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Roy Harris's Symphonies (Part II)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2016
Extract
The first part of this article outlined Roy Harris's symphonic output up to Symphony No.6 of 1944, the period of his greatest popularity after the phenomenal success of the Third, still often referred to as the greatest American symphony. I now turn to the latter half of Harris's copious, symphonic output, works which – with the similarly meteoric decline in his critical standing after the early 1950s – have (with the exception Symphony No.7) been seldom heard and seldom accorded much critical consideration: a state of affairs which is certainly unjust.
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References
1 The Band Symphony's only commercial recording, by the UCLA Wind Ensemble under James Westbrook (formally available on Bay Cities BCD–1008), is adequate but the performance lacks conviction.
2 It was also used in Sad Song for jazz band, the only completed movement of the American Symphony of 1938.
3 Amazingly this is still the only commercial recording of the Seventh, currently available on an Albany Troy CD.
4 Composer's programme-note for the first performance.
5 Although Harris again attempted to complete a choralorchestral Walt Whitman Symphony, previously attempted in 1936, he only completed one movement which became the cantata Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun.
6 Harris also composed a Concerto for Amplified Piano, Brass, String Basses and Percussion in 1968.
7 The composer's wife Johana, a notable pianist and exponent of his work, played the solo part at the symphony's première.
8 Schoenberg, Harold C, New York Times 31 01 1963 Google Scholar.
9 The Symphonies of Roy Harris, An Analytical Study of the Linear Materials and of Related Works (available from UMI Dissertation Services). Also frequently referred to in Part 1.
10 The passage, however, originates in The Canticle of the Sun.
11 Harris later briefly considered making a new symphony out of the existing Prelude and two other orchestral works from 1964, the eloquent Epilogue to Profiles in Courage —JFK and Horn of Plenty.
12 Dr Stehman's Analysis refers to the Tenth as being commissioned by the Music Educators National Conference; however, in his more recent Roy Harris: A Bio-Bibliography (Greenwood Press, 1991)Google Scholar, he gives the Hammond Organ Co. as the original commissioning body.
13 These works tend to eschew the grandeur and complexity of much of his orchestral and chamber music for a more straightforward and at times moving utterance; among the best of these pieces is the Alleluia of 1945.
14 Composer's note for the première, reprinted by Stehman in 1973.
15 This quartet was also a source of ideas in some earlier symphonies (see Part 1)
16 A number of sources seem to list a further two or three symphonies by Harris completed after the Bicentennial Symphony, but although he may have planned more symphonic works they do not appear to havè been composed.
17 ‘Symphony blasts American black suffering’, University Times, 19 February 1976.