But, at the same time he was enlarging and refining his technical resources, Harris also was coming to rely increasingly on the reworking of gestures and materials he had explored in previous works. This practice, which originated during the early30s, was to become one of the most noticeable (in some instances, most obtrusive) features of his compositional practice and sometimes led in later years to assertions by critics that he did little but repeat himself.
The third period, occupying the decades of the 1950s and 60s, reveals Harris's idiom at its most opulent, with rich, polychordal textures and large instrumentations in some of the orchestral and band works, the former often featuring complex string divisi generated by the polychordal style. During the 1960s, he enriched this idiom further, while at the same time aerating his textures, through an increasing use of chords in multiple open fifths. He also (beginning in the 1950s) moved toward a more sophisticated, even abstract, handling of folk materials, devising complex polyphonic fabrics with motives derived from the borrowed tunes, employing a wider variety of harmonic support, and creating a greater expressive depth and a broader and more potent emotional resonance (the Folk Fantasy for Festivals is the most impressive representative of this trend). Works representative of this period in addition to the Folk Fantasy are the Symphonies Nos. 7 and 8, the Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra, and the three solo-voice cantatas: Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight, Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun, Canticle of the Sun. The 1960s especially marked the emergence of a degree of personal introspection that had not been strongly evident earlier, a notable feature of Symphonies Nos. 9 and 11, the Sonata for Violoncello and Piano, and Childhood Memories of Ocean Moods).
Harris's final period, which occupied the first half of the decade of the 1970s, is marked by a simplification of textures and a conscious implementation of an amalgamation of the instrumentation of the symphony orchestra and the concert band that he had envisioned as far back as the 1940s. It was also during these last years of his creative life that his art becomes increasingly politicized, the texts of the large works for chorus and orchestra and chorus and band revealing an increasingly vigorous, sometimes sardonic, expression of concern over what he perceived as the deterioration of American society, particularly as demonstrated in the exploitation of the underprivileged by the moneyed stratum. Representative works are Whether this Nation; the Bicentennial Symphony 1976; and Cantata to life.
