffering a serious back injury, Harris returned to the United States for treatment. He formed relationships with Howard Hanson at the Eastman School of Music and with Serge Koussevitsky of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. These connections helped his large-scale compositions be performed. In 1934, his Symphony '1933' became the first American symphony to be recorded commercially after its first performance by Koussevitsky. His music was also part of the art competition at the 1936 Summer Olympics.

His Symphony No. 3, first performed by Koussevitsky in 1939, became his most famous work and made him well-known across the country.

During the 1930s, Harris taught at Mills College, Westminster Choir College (1934–1938), and the Juilliard School of Music. He later held teaching positions and residencies at many American colleges and universities. His final roles were at UCLA and California State University, Los Angeles. His students included notable musicians such as William Schuman, H. Owen Reed, John Donald Robb, Robert Turner, Lorne Betts, George Lynn, John Verrall, Florence Price, Regina Hansen Willman, Peter Schickele, and Rudi Martinus van Dijk. He received many prestigious awards and was named Honorary Composer Laureate of the State of California.

In 1936, Harris married pianist Johana Harris (née Duffey), who was 14 years younger. She had a successful career as a pianist, performed with major orchestras, and taught at Juilliard. Before marriage, her name was Beula Duffey, but she changed it to Johana in honor of J.S. Bach. The couple had five children: Patricia, Shaun, Daniel, Maureen, and Lane. Their two sons performed with The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, a 1960s rock group. Roy Harris arranged strings for Shaun’s solo album in 1973.

The Canadian Encyclopedia noted that Roy and Johana Harris worked together closely, much like the famous composer couple Robert and Clara Schumann. They organized concerts, judged festivals, and founded the International String Congress in 1959. They promoted American folk songs by including them in their performances and radio broadcasts.

Harris was one of the founders of the Music Academy of the West summer conservatory in 1947.

Character, reputation, and style characteristics

Harris supported many causes throughout his life. He created the International String Congress to address concerns about a lack of string musicians in the United States. He also helped start the American Composers Alliance. In 1958, the U.S. State Department sent Harris and other composers, such as Peter Mennin and Roger Sessions, to the Soviet Union as cultural ambassadors. He was impressed by the support the Soviet government gave to composers. Harris organized many conferences and festivals for contemporary music. He also frequently worked as a radio broadcaster. His final symphony, written for the American Bicentennial in 1976, received negative reviews during its first performance. This may have been because the symphony included themes about slavery and the Civil War, which contrasted with the celebratory mood of the country at the time.

Harris’s music from the 1930s and 1940s showed strong American patriotism, which influenced his use of folk music and, to a lesser extent, jazz rhythms. However, he was also deeply interested in European musical forms, especially the fugue (heard in his Third Symphony) and the passacaglia (featured in his Seventh Symphony). His style often included long, expressive musical lines and harmonies inspired by Renaissance polyphony. He also used antiphonal effects, which he performed skillfully with large orchestras. Like many American composers of his time, Harris admired the symphonic works of Jean Sibelius. In his best compositions, the music develops naturally from the opening notes, as if a small seed grows into a full tree. This is true of the Third Symphony, which became part of the American repertoire around the same time as works by Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson. The first edition of Kent Kennan’s The Technique of Orchestration (1952) included three examples from this symphony to demonstrate good orchestral writing for cello, timpani, and vibraphone. No other Harris symphonies were included in the book. Few American symphonies have achieved the same level of recognition in standard performances as the Third Symphony, largely due to Leonard Bernstein’s support for the piece, which he recorded twice.

Although Harris’s symphonies are his most famous contributions to American music, he composed over 170 works, including many for amateur musicians. His compositions covered a wide range of settings, such as band, orchestra, voice, chorus, and chamber ensembles.

