For Everybody Except Composers

Lean, sandy Roy Harris is a composer; he also has to eat. One spring day, he recalls, "it suddenly occurred to me that I was living in a ... civilization where cops and janitors and everyone else got paid for being what they were--everybody except composers ... So I decided never to write again except for a fixed sum of money agreed upon in advance." His policy has brought him a better living in the last 15 years than most U.S. composers outside of Hollywood.

Three months ago, when the prelates of Manhattan's St. Patrick's Cathedral read his statement in the New York Times, they decided that Composer Harris, who describes himself as "a shouting Methodist," had shouted a bit too loudly. St. Pat's had planned to perform Harris' new Mass for Men's Voices and Organ on Easter Sunday. The plans were dropped.

Off went a letter to Colorado, addressed to the Times correspondent who wrote the story. Wrote the Rev. William T. Greene, moderator of St. Pat's choir: "You may be interested in knowing that at no time in the future will the Mass of Roy Harris be performed in St. Patrick's." Added Father Greene: the implication that the Mass was written for cash was "not only untrue, but most distasteful."

Last week, Composer Harris' Mass was finally performed--but not at St. Pat's. Music lovers trekked uptown to Columbia University's St. Paul's Chapel to hear the Princeton Chapel Choir sing it. Composer Harris had cluttered up the program with his usual pious phrases about American music ("All the materials have been extracted from prototypes of American folk songs"). Some of the new Mass sounded more like monkish Plainsong. But there was plenty of power, freshness and vigor, and surprisingly little of Harris' usual repetitiousness.

In his rambling, two-story Colorado Springs house, whose living-room windows frame Pikes Peak, Composer Harris, now 50, was having an unusual silent streak. Even for him, the country's most prolific symphonist, and one of the most frequently heard, a first performance in St. Patrick's would have been something to boast about. Said he stubbornly: "The Mass [is] for the Catholic people of the United States."

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