John Harbison

John Harbison is an American composer, born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1938. He studied with Walter Piston at Harvard and with Roger Sessions at Princeton, with a period at the Berlin Musikhochschule in between, and joined the faculty of MIT in 1969. He writes operas, symphonies, concertos, chamber and sacred music, and also plays and arranges jazz. He won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for music for The Flight into Egypt and a MacArthur Fellowship in 1989. Harbison's operas include Full Moon in March (1977), Winter's Tale and The Great Gatsby (1999), premiered by the Metropolitan Opera.