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.
Eclectic but distinctively original, John Harbison's Concerto for Viola and Orchestra reflects an artist of deep sensibility and training. Harbison (b 1938) is a recipient of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize and has received commissions from numerous ensemble…
A few years ago a German presenter asked me for my "artistic Credo," which seemed a characteristically European request, but in the spirit of international cooperation I furnished the following: "to make each piece different from the others, to find …
Modern music-especially American music, with its tendency to invite various traditions to share the same compositional space-can be a generous art, an art which welcomes inclusivity. Here are works by John Cage (b 1912), Yehudi Wyner (b 1929), John H…
John Harbison's music draws together gestures and ideas from musical worlds that reflect such favorite composers as Robert Schumann and Heinrich Schutz, the songs of George Gershwin, and the hieratic qualities of Igor Stravinsky. His work has always …