Harris maintained a guarded relationship with his contemporaries, the special nature (some might say constraints) of his style often making it difficult for him to enter fully into their various idioms and aesthetics. However, he did express particular enthusiasm for Prokofiev (SEE: BH65) and Vaughan Williams (with whom he appeared to feel a special kinship) and appreciation of individual works by Barber (the fourth movement of whose Sonata for Piano he regarded as the finest piano fugue ever written by an American), Elliott Carter, and Virgil Thomson. He had little use for Stravinsky, whose various stylistic developments he likened to the donning and doffing of gloves, or the twelve-tone practitioners (Schonberg included), whose serial manipulations he regarded as contrived and lacking in organic cohesion (in making this judgment, Harris conveniently ignored the fact that he himself had often been guilty of intellectual contrivance, especially in the early works). With Copland, his relationship moved from fairly close comradeship during the 1920s and 30s through friendly rivalry during the 1940s to open hostility from the 1950s on (a feeling that was not shared by Copland). Harris felt that his colleague had attempted, in such works as Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid, and Rodeo, to cash in on the folk idiom and other Americanist elements that he apparently regarded as his birthright and was also scornful of what he perceived to be his former supporter's pragmatic approach to music, which he found lacking in vision.
Harris was firmly committed to the idea of the creative artist reaching out to all levels of the community: in addition to writing many works for high school and community organizations, service bands, and patriotic occasions, he and Johana were deeply involved in broadcasting on radio and television. This activity, which may have been sparked by the numerous series of public lectures the composer had been giving since the 1920s, was launched in the mid30s on the Mutual Broadcasting System with the Let's Make Music series (an outgrowth of the Composers' Forum-Laboratory, of which Harris served as a board member) and continued with various later incarnations of that program as well as numerous other series on a variety of stations in virtually every area in which the couple resided up through the Pittsburgh years. Perhaps the most ambitious of these endeavors was Johana's Master Keys series for station WWSW in Pittsburgh, which was disseminated across the country over stations affiliated with the National Association of Educational Broadcasters and in Europe through the Voice of America. Harris was involved in another aspect of the media when he served as Chief of the Music Section of the Radio Program Bureau of the Overseas Branch of the Office of War Information from 1945-48 (he obtained an indefinite leave of absence from The Colorado College for this, although he continued to participate in Summer activities there). He was in charge of all shortwave radio music programs and of the provision of recordings to O.W.I, outposts, as well as the securing of the necessary musical talent.
