John Harris Harbison (born December 20, 1938) is an American composer and academic.
John Harris Harbison was born on December 20, 1938, in Orange, New Jersey, to the historian Elmore Harris Harbison and Janet German Harbison. The Harbisons were a musical family; Elmore had studied composition in his youth and Janet wrote songs.[1] Harbison's sisters Helen and Margaret were musicians as well. He won the prestigious BMI Foundation's Student Composer Awards for composition at the age of 16 in 1954. He studied music at Harvard University (BA 1960), where he sang with the Harvard Glee Club, and later at the Berlin Musikhochschule and at Princeton (MFA 1963). He is an Institute Professor of music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a former student of Walter Piston and Roger Sessions. His works include several symphonies, string quartets, and concerti for violin, viola, and double bass.
Harbison won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1987 for The Flight into Egypt, and in 1989 he received a $305,000 MacArthur Fellowship.[2] In 1998, he received the 4th annual Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities.[3] He was awarded the Harvard Arts Medal in 2000.[4] In 2006, a recording of his Mottetti di Montale was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Small Ensemble Performance category.
The Metropolitan Opera commissioned Harbison's The Great Gatsby to celebrate James Levine's 25th anniversary with the company. The opera premiered on December 20, 1999, conducted by Levine, with Jerry Hadley, Dawn Upshaw, Susan Graham, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Mark Baker, Dwayne Croft, and Richard Paul Fink among the cast.[5]
In 1991, Harbison was the music director of the Ojai Music Festival in conjunction with Peter Maxwell Davies. He has served as principal guest conductor for Emmanuel Music in Boston.[6] After founding director Craig Smith's death in 2007, Harbison was named acting artistic director. Harbison and his wife, Rose Mary Harbison, a violinist, ran the Token Creek Chamber Music Festival from 1989 to 2022.[7]
External videos | |
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John Harbison (on his Symphony No. 1), March 22, 1984, 4:20, Boston TV Digital Archive[10] |