Harris No. 8

Modern music, according to Composer Roy Harris, has "gotten off the track: it went for dissonance, and that's a dull palette; but America is going to come out of that." To help speed the escape, Composer Harris. 63. has produced vast quantities of music in the folksy, melodic style that put his name on the U.S. musical map 30 years ago. Last week, still waging the good fight for consonance, Harris heard his eighth symphony given its premiere by the San Francisco Symphony. It proved to be as strong a score as Harris fans have heard in years.

Written on commission from the San Francisco Symphony, which is celebrating its 50th season. Composer Harris' new work is titled San Francisco Symphony. But it is actually intended as a musical evocation of the life of St. Francis of Assisi. Harris began work, he says, when he was flying across the country at 33,000 ft.--hence the music's "quality of aspiration." Often rising at 3 a.m. and working through until midnight, Harris finished his 22-minute symphony in one month. As played last week, it had all the ardor, the sinewy strength, the luminosity and clarity of theme of Harris' best works. Among the more unusual touches: an amplified piano, played by Harris' wife Johana, that at times seemed to envelop the entire orchestra.

The San Francisco Symphony, which started 50 years ago as a part-time job for bawdyhouse musicians, has a special appeal for Composer Harris: he got his first real acquaintance with symphonic music while working as an usher for the orchestra, soon decided to become a composer. Now, several hundred compositions later, Harris is a guest lecturer at U.C.L.A., but he is a resident of Puerto Rico, where he teaches at the Inter-American University and composes more furiously than ever. He was not even slowed down by a bad auto accident several years ago in which his right knee was smashed into 20 pieces: he went right on working in the hospital, turning out his massive, 55-minute Folk Fantasy for Festivals. Now recovered (doctors had predicted he would never walk again), he works on several compositions at the same time, often taking his inspiration from famous historical figures.

Although he thinks "some very good twelve-tone music has been written," he deplores the "sycophants" who insist on it. Some of his other opinions are equally unfashionable: there is no reason, says Harris, why symphonic music should not try to express specific, literal themes. Now that he has finally put St. Francis on paper, he plans to finish a symphony on Walt Whitman and an oratorio on the life of Christ.

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