Influential as a teacher as well as a composer, Roy Harris belongs to the same generation as Aaron Copland and his music shares a similar and readily-identifiable quality of “American-ness”. Harris wrote in all the major genres except opera, and was especially prolific as a choral composer, but the backbone of his output is the series of thirteen symphonies, spanning the greater part of his career from 1933 to 1976. The single movement Symphony No. 7 develops from a moodily expressive opening to a vigorously triumphant conclusion, and the Symphony No. 9, commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra, is among the more expansive of the composer’s later works. The assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 inspired tributes from many composers, and Harris’s elegiac and impassioned threnody Epilogue to Profiles in Courage – JFK (1964) is a fully characteristic and appropriate response.
