Roy Harris

Roy Harris (1898–1979) is an American classical composer from Chandler, Oklahoma, United States. He is best known for his Symphony No. 3, which becomes his major breakthrough and establishes him as a significant figure in 20th-century American music.

Early life and training

Harris is born in a log cabin to poor parents and grows up in rural isolation in California after his father uses a gambling win to buy a small holding there. He has mixed Scots, Irish and Welsh ancestry. He studies piano with his mother and later clarinet. Although he studies at the University of California, Berkeley, he is still largely self-taught when he begins composing. In the early 1920s he takes lessons from Arthur Bliss and Arthur Farwell.

He works as a truck-driver and delivery man for a dairy firm while supporting himself, and he later sells his farmland. Through contacts in the East and with Aaron Copland’s recommendation, he spends 1926 to 1929 in Paris, studying with Nadia Boulanger. He rejects her neoclassical approach, but under her guidance he begins a lifelong study of Renaissance music. His early significant works include a concerto for piano, clarinet and string quartet, which draws praise from Frederick Delius.

Career and teaching

After a serious back injury, Harris returns to the United States and forms professional links with Howard Hanson at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester and with Serge Koussevitzky at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. These connections help secure performances of his large-scale works. His Symphony ‘1933’ is commercially recorded in 1934, soon after its première under Koussevitzky, and is the first American symphony to receive a commercial recording.

Harris teaches at Mills College, Westminster Choir College from 1934 to 1938, and the Juilliard School of Music. He later holds posts at several colleges and universities across the United States, including UCLA and California State University, Los Angeles. Among his pupils are William Schuman and Peter Schickele.

Music and style

Harris writes more than 170 works. His output includes symphonies, orchestral music, vocal, choral, chamber and instrumental works, and a substantial number of band pieces. He does not write opera. His symphonies are the central part of his output and remain his most important contribution to American music.

His music often draws on American subjects, folk music and, to a lesser extent, jazz rhythms. It also reflects an interest in large European pre-classical forms, especially fugue and passacaglia. His orchestral style uses long melodic lines, modal harmonies, antiphonal writing, chromatic harmony, bell-like tuned percussion, prominent horn writing and timpani ostinatos. Musicologist John Canarina describes the “Harris style” as having exuberant horn passages and timpani ostinatos.

His Symphony No. 3, premiered by Koussevitzky in 1939, becomes the work that brings him the widest recognition. Other notable works include Symphony ‘1933’ and the Sixth Symphony, “Gettysburg”. His symphonic writing, especially the Third, is singled out in Kent Kennan’s The Technique of Orchestration.

Public life, causes and recognition

Harris is active as an organiser of conferences and contemporary music festivals and is a frequent radio broadcaster. He founds the International String Congress to address a shortage of string players in the United States, and he co-founds the American Composers Alliance. He receives several of the United States’ major cultural awards and is named Honorary Composer Laureate of the State of California near the end of his life.

He travels to the Soviet Union several times, and his admiration for it attracts criticism during the McCarthy era. He is politically liberal on social issues and opposes anti-semitism and racial discrimination. In his final years he is increasingly troubled by materialism, discrimination against minorities and environmental destruction in the United States.

Later works and legacy

His last symphony is commissioned for the American Bicentennial in 1976 and addresses slavery and the Civil War. It is poorly received at its first performance. Leonard Bernstein is a strong supporter of Harris’s music and records the Third Symphony several times, helping to secure its place in the standard repertoire.

Harris’s sons Shaun and Dan perform with The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, a Los Angeles psychedelic rock group of the late 1960s. Harris does not approve of rock music.