Works

Harris composed at least 18 symphonies, although not all have numbers or are meant for an orchestra. A complete list is as follows:

• Symphony – Our Heritage (1925 rev. 1926, abandoned), sometimes called Symphony No. 1 for orchestra – only the Andante movement survives
• Symphony – American Portrait (1928–29) for orchestra
• Symphony 1933 (1933), sometimes called Symphony No. 1 for orchestra
• Symphony No. 2 (1934) for orchestra
• Symphony for Voices (1935) after Walt Whitman for unaccompanied SATB chorus
• Symphony No. 3 (1937–38, rev. 1939) for orchestra
• Folksong Symphony (Symphony No. 4) (1939 rev. 1942) for chorus and orchestra
• Symphony No. 5 (1940–42 rev. 1945) for orchestra – dedicated "to the heroic and freedom-loving people of our great ally, the Union of Soviet Republics"
• Symphony No. 6 'Gettysburg Address' after Lincoln (1943–44) for orchestra
• Symphony for Band 'West Point' (1952) for US military band
• Symphony No. 7 (1951–52, rev. 1955) for orchestra
• Symphony No. 8 'San Francisco' (1961–62) for orchestra with concertante piano
• Symphony No. 9 (1962) for Philadelphia for orchestra
• Symphony No. 10 'Abraham Lincoln' (1965) for speaker, chorus, brass, 2 pianos, and percussion; revised version for speaker, chorus, piano, and orchestra (1967; long thought missing, some string and woodwind parts found mis-filed in the library of the Youngstown Symphony, which premiered the orchestral version. Those parts donated to the Library of Congress.)
• Symphony No. 11 (1967) for New York PO 125th for orchestra
• Symphony No. 12 'Père Marquette' (1967–69) for tenor solo, speaker, and orchestra
• Bicentennial Symphony 1776 (1969–74), numbered by Harris as Symphony No. 14 out of superstition over the number 13 but posthumously re-numbered as No. 13 by Dan Stehman with the permission of the composer's widow for six-part chorus and orchestra with solo voices and speakers

In addition, there is a missing (and perhaps not completed) Symphony for High School Orchestra (1937) and the following unfinished or fragmentary works:

• American Symphony (1938) for jazz band
• Choral Symphony (1936) for chorus and orchestra
• Walt Whitman Symphony (1955–58) for baritone solo, chorus, and orchestra

In 2006, Naxos Records launched a project to record the 13 numbered symphonies, primarily with conductor Marin Alsop. As of June 2018, they had released recordings of the Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Ninth Symphonies. The recordings of the Seventh and Ninth Symphonies are by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine under Theodore Kuchar. Symphony 1933 was recorded in 1987 by the Louisville Orchestra under the baton of Jorge Mester for their First Edition Recordings series. The same orchestra has also recorded and released his Fifth Symphony 22 years prior. The Albany Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of David Alan Miller, released their recording of Harris's Symphony No. 2 (paired with Morton Gould's Third Symphony) in 2002. Harris's Eighth and Ninth Symphonies can be found on Albany Symphony Orchestra's 1999 recording titled, "The Great American Ninth."

• Sonata Op. 1 (1928) Prelude, Andante, Scherzo, Coda
• Little Suite for Piano (1938) Bells, Sad News, Children at Play, Slumber
• Suite for Piano (1944)
• American Ballads (1946)
• Toccata (1949), based on the withdrawn Toccata from 1939

• Andante for orchestra (1925 rev. 1926) [only completed movement of Symphony 'Our Heritage']
• Epilogue to Profiles in Courage – JFK (1964)
• Fantasy for piano and orchestra (1954)
• Concerto for String Quartet, Piano, and Clarinet (1926, rev. 1927–8)
• Piano Quintet (1936)
• String Quartet No. 3 (Four Preludes and Fugues) (1937)
• Violin Concerto (1949)
• When Johnny Comes Marching Home – An American Overture (1934)
• American Portraits for orchestra (1929)
• American Creed for orchestra (1940)
• What So Proudly We Hail – ballet (1942)
• Kentucky Spring for orchestra (1949)
• Cumberland Concerto for orchestra (1951)
• Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight – chamber cantata (1953) based on a poem of the same title by Vachel Lindsay
• Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun – cantata for baritone and orchestra (1959)
• Canticle to the Sun – cantata for soprano and chamber orchestra (1961)
• Western Landscape – ballet (1940)
• Evening Piece for orchestra (1940)
• Folk Fantasy for Festivals for piano and choir (1956)