Roy Harris
American composer (1898-1979)
Roy Ellsworth Harris (February 12, 1898 – October 1, 1979) was an American composer. He wrote music on American subjects, and is best known for his Symphony No. 3.
Life
Harris was born in Chandler, Oklahoma on February 12, 1898. His ancestry was Scottish, Irish and Welsh. In 1903, his father was able to combine the proceeds of the auction of his Oklahoma homestead with his winnings from a lucky gambling streak to purchase some land near Covina in the San Gabriel Valley of southern California and move the family there. Roy Harris grew up as a farmer in this rural, isolated environment. 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. In the early 1920s, he had lessons from Arthur Bliss (then in Santa Barbara) and the senior American composer and researcher of American Indian music, Arthur Farwell.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Roy Harris” is american composer (1898-1979). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Harris, American and composer, not as a finished interpretation.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q959136. VIAF identifies the subject as 19865546. The Library of Congress control number is n80144669. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1898, 1979 and 1903.
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This entry incorporates text from “Roy Harris” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.