Staff

John Harbison, Principal Guest Conductor

Composer John Harbison is among America's most prominent artistic figures. He has received numerous awards and distinctions, including three of the most prestigious: the MacArthur Foundation's "genius" award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities. Harbison has composed music for most of this country’s premiere musical institutions, including the Metropolitan Opera (for whom he wrote The Great Gatsby), Chicago Lyric Opera, New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Boston Symphony, Los Angles Philharmonic, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and the Santa Fe and Aspen festivals.  His works include four string quartets, five symphonies, a ballet, three operas, and numerous chamber and choral works, more than sixty of which have been recorded on leading record labels.

Harbison's music is distinguished by its exceptional resourcefulness and expressive range. He is considered to be "original, varied, and absorbing - relatively easy for audiences to grasp and yet formal and complex enough to hold our interest through repeated hearings - his style boasts both lucidity and logic" (Fanfare). Harbison is also a gifted commentator on the art and craft of composition and was recognized in his student years as an outstanding poet (he wrote his own libretto for Gatsby). Today, he continues to convey, through the spoken word, the multiple meanings of contemporary composition.

Several works have recently premiered: Mary Lou (for the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony), The Seven Ages (a Koussevitsky commission for the New York New Music Ensemble and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players), French Horn Suite (Boston, MA), A Clear Midnight (Pro Arte Singers), Winter’s Tale (BMOP, complete revised version), Symphony No. 5, commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra; Gatsby Suite (for the Aspen Festival Orchestra); Cortège, for six percussionists (New England Conservatory); Milosz Songs (commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for long-time Harbison champion Dawn Upshaw); the Concerto for Bass Viol (commissioned by the International Society of Double Bassists for a consortium of fifteen major orchestras); But Mary Stood: Sacred Symphony for Soprano, Chorus, and Strings (Cantata Singers of Boston); and the sinfonietta Umbrian Landscape (Chicago Chamber Musicians).

Among other recent works are Abu Ghraib (for the Rockport Festival), Crane Sightings, for violin and strings (Tanglewood), Songs America Loves to Sing (for the Atlanta Chamber Players and the Da Capo Chamber Players), Canonical American Songbook (for Albany Symphony), the overture Darkbloom (for the Boston Symphony, celebrating James Levine's inaugural season as music director), Symphony No. 4 (for the Seattle Symphony), Piano Trio No. 2 (for the Amelia Trio), the motet Abraham (commissioned for the Papal Concert of Reconciliation in Rome in 2004), Requiem (for the Boston Symphony Orchestra), Piano Sonata No. 2 (for Robert Levin), String Quartet No. 4 (for the Orion String Quartet),  Four Psalms (commissioned by the Israeli Consulate for the Chicago Symphony to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel), and Partita (a Minnesota Orchestra centennial commission). Revivals of The Great Gatsby took place at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in October 2000 and at the Metropolitan Opera in May 2002.

Harbison’s present composition projects include a setting of texts by Alice Munro for voice and orchestra (for the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra), a work for piano solo (in honor of Leonard Stein, for Piano Spheres), as well as a double concerto for violin and ‘cello (for the Boston Symphony) and his fifth string quartet (for the Pro Arte Quartet). 

Harbison’s Christmas Vespers was released in December 2008 (Brassjar Music), Montale Occasions on the Albany label in January 2009, and his ballet Ulysses in February (BMOP Sound). Several new recordings were released last season, among them: The Rewaking (String Quartets with Soprano, Bridge); Partita (American Orchestral Works, Cedille), nominated for a Grammy Award;  John Harbison: Chamber Music (Naxos);  Music of John Harbison, Volume 1(Bridge); and The Amelia Trio: Music of John Harbison (Naxos). Other recent rerecording’s include: Motetti di Montale (Koch), also a Grammy nominee,  Symphony No. 3 (Oehms Classics: Levine/Munich), String Quartet No. 4 (Koch), the Viola Concerto (Albany), the Cello Concerto (Albany), Four Psalms and Emerson (New World), and Variations, Four Songs of Solitude, and Twilight Music (Naxos). Altogether, almost ninety of his compositions have been recorded on labels such as Albany, Centaur, Nonesuch, Northeastern, Harmonia Mundi, New World, Decca, Koch, Archetype, CRI, Naxos, Bridge, Cedille, and Musica Omnia labels. The Musica Omnia double album  of works for string quartet, was named one of top ten classical CDs of the year by The New York Times. 2009 will see the releases of Harbison’s Full Moon in March (BMOP Sound), an album of his first four string quartets (Centaur), and a CD of works for oboe (Bridge).

