The individual who truly served as the catalyst in Harris's career, however, was Arthur Farwell. He studied with Farwell only briefly, during 1924-25, although the two remained in touch for many years afterward. Although the extent of his studies has not been well documented, it is known that Farwell encouraged Harris to explore the aesthetics and elements of music from a fresh viewpoint and was, in turn, evidently excited by his student's investigations into the rudiments of what would later become his mature harmonic idiom. Farwell also introduced Harris to the poetry of Walt Whitman, of whose words he was subsequently to make numerous settings.
Having sold his farmland, Harris supported himself and his family during this period by delivering butter and eggs for a local dairy on a route that took him from the San Gabriel Valley to the coast near Venice. It was from both his early experiences on the farm and this job that he acquired the habit of rising early, undertaking, until the last several years of his life, much of his composing in the morning.
Farwell appears to have played a role in securing for Harris his first professional jobs in music, writing criticism for the Los Angeles Illustrated Daily News and teaching advanced harmony at the Hollywood Conservatory of Music and Arts (1924-25). (It is likely, although I cannot verify this, that these were parttime activities that supplemented his income from the dairy.) It was through his teacher's offices, too, that the fledgling composer received his first documented performance with a local reading of a Fantasy for Chorus and Trio by the Pasadena Community Chorus, which Farwell directed.
Farwell evidently sent his pupil to composer-conductor Modeste Altschuler for work on orchestration. Although finding himself at odds with Altschuler's Germanic approach, Harris nonetheless completed for him the slow movement of what was to have been a symphony (Farwell may also have had a hand in overseeing this), and Altschuler's approval of the result led to the score's being submitted to Howard Hanson, who gave the piece, under the title Andante, at the Eastman School of Music's 1926 American Composers' Concerts. Harris had made an unsuccessful trip to New York the previous year (he also alluded in a 1968 interview to what appears to have been a 1923 trip, for which no documentation has come to light), but, spurred by the opportunity to hear his first completed orchestral essay, he returned for the Eastman premiere, as well as a subsequent performance in Lewisohn Stadium by Willem van Hoogstraten and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra..
