John Harbison

INTERVIEWER: We're speaking today with Institute Professor John Harbison, who is among America's most distinguished figures in contemporary music. He's the recipient of many awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize for Music composition, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities. Composer, conductor, violinist, and pianist, Professor Harbison's compositions include five string quartets, six symphonies, a ballet, three operas, five song cycles, and numerous solo, chamber, and choral works. As a conductor, he has led orchestras and chamber groups around the world and has had long-term residencies with top national music festivals.

John, you've been a faculty member at the MIT Department of Music since 1969. And here, you're also the founder, and coach, and arranger of MIT's vocal jazz ensemble, a pianist with the faculty jazz group Strength in Numbers, you coach a variety of other chamber music ensembles, and you've composed and performed original music for special Institute events. We have a lot to talk about. Thank you for taking the time to contribute to MIT's Infinite History series.

HARBISON: I'm very happy to be here.

INTERVIEWER: Great. What we've been doing is starting with the early days, we do a chronological look at then and now. So if you could just tell us a bit about growing up in a musical family and how you came to decide that-- discover that music would be your life's work.

HARBISON: Yes, my parents were both quite musically adept. My father had wanted to be a composer, I think, when he was young. His family disapproved of that. They thought that that was not a way to make a living. And basically, they were right. But he became a renaissance and reformation historian. But he did teach me a lot of my fundamental musical basics.

Well, my parents had a lot of phonograph records and I listened to a lot of music, learned pretty early to pick things out of the shelves myself. I was interested and asked to start studying pretty young on violin and piano. And soon as I could, I switched to viola, which was the instrument that interested me most, I guess, at least for concert music. For jazz, I was always a piano player and sort of kept those two strands quite separate.

My sister also went into music. She was a cellist, a very excellent one. And there were a lot of good teachers in town. My first teachers were mostly coming in from New York to teach in Princeton, but eventually, also some local folks. And I was taught in a, what I now take to be a very fundamentalist way, on the violin. I think I was not allowed to do anything but bow for a year, no fingers. I don't think anyone does that anymore. I think all the modern pedagogy is about much more instant gratification. And that was really how--

INTERVIEWER: In terms of career, did you have family approval of your direction towards music?

HARBISON: I think my parents were okay with that. My father had wanted to be a composer, but he had been sort of dissuaded. But, no, I think my parents didn't see me interested very much in anything else and I think they thought that I would eventually be purely a teacher, a university person like my father was. My biggest problem explaining myself to my parents later on was that I didn't, for instance, I didn't want to do a PhD. I didn't want, I wasn't interested in what we would call studies and that aspect of the profession.

INTERVIEWER: You said your father was a professor, was he at--

HARBISON: Yeah, he was a professor of history and I think from him, I might have inherited a lot of the interest in church music. Because I've been at least all the way really all the way through, along with MIT, active as a church musician across town at Emmanuel Music. And the big heroes in my family's portrait gallery were Luther, and Calvin, and, I suppose, Bach, which is really the region my dear father both taught and thought a lot.

INTERVIEWER: And what were you exploring, yourself, musically, through your high school years, say?

HARBISON: Well, I was improvising my own pieces on piano and--

INTERVIEWER: Was that classical?

HARBISON: Yeah, well, I'm not quite sure what they were and I know that my mother was annoyed by it. Because when you're doing that, you do the same thing over and over, trying to get it a certain way. And she was, unfortunately, was around, probably listening to that.

INTERVIEWER: You also have to practice whatever you're doing.

HARBISON: Yeah, I would think. And I wasn't too interested in learning to play my instruments. That was actually a deficiency that I've regretted, that I wasn't-- the instruments were really just a means of being around music and being a participant. So the basic day-to-day that I see really high-skilled professional musicians have, I didn't have the temperament for it. I wanted to improvise my own things.

And I really, really fooled my teachers into thinking I was practicing, I'm sorry to say. Sometimes they'd say, oh, you really worked this week. And I would feel bad because I didn't. That was not where I was engaged. The one time I made progress in the conventional way on an instrument was in high school. I studied the tuba because I wanted to learn about brass. And the format was that you were signed up every day to practice, and that was just the deal.

And I zoomed ahead on the tuba. I became as close to being a real player on that instrument as I was on any instrument in my entire life. And it's what I go back to to empathize with or understand what the really great players that I'd sometimes write for experience. That high-wire act of being really able to play the instrument almost on an unconscious level. But that's--

INTERVIEWER: Did you continue that?

INTERVIEWER: No, I dropped as soon as I was out of high school, really. And my high school teacher, soon after I got married, went to my wife and he said, could she be talked into getting me back on the tuba? That he had planned a virtuosic career for me. He was a brass specialist, a very good high school teacher. So I look back on that as the experience of what it was like to submit to the discipline, to really play an instrument.