Harbison has been composer-in-residence with the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Tanglewood, Marlboro, and Santa Fe Chamber Music Festivals, Songfest, and the American Academy in Rome. His music has been performed by many of the world's leading ensembles, including the Metropolitan Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera, New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Lincoln Center Chamber Players, the Santa Fe and Aspen festivals, among others.

As conductor, Harbison has led a number of leading orchestras and chamber groups. From 1990 to 1992 he was Creative Chair with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, conducting music from Monteverdi to the present. In 1991, at the Ojai Festival, he led the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Former music director of the Cantata Singers in Boston, Harbison has conducted many other ensembles, among them the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, and the Handel and Haydn Society.  Mr. Harbison first led Bach cantata performances in 1958 as conductor of Harvard’s Bach Society Orchestra. He has continued to do so every year since then, in two tenures as music director of Boston’s Cantata Singers, and then for many years as principal guest conductor of Emmanuel Music in Boston, leading performances there not only of Bach cantatas, but also 17th-century motets, and new music. He was Acting Artistic Director of Emmanuel Music from November 2007 through the 2009-2010 season.

Harbison was born in Orange, New Jersey on 20 December 1938 into a musical family. He was improvising on the piano by five years of age and started a jazz band at age 12. He did his undergraduate work at Harvard University and earned an MFA from Princeton University. Following completion of a junior fellowship at Harvard, Harbison joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where, in 1984, he was named Class of 1949 Professor of Music; in 1994, Killian Award Lecturer in recognition of "extraordinary professional accomplishments;" and in 1995 he was named Institute Professor, the highest academic distinction MIT offers to resident faculty. He has also taught at CalArts and Boston University, and in 1991 he was the Mary Biddle Duke Lecturer in Music at Duke University. Furthering the work of younger composers is one of Harbison's prime interests, and he serves as president of the Aaron Copland Fund for Music.

In 1998, Harbison was named winner of the Heinz Award for the Arts and Humanities, a prize established in honor of the late Senator John Heinz by his wife Teresa to recognize five leaders annually for significant and sustained contributions in the Arts and Humanities, the Environment, the Human Condition, Public Policy and Technology, and the Economy and Employment.  He is the recipient of numerous other awards, among them the Distinguished Composer award from the American Composer's Orchestra (2002), the Harvard Arts Medal (2000), the American Music Center's Letter of Distinction (2000), the Kennedy Center Friedheim First Prize (for his Piano Concerto),  a MacArthur Fellowship (1989), and the Pulitzer Prize (1987). He also holds four honorary doctorates.

Much of Harbison’s violin music has been composed for his wife Rose Mary, with whom he serves as artistic director of the annual Token Creek Chamber Music Festival, founded in 1989 and held on the family farm in Wisconsin, where much of Harbison’s music has been composed.

In recent years Harbison has revived his career as a jazz pianist, composer, and arranger. Early on the founder-leader of the Harbison Heptet and sideman in many other groups, playing with Tom Artin, Buck Clayton, Vic Dickenson, Jo Jones, and Edmund Hall (1952-1963), he took a jazz sabbatical for four decades, returning in 2003 to found the Token Creek jazz ensemble. The quartet and guests perform exclusively for the annual Token Creek Festival in Wisconsin. As a keyboard player he explores affinities between jazz change playing and figured bass realization.

Harbison’s music is published exclusively by Associated Music Publishers. A complete works list can be found at www.schirmer.com.

(May 2009)