 Roy Harris wrote his Symphony for Voices in 1935 for a cappella choir split into eight parts . Harris focused on harmony , rhythm and dynamics , allowing the text by Walt Whitman to dictate the choral writing . " In a real sense , the human strivings so vividly portrayed in Whitman 's poetry find a musical analog to the trials to which the singers are subjected " , John Profitt writes both of the music 's difficulty for performers and of its highly evocative quality . Malcolm Williamson wrote his Symphony for Voices between 1960 and 1962 , setting texts by Australian poet James McAuley . Lewis Mitchell writes that the work is not a symphony in any true sense , but rather a four @-@ movement work preceded by an invocation for solo contralto . The text is a combination of poems celebrating the Australian wilderness and visionary Christianity , its jagged lines and rhythms matched by the music . Mitchell writes , " Of all his choral works , with the possible exception of the Requiem for a Tribe Brother , the Symphony is the most Australian in feeling " . 