Later on, on the viola, my wife was a violinist, she took me through a fairly strict more than refresher course, basic course, which improved my playing. But I think it was too late for me to be able to be the kind of player that I write for. That sort of player for whom it really is like pick it up, it's part of your body. And that was the tuba for me.

Of course, I was also very interested in singing in school because that was one of the things my high school offered at a very high level, choir singing. We were so devoted to it, we would come one hour early for school. Our teacher had to climb in through the men's room window to open up the school for us. And we were very good. We were kind of an elite group. We were sent out to give concerts all around the state, which meant getting out of classes, which we always loved. And really that singing interest, I think, developed around the chance to participate in such a high level of ensemble.

INTERVIEWER: And you've kept your work with choral--

HARBISON: Sure, I've certainly remained interested in singing. I was never, myself, a truly high professional singer, but I sure feel that discipline as very close to what interests me about music.

INTERVIEWER: To continue the education arc, you were an undergraduate at Harvard?

HARBISON: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: And you did-- what was the pursuit of music there?

HARBISON: Well, I was pushed ahead because I had studied, at home, a lot of fundamental musical studies in Princeton with a very good teacher, Mathilde McKinney, who was a tough teacher and--

INTERVIEWER: Princeton, where you did your master's?

HARBISON: No, this was down while I was still in high school.

INTERVIEWER: Oh, I see, sorry.

HARBISON: I had essentially gone through basic college courses, harmony and counterpoint. And so I came in at about a third or fourth year level in college. I think I was well-taught. She was supposed to be my piano teacher. And I came in one day to play the Beethoven 1st, F Minor Sonata for her that I was learning. And she stopped me, and she said, "I think I don't ever want to listen to that anymore."

INTERVIEWER: Meaning?

HARBISON: Well, I had become a full-time jazz player and apparently I just couldn't play even eighth notes. I was swinging everything and she just was bothered. She just didn't think that was anything she wanted to go any further with, so she said, "You're writing these pieces. Just bring me your pieces and we'll look at those."

INTERVIEWER: So you were going towards composition at that point?

HARBISON: She seemed to think that was what was happening. And she was right. She was a composer, fortunately. And so from then on, through high school, I brought in my pieces to her. And she put them on her piano recitals at the end, and I had two good results. I got to hear my pieces, but also I didn't have to play on the recitals.

INTERVIEWER: She liberated you.

HARBISON: Well because I wasn't really equipped to do that. That's, again, a regret because these days when I do want to play concert music on the piano, I look back to Mathilde McKinney in that day and think, oh, well I wish she'd said, "I want to correct your horrible piano playing."

INTERVIEWER: So sounds like the high school was a very important time. Did college, the college instruction, add to your composition?

HARBISON: College instruction was maybe more predominately involved with playing with groups, orchestras there, eventually becoming a conductor of Bach Society Orchestra. Because my coursework started fairly far on, and I was in graduate courses, actually, towards the end, which were way over my head. My greatest achievement in the history of music came as a complete fluke because I wasn't doing well in the course, and it was mostly very, very devoted graduate students. And I gave up the night before. I said, "I'm just going to just going to be hopeless. I can't do this exam." And I strolled up to the library and wandered through and I saw a bunch of the real graduate students studying masses by Cristobal Morales. And I thought, I don't even know who he was.

And on the exam, we had five pieces to identify and write about. And one of the five pieces was one of the Cristobal Morales masses that I looked at as I walked by the table in the library. And so by, I'd say, staging my identification of that piece I dazzled the history of music teacher into feeling that I was a truly qualified historian. And in fact, that part of my education, which was really shaky, I wound up curiously developing a certain bent towards at least understanding in the historical context certain composers and a side light that's really developed into a very front light in recent times.

Studying Bach not only from the standpoint of learning a lot of his cantatas very thoroughly, but also for him to figure out what his world was and how he related to his students, and his culture, and the changes that were going on in music at the time. And this has been useful to me as a composer.

INTERVIEWER: And was that partly inspired by your father's work in history of that--

HARBISON: I think probably, and also that the best part of my college experience was being commanded, essentially, to get a thorough background in music history.

INTERVIEWER: Weren't you an English major? Or--

HARBISON: I was for a couple years. But Harvard College was one of the few places then, and certainly-- or any time in recent history, that insisted on an extremely thorough grounding in early music. There were two history courses. The first one stopped in 1600. So that for me was all territory that I essentially knew nothing about, and I was very excited by that. I really burrowed into It. And then the next course was 1600 to the present, but the teacher never got much beyond 1700. He got through about a hundred of the 300 years he was supposed to cover.

INTERVIEWER: That always happens with history, doesn't it? People rush the end.

