The shorter orchestral compositions and band works belong to the symphonic poem, concert overture, and suite genres. Nearly all have descriptive titles suggesting moods or concepts, but rarely does the composer attach explicit programs. They are uneven in quality, but the finest, such as the orchestral Epilogue to Profiles in Courage-JFK, Kentucky Spring, Memories of a Child's Sunday, Ode to Friendship, the overture When Johnny Comes Marching Home, Chorale for strings, and Cimarron for band contain many felicitous ideas and some skillful craftsmanship and belong among the better works of this type in the literature of twentieth-century American music.
The bulk of Harris's concerted works are for piano (written for Johana), although the violin (Concerto for Violin and Orchestra [1949]), viola (Elegy and Paean), and accordion (Theme and Variations) are represented by substantial entries. While he often used for these essays a single-movement design incorporating variations procedures, there were occasional forays into the standard three-movement format (e.g., the Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra),. While he seemed not always able to exploit fully the virtuoso resources of his solo instruments, Harris nonetheless managed to create in the best of these vehicles, such as the Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra (and its source work, the Concerto No. 2 for Piano and Orchestra) and the Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra, essays of considerable depth, spontaneity, and polish.
Although Harris showed considerable affinity for the piano, something certainly intensified by his exposure to Johana's artistry, he left only a small number of solo works for the instrument Many are folksong arrangements, the published American Ballads being representative examples of his sensitive, evocative, and distinctive interpretation of the idiom. Of the rest, the 1928 Sonata exemplifies the lean textures, angular lines, rhythmic complexity, and boldness and grandeur, as well as the occasional ungainliness, of the composer's early works.
