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Roy Ellsworth Harris (February 12, 1898 in Chandler, Oklahoma, United States - October 1, 1979), was an American classical composer. Events 1429 - English Forces under Sir John Fastolf defend a supply convoy carrying rations to the army besieging Orleans from attack by the Year 1898 ( MDCCCXCVIII) was a Common year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian calendar (or a Common Chandler is a city in Lincoln County, Oklahoma, United States. Oklahoma ( is a state located in the South Central region of the United States of America. The United States of America —commonly referred to as the Events 331 BC - Alexander the Great defeats Darius III of Persia in the Battle of Gaugamela. Year 1979 ( MCMLXXIX) was a Common year starting on Monday (link displays the 1979 Gregorian calendar) The United States of America —commonly referred to as the A composer (literally meaning 'one who puts together' is a person who creates Music, usually in the medium of notation, for Interpretation and Performance He wrote much music on American subjects, becoming best known for his Symphony No. 3. Roy Harris wrote his Symphony No 3 in 1939 on a commission from Hans Kindler but gave it to Serge Koussevitzky instead (Stehman 1984

Contents

Life

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). Oklahoma ( is a state located in the South Central region of the United States of America. Abraham Lincoln (February 12 1809 &ndash April 15 1865 the sixteenth President of the United States, successfully led his country through its greatest internal A gambling win enabled his father to buy a small holding in California, where the boy grew up a farmer, in the rural isolation of the San Gabriel Valley. California ( is a US state on the West Coast of the United States, along the Pacific Ocean. The San Gabriel Valley is one of the principal valleys of southern California. 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. The University of California Berkeley (also referred to as Cal, Berkeley and UC Berkeley) is a major research university located in Berkeley Sir Arthur Edward Drummond Bliss, CH, KCVO ( 2 August 1891 - 27 March 1975) was a British composer Santa Barbara is a city in Santa Barbara County California, United States. Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples from the regions of North America now encompassed by the continental United States Arthur Farwell ( 23 March 1872 - 20 January 1952) was an American composer conductor educationalist lithographer esoteric savant and 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. Aaron Copland (November 14 1900 &ndash December 2 1990 was an American Composer of concert and film music as well as an accomplished Pianist. Nadia Boulanger (September 16 1887 &ndash October 22 1979 was an influential French Composer, conductor, and Music professor 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. Neoclassicism in music was a 20th century development particularly popular in the period between the two World Wars in which composers drew inspiration from music of the 18th century Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (Игорь Фёдорович Стравинский) ( &ndash 6 April 1971 was a Russian born Composer, considered by many to The Renaissance (from French Renaissance, meaning "rebirth" Italian: Rinascimento, from re- "again" and nascere Frederick Albert Theodore Delius CH (29 January 1862 &ndash 10 June 1934 was an English Composer born in Bradford in the West Riding of Yorkshire

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. Howard Harold Hanson ( October 28, 1896 &ndash February 26, 1981) was an American Composer, conductor, educator The Eastman School of Music (also known more simply as The Eastman School, Eastman, or ESM) is a music conservatory located in the Rochester is a city in Monroe County, New York State, south of Lake Ontario in the United States. WikipediaWikiProject Classical music#Biographical_infoboxes -->Dr The Boston Symphony Orchestra is an American orchestra based at Symphony Hall in Boston Massachusetts, USA 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. Mills College is an independent liberal arts women's college founded in 1852 that offers Darius Milhaud (darjys mijo (September 4 1892 &ndash June 22 1974 was a French Composer and teacher The Juilliard School, located in New York City, is a world renowned Performing arts conservatory. The University of California Los Angeles (generally known as UCLA) is a public research university located in Westwood Los Angeles, California, United Among his pupils were William Schuman, H. Owen Reed, and Peter Schickele (best known as the creator of P. D. Q. Bach). William Howard Schuman ( August 4, 1910 – February 15, 1992) was an American Herbert Owen Reed (born June 17, 1910) is an American Composer, conductor, and Author. Johann Peter Schickele (born July 17 1935) is an American Composer, musical educator and parodist, best known for his comedy music P D Q Bach is a fictional composer invented by musical satirist "Professor" Peter Schickele. 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). The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band was an American Psychedelic rock band of the late 1960s based in Los Angeles, California Psychedelic rock is a style of Rock music that attempts to replicate the mind-altering experiences of hallucinogenic drugs.

Character, reputation and style characteristics

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. The American Composers Alliance is an American membership organization dedicated to the publishing and promoting of American Contemporary classical music. He made several trips to the Soviet Union; his admiration for that country attracted adverse criticism during the McCarthy era. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR was a constitutionally Socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991 Harris was indeed in US terms a liberal on many social issues, and pugnaciously opposed to anti-semitism and racial discrimination. 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. The United States Bicentennial was celebrated on Sunday July 4, 1976, the 200th Anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence As a social-economic system slavery is a legal institution under which a Person (called "a slave" is compelled to work for another Causes of the war See also Origins of the American Civil War, Timeline of events leading to the American Civil War The coexistence of a slave-owning South 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.

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). Jazz is an American Musical art form which originated in the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States In Music, a fugue (ˈfjuːg is a type of contrapuntal composition or technique of composition for a fixed number of parts, normally referred A passacaglia is a short usually slow and often grave musical work in any metre 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). 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. Aaron Copland (November 14 1900 &ndash December 2 1990 was an American Composer of concert and film music as well as an accomplished Pianist. For the American author with a similar name see Virgil Thompson (author Virgil Thomson ( November 25, 1896 - September 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. WikipediaWikiProject Composers#Lead section --> WikipediaWikiProject Classical music#Biographical_infoboxes

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). 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".

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.

The Symphonies

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. Naxos Records is a Record label for classical music Compact discs and DVDs Founded in 1987 by Klaus Heymann, a Marin Alsop (born October 16 1956) is an American conductor and the current music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra

Other notable works

These include:

References

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