Discipline: Music Composition

Roy Harris

Discipline: Music Composition
MacDowell Fellowships: 1925, 1926
Roy Harris (1898-1979) was an American composer. He wrote music on American subjects, and is best known for his Symphony No. 3. During the 1930s Harris taught at Mills College, 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 American colleges and universities. His final posts were in California, first at UCLA and then at California State University, Los Angeles. 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. In 1958 the U.S. State Department sent him, along with some fellow composers including Peter Mennin and Roger Sessions, to the Soviet Union as a "cultural ambassador"; he was impressed by the support for composers that the Soviet state provided, not aware at the time of how carefully his visit was managed. In Harris's best works the music grows organically from the opening bars, as if a tiny seed gives birth to an entire tree. This is certainly the case with the Symphony No. 3, which joined the American repertoire during the same era as works by Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson.