Roy Harris: A Well-Known American Composer

Roy Harris (1898–1979) is a well-known American composer who used the American subjects to his works. Roy Harris who was born in Oklahoma, on Abraham Lincoln 's birthday studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and had lesson with Arthur Bliss, Arthur Farwell. Furthermore, he studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris because of Aaron Copland’s recommendation during 1926-29. After returned to U.S, Roy Harris began to compose large scale works, and taught at American colleges and universities like Westminster Choir College, the Juilliard School of Music, UCLA, and California State University, Los Angeles. Although he contributed to American music with symphonic genre, he composed almost one hundred seventy works with various genres such

Furthermore, in general, Roy Harris was delved into him and his works by American scholars. Unlike foreign composers, it was easy to search information in English since he is an American composer. In this process of research, the primary sources of bibliographies are several scholar’s books, journal articles, and dissertations. In addition, it was categorized with several keywords: biography, symphonies, band music, keyboard music, vocal music, chamber music, choral music, and theory.

First of all, his biographies are the most searched section of this project, included fifty-two bibliographies regarding subject. It comprises biography books, chapters of book, and articles about him. Mostly his biographies offer from chapter of book with other American composers or twentieth century composers, and numerous articles from American

Levy, Dan Stehman, David Ewen, Malcolm D. Robertson, Nicolas Slonimsky, Paul Rosenfeld, and Robert Murrell Stevenson. They wrote about biographies or his works particularly symphonies and other. In addition, the chronological order of research about Roy Harris is since 1932 when Roy Harris focused on composing large scale works like symphonies. After 1932, scholars continue to research and write regarding him until now so the most recent research is in 2015. Moreover, most of bibliographies are published with various journals, university presses like Oxford University Press, University of California Press, California State University, and publishers such as Lippincott, Dutton and