Roy Ellsworth Harris (February 12, 1898 in Chandler, Oklahoma, United States - October 1, 1979), was an American classical composer. He wrote much music on American subjects, becoming best known for his Symphony No. 3.
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 birthda...
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Roy Ellsworth Harris (February 12, 1898 in Chandler, Oklahoma, United States - October 1, 1979), was an American classical composer. He wrote much music on American subjects, becoming best known for his Symphony No. 3.
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). 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. 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...
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