William Henry Harris

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This article is about the organist and composer. For the Welsh divine and professor of Welsh, see William Henry Harris (academic).

Sir
William Henry Harris
Petersfield, Hampshire
Occupation(s)Composer and organist
Era20th century
St. George's Chapel, Windsor Castle
, where "Doc" Harris served as organist and choirmaster

Sir William Henry Harris

KCVO (28 March 1883 – 6 September 1973) was an English organist, choral trainer and composer
.

Early life and education

Harris was born in

Henry Walford Davies.[1]

Career

Harris was organist at

The Proms: the overture Once Upon a Time (1940) and the Heroic Prelude (1942).[4]

Bruce Nightingale, who became senior chorister at Windsor during the wartime years, describes "Doc H" as having "a fat, usually jolly face with a few wisps of hair across an otherwise bald head." Although choir practice was normally conducted in a "benign atmosphere," Nightingale recounts that Harris would occasionally complain of a "batey practise" and, on the rare occasions he considered a performance mediocre, would scold the choirboys in a loud stage whisper from the organ loft. Harris was involved in the musical education of the teenage Princesses

Margaret Rose, who spent the wartime period at Windsor Castle. Every Monday he would direct madrigal practice in the Red Drawing Room at Windsor, where the two Princesses sang alongside four of the senior choristers with the lower voices augmented by Etonians, Grenadier Guards and members of the Windsor and Eton Choral Society. Jars of Argentinian honey, sent to Windsor by overseas subjects, were donated by the Princesses to the Choir School as a treat for the choristers.[5]

Between 1923 and 1953 Harris served as a professor of organ and harmony and the Royal College of Music. He was also president of the Royal College of Organists (1946–8), and director of musical studies at the Royal School of Church Music (1956–61).[2] He was appointed KCVO in 1954.[6] Harris married Kathleen Doris Carter in 1913 and they had two daughters. After retirement from St George's Windsor in 1961 the couple went to live in Petersfield, Hampshire. Kathleen had suffered from deafness since 1925, but in the early 1960s her hearing was partially restored. She died in 1968. Harris died at the age of 90 five years later.[7]

Compositions

Harris is best remembered today for his

anthems for unaccompanied double choir: Faire is the heaven (1925), a setting of Edmund Spenser's poem "An Hymne of Heavenly Beautie";[8] and Bring us, O Lord God, a setting of a poem by John Donne first heard in Windsor on 29 October 1959, and which was sung at the Committal Service of Queen Elizabeth II at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle on 19 September 2022.[9][10]

Another popular anthem by Harris is Strengthen ye the weak hands (1949) for choir and organ. The late anthem Evening Hymn (1961), a setting of Thomas Browne's 'The Night is Come', is particularly notable for its intense and expressive ending (on the words 'when I shall never sleep again, but wake forever') set "in a cool, clear C major with the hint of a sharpened fourth".[11] His Communion Service in F was frequently sung in a great many

psalm
chants remain familiar.

Harris also composed

Princess Diana. Most of the organ pieces are miniatures, with the exception of the Organ Sonata (1938) and the two complex Fantasias on "Babylon Streams" (1922) and "Monks Gate" (1930).[13]

References

  1. ^ Palmer, Christopher. Harris, Sir William H(enry) in Grove Music Online
  2. ^ a b c Cooke, Mervyn. 'Harris, Sir William Henry', in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
  3. ^ Henderson, John and Jarvis, Trevor. Sir William Henry Harris, Organist, Choir Trainer and Composer, RSCM Press, 2018
  4. ^ BBC Proms Archive
  5. ^ Nightingale, Bruce. Seven Rivers To Cross: A Mostly British Council Life, The Radcliffe Press (1996)
  6. ^ Obituary The Times, 8 Sept 1973
  7. ^ William Henry Harris biography, Naxos
  8. ISBN 9781627873321
    . Retrieved 3 September 2018.
  9. ISBN 9780195327786
    . Retrieved 3 September 2018.
  10. ^ Meyrick, Sarah. "Privacy for royal grief at last as Queen Elizabeth II is laid to rest at Windsor". www.churchtimes.co.uk. Archived from the original on 19 September 2022. Retrieved 20 September 2022.
  11. ^ Sampson, Alastair: William Henry Harris, Anthems, notes to Naxos CD 8.570148 (2006)
  12. ^ Erpelding, M.A. The danger of the disappearance of things: William Henry Harris' The Hound of Heaven, University of Iowa dissertation, 2014
  13. ^ 'Complete Organ Works', Priory PRCD 1187 (2020) reviewed at MusicWeb International

External links

Cultural offices
Preceded by
Organist and Master of the Choristers of New College, Oxford

1919-1929 		Succeeded by
Preceded by
Noel Ponsonby
Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford

1929–1933 		Succeeded by
Thomas Armstrong
Preceded by Director of Music, St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle
1933-1961 		Succeeded by
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