Many of Roy Harris’s piano pieces were inspired by his wife, the pianist Johana Harris, and demonstrate his wide-ranging musical influences, from Medieval chant and Baroque counterpoint to 20th-century French composers (he studied with Nadia Boulanger) and American and Irish folk music. His love of polytonal sonorities, spacious virtuosity, rhapsodic improvisational passages and intimate moods—a heady brew of diverse ingredients!—gives his piano music a fascinating quality, as if one were experiencing spontaneously evolving soundscapes teeming with vitality.
