John Harbison

John Harris Harbison (born December 20, 1938) is an American composer and academic. Life 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. 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. In 1998, he received the 4th annual Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities. He was awarded the Harvard Arts Medal in 2000. In 2006, a recording of his Mot