Roy Harris is a child of nature with a child’s love for his native hills and a childlike belief in the moral purpose of music. His music reflects these things faithfully - it owes nothing to city influences, but seems always full-blooded and spiritually pure. Harris, the quintessential ‘pioneer’, was born in Oklahoma on Lincoln’s birthday in 1898 in a log cabin built by his father. In 1933 Copland introduced Harris to Sergei Koussevitzky who invited him to write an ‘a big symphony from the west’. Harris’ musical language is strongly personal, based on modality with polytonal implications. Like the finale of Sibelius’s Second Symphony, for Harris this is a point of arrival after a tortuous and at times agonizing musical journey. Harris himself conducted the work in Moscow on 15 October 1958, becoming the first American composer to conduct his own music in the USSR.