Tall, soft-spoken, casually clad, far more youthful in appearance than his 48 years, Pulitzer laureate John Harbison looks the part of a young, thoughtful assistant university professor.
Indeed, the winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for music seemed more agitated by being late for an interview than by all of the sudden fuss over his prize. In fact, not only did he not expect the prize, he didn`t even know that his piece, ”The Flight Into Egypt” had been nominated.
”It was very surprising this year because I had had this detailed discussion with the people at Associated Music, who generally make the nominations, and they decided they weren`t going to do anything this year,”
he said. ”So I certainly wasn`t thinking about it at all.”
Being a member of juries that have selected prize winners in the past, Harbison also has a sense of perspective about the Pulitzer process and about what the judges are looking for. ”I`ve been told that part of it is just a refusal to go away,” he put it with a touch of self-deprecation.
”The list of the people who have won Pulitzer Prizes is a very good list, and so is the list of those who haven`t. Probably about even.”
”The Flight Into Egypt” is a 15-minute choral cantata with vocal soloists and orchestra, set to what Harbison calls ”a dark kind of Christmas text,” inspired in part by the growing numbers of homeless in Boston. It was written in the summer of 1985 for a small ensemble the size of those that perform Bach cantatas in churches.
A Pulitzer can do important things for a piece of music, and this is particularly notable when its creator happens to be composer-in-residence for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, as well as director of the orchestra`s New Music Group.
Yet Harbison insists that the piece was written for the kind of music scene he found around Boston, where small orchestras are common.
”L.A., as far as I can tell, tends to be not as often involved with this kind of thing. So the piece won`t have a lot of performances in the large-scale arena.”
It`s hard to say how long Harbison is going to be around Los Angeles in the future. His three-year term as a composer-in-residence–two years with the Pittsburgh Symphony and one year with the L.A. Philharmonic–ends this season. Next year, he will simply be the New Music Group`s director while concurrently teaching at MIT in Boston.
Already he is formulating some ambitious plans for the New Music Group in 1987-88, particularly a sharing of resources with a professional new-music ensemble from CalArts, with one joint concert that will feature a newly commisioned work by Rand Steiger. A zany but enlightening idea is a ”49ers concert”–devoted not to the football team, but to composers born in 1938 who will be 49 next year; the list includes William Bolcom, Charles Wuorinen, Joan Tower, John Corigliano and, for that matter, Harbison.
After the year is over, Harbison expects that his successor at the New Music Group will be named. ”I was hoping to work out a way to stay here full- time, but the various academic possibilities that were made possible just didn`t fall into place,” he said.
”I wound up having to make my commitment back to MIT before the cutoff time. I start out with them in the fall, and I`ll be here for periods of two weeks at a time. That`s not ideal, and unlike some of the other composers who claim to be resident composers on that basis, I`m not going to do that.”
Harbison`s musical background is quite varied. Born in Orange, N.J., Harbison has his deepest roots in the classics. He came from a musical family (his dad was a composer and pianist). At a very young age, Harbison started improvising on the piano before his first lessons, and he also took up the violin and viola.
Luckily, Harbison`s teachers understood that his first priority was composition, and they steered his musical development along that path. His most revered teacher was the American composer Roger Sessions, whom Harbison still quotes constantly in interviews and in his prose writings.
Harbison also has a strong interest in jazz, having played piano as a youth in a jazz combo, which he remembers as ”a tremendous high, no doubt about it. It is something I really do miss.”
Harbison also composes pop songs–something he has done ever since he was a teenager in a summer camp–and is a fervent admirer of the golden age of Tin Pan Alley. This should surprise those who have only heard his earnest, serious-minded classical pieces over the last couple of years at L.A. Philharmonic and chamber music concerts.
A key to Harbison`s recent success in latching onto major symphony orchestras has been his association with Andre Previn. Those ties took hold in a rather casual manner, when Previn heard part of Harbison`s Piano Quintet on the radio.
”He got in around the end of the first movement, and he just stayed in his car and waited for it to finish. This was right around the time in which the Pittsburgh was considering getting into the composer-residency program. He then got a bunch of other things of mine from libraries, recorded pieces. When it came time for him to make his selection–the music director just chooses someone–he invited me to come to Pittsburgh.”
