Roy Harris

Roy Ellsworth Harris (February 12, 1898 – October 1, 1979) was an American composer. He wrote music on American subjects, and is best known for his Symphony No. 3. Life Harris was born in Chandler, Oklahoma on February 12, 1898. His ancestry consisted of Scottish, Irish and Welsh. In 1903, his father was able to combine the proceeds of the auction of his Oklahoma homestead with his winnings from a lucky gambling streak to purchase some land near Covina in the San Gabriel Valley of southern California and move the family there. Roy Harris grew up as a farmer in this rural, isolated environment. 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. In the early 1920s, he had lessons from Arthur Bliss (then in Santa Barbara) and the senior American composer and researcher of American Indian music, Arthur Farwell. Harris sold his farmland and supported himself as a truck-driver and delivery man for a dairy farm. 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 work: the Concerto for Piano, Clarinet and String Quartet. After suffering a serious back injury, Harris was obliged to return for treatment to the United States, where he 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 first performance under Koussevitsky, his Symphony '1933''' became the first American symphony to be commercially recorded. His work was also part of the music event in the art competition at the 1936 Summer Olympics. It was his Symphony No. 3, however, first performed by Koussevitsky in 1939, which proved to be the composer's biggest breakthrough and made him practically a household name.