Brynn Bruijn
The Pro Arte Quartet and Madison Symphony Orchestra will both celebrate Harbison by performing his works early next year.
If John Harbison were an athlete, his 2018-19 season might be considered a “career year” for the award-winning composer and music educator. New commissions, world premieres of his compositions, and the publication of his first book, What Do We Make of Bach?, have created a whirlwind season for Harbison, who turns 80 on Dec. 20.
Most Madisonians know Harbison as co-founder with his wife, Rose Mary Harbison, of the Token Creek Chamber Music Festival, the weeklong concert series held over each Labor Day weekend for the past 29 years in a converted barn on Rose Mary’s family’s former dairy farm near DeForest. To the rest of the classical music world, however, the Orange, New Jersey, native casts a much broader shadow as one of the country’s most innovative, prolific and honored living composers today.
Busy as he has been, however, Harbison has many things to think about. Not all are musical, and some he’d rather not think about at all.
“My kidneys are failing, and I am on the way out,” Harbison says simply during a phone interview from his Boston home, declining to disclose further information about his condition or how long he has left to live. “I’ve been told what was going to happen and everything so far has been as predicted. But I’ve appreciated the chance to catch up on a few things I had set my sights on.”
One project in the works is the tentatively titled Sonata for Viola and Piano that Harbison is composing for Sally Chisholm, a UW music professor and violist with the Pro Arte Quartet. The composition, inspired by the composer’s own work as a violist and in recognition of Chisholm’s mastery of the instrument, will receive its world premiere performance on Feb. 17 in Mills Auditorium in the Humanities Building on the UW campus.
“From living part-time in Madison I became very aware of Sally’s playing,” Harbison says. “She has performed a number of my works both here and in Minnesota and she’s really quite remarkable.”
The violist is equally complimentary about the composer’s new work written specifically for her.
“The emotional content of the first movement alone is powerful,” Chisholm says. “The writing is brilliant and that of a composer at the height of his power.”
If his health allows, Harbison plans to attend the performance. He has a longstanding friendship with Chisholm and the other quartet members. He also hopes to be in the audience for a Madison Symphony Orchestra concert featuring his composition, The Most Often Used Chords, that same weekend. Other events also have been planned around what will constitute a month-long birthday celebration for the composer.
When not in Madison, Harbison teaches composition and chamber music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His impressive composing credits include 12 concerti, seven symphonies, six string quartets, three operas, a ballet, and numerous song cycles and chamber works. He writes both secular and sacred music, and has spent 45 years as conductor for the classical music program of the Emmanuel Episcopal Church of Boston..
Harbison’s 1999 opera The Great Gatsby, commissioned by New York’s Metropolitan Opera to celebrate former conductor James Levine’s 25th anniversary, was recently revived by Germany’s Semperoper Dresden. His orchestral and choral work Four Psalms was commissioned to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Israel’s statehood, and his sacred motet Abraham was composed for the 2003 Vatican conference on world peace and reconciliation.
Harbison won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Music for The Flight into Egypt, a vocal and chamber orchestra work, and is a past recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship “genius” grant. He also has a long association with the Tanglewood Music Center, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home.
This fall has seen both performances and premieres of the composer’s newer works, including an Oct. 12 world premiere by the Minnesota Orchestra of What Do We Make of Bach? for orchestra and obbligato organ, a companion composition to his recently published book.
Once he completes the viola sonata for Chisholm, Harbison’s next commission takes him into formerly uncharted — and jazzier — waters.
“I am working on a big band piece called Thread, a tribute to Fred Harris, head of the MIT jazz program,” says Harbison, who currently teaches in MIT’s jazz division. “Composing for big band is hard work because there are lots of instruments and lots of lines on the staff.”
Although it’s tricky to predict which of his compositions will stand the test of time, Harbison is proud of his illustrious career. “I am happy I have gotten to do the things I wanted to do, especially for voice and piano,” Harbison says. “I am most grateful for those requiring a lot of research, like Four Psalms, which led to extensive tours of Israel and Palestine.”
Harbison’s health situation is changing the way he composes, making him less concerned with deadlines and formal structure. Knowing his prognosis, he says, is “a great gift for anyone in the arts” who still has goals to accomplish.
The composer’s lasting musical legacy, he says, may depend on the tastes and temperament of generations to come. He will keep working as long as possible for a world of listeners who are growing increasingly appreciative of his music.
“A good last performance requires a dignified spirit,” he adds. “It’s as important as a good first performance.”
