On both his 1925 and 1926 New York sojourns, Harris stayed part of the time at the MacDowell Colony, where he met Aaron Copland (his initial stay at the Colony may have been sparked and facilitated by possible contact with Mrs. Edward MacDowell during her Los Angeles visit in Iate24). Following the Lewisohn Stadium performance of the Andante, he was invited to a party at the home of Alma Wertheim, of the Morgenthau family. Mrs. Wertheim offered the young man financial assistance to study abroad, a windfall Harris agreed to accept only with the understanding that he would repay her if he did not feel he had achieved to his expectations. Aaron Copland recommended Nadia Boulanger, with whom he himself spent a rewarding period of study, and Harris and Sylvia left for France before the end of the summer.
Upon arriving, they first settled at Chatou, by the Seine, later in a house on the estate of a Mme. Boudin in the village of Juziers, Harris commuting to Paris for his lessons on weekends. His work with Boulanger lasted from Summer26 through 1929 (with one or two trips back home). These studies were supported initially by the Wertheim money, later (1927 and 1929) through two Guggenheim Fellowships (he was to receive a third in 1976).
By his own account, Harris resisted what he called Boulanger's "Academie Francaise" approach to disciplined, systematic musical study, likening the results it produced to the neatlymanicured grounds of the Palace at Versailles. Although he cooperated initially to the extent of producing numerous exercises in melody writing in various styles and some contrapuntal studies for string quartet, he eventually insisted on developing his own curriculum, part of which consisted of examining passages of selected works of the great composers in which Boulanger felt they had miscalculated. Among the exemplars Harris studied in this and more positive ways were Beethoven (whose quartets he explored intensively), J. S. Bach, and the great Renaissance polyphonists, prominent among them Palestrina and Lassus; Boulanger also seems to have led him to a number of 16th-century French composers, such as Costeley and Le Jeune. Other figures for whom he later expressed a special regard were Chopin, Debussy (he felt the French had produced the finest orchestrators), Schubert, and Tchaikovsky.