HARBISON: And that was perfect because, of course, that was the part I wouldn't have known anything about. And so as I look back on Harvard as that undergraduate experience, of course it was the opportunity to conduct the Bach Society Orchestra, which was remarkable. But it was the history, the idea of all this music that preceded Bach and the music that I would have had some experience of, which really has continued to open up and reveal. And I had already developed an interest in German 17th century music, just by browsing around in the recording world. Heinrich Schutz, who became, throughout the rest of my life, a very important composer for me, but I'm grateful that we didn't just speed through and talk about the pieces that we already knew. And I don't know whether Harvard still does that, I'm not that much in touch with it. It always pleases me to see that at least at MIT, we don't neglect earlier music.

INTERVIEWER: And then at Princeton, you did your master's of fine arts. What did you work on there, mostly?

HARBISON: Well, I first I went on a fellowship to Berlin, and I studied with an interesting gentleman, Boris Blacher. He had eight students and he taught only one half hour Monday morning. He explained that was the deal. And he'd already had a couple glasses of schnapps before he started, and his secretary would come and just grab a score. And he would follow her into the room and he would do five minutes, and--

INTERVIEWER: The half hour was for everybody?

HARBISON: Yes. It was five. He said, "I've told you, I warned you, five minute lessons." And of course, when he told me that, when I went to him at the beginning of the year, I'd thought that can't be serious. But of course, it turned out to be exactly true. And that the interesting useful year, because sometimes, the five minute, he would have time for about one sentence. And sometimes it was a really interesting sentence, about three or four of those weeks. And so I was really glad, eventually, that I had experienced his unusual approach.

And then I found out right away, I think the first week, that there was a Bach cantata group going on way out in Zehlendorf, which is a long ride on the overhead railway, about an hour plus. And I went there once a week, and sometimes twice, to work with this religious school choir that was performing a Bach cantata. No, it wasn't in Zehlendorf, it was in Kustendorf, for the performances, which were another hour in the other direction. It was the Johannesstift out by the Spandau Prison. And it wasn't that long, cause it was 1960, 15 years after the end of the war. So Berlin was still a pretty bombed out city. I had some very interesting other students that I met during that year that I kept up with.

But that choir was really my main, perhaps, my focus, because every week there was a new Bach cantata that I would get from the library, and study, and sing in that choir, and learned maybe 20 Bach cantatas quite well with a very, very unusual conductor, Hanns-Martin Schneidt, who I now realized--I thought of him as very experienced, but he was probably 30, young guy. And this beautiful bunch of students who really thought of the pieces, really in the old way, very much like the original Bach choir that is the text, because they were theology students who were kind of where their connection was.

INTERVIEWER: So a year in Germany, then? And then you went to graduate school at Princeton?

HARBISON: Yeah, I went in the summer to a conducting school. Because I was still very interested in conducting, as I had been at Tanglewood in the summer during my college years.

INTERVIEWER: Doing what?

HARBISON: As a conductor.

INTERVIEWER: During your college years?

HARBISON: Yeah. I was a fellow in conducting and I was the youngest fellow and I was not too experienced- I did one year of, maybe, Bach Society Orchestra. But I learned some things about it. I certainly learned about Tanglewood. And certainly it's been useful to me, as a longtime teacher there, to have been a fellow and sort of remember how daunting it is to be with that many good musicians trying to figure out how you get along. So I went to this conducting school in Salzburg and to my really great surprise, I did really well. I mean, Leopold Hager, who was the day-to-day teacher, a very fine conductor, he liked my work and he gave me a lot of chances. And I think they came out well.

And then Herbert von Karajan, who was our guest teacher, was also very encouraging. It was one of those experiences where I thought I would go, kind of get lost in the flock, but both of those teachers were very helpful to me, and liked my approach. I wasn't too interested in the choreography or even the career issues of conducting, but I was interested in how to study.

INTERVIEWER: What do you mean by the choreography?

INTERVIEWER: Well, a lot of conducting teaching, particularly nowadays, is, if you do this, in this situation, you shouldn't. You should have done that. And they were much more, at least Hager was more about how well do you know the piece? Have you studied the detail? And I think--

INTERVIEWER: So what did, it was more loose?

HARBISON: Yeah, and I felt that I had done that part of it well. And so I came back to school at Princeton, and went right away to the university orchestra and said, "I just came from Salzburg and I think I know how to conduct." And I became an assistant conductor of the orchestra. So I got chances to conduct a lot of rehearsals, the conductor wasn't there quite often. And I met my future wife in the orchestra. And it was really a kind of dual identity for quite a while. I thought of conducting as probably the best way to make a living, for a while. I'm not sure I was right about that, but that moment seemed plausible. I had been through a kind of crucial decision about jazz during college, because I was playing with a couple of bands. I felt like I was really going somewhere, as a jazz musician, that felt very purposeful and--

INTERVIEWER: As a composer of jazz music?

HARBISON: As a player.

INTERVIEWER: As a player.

HARBISON: And it's kind of a fluky set of circumstances where I was trying to decide whether to go to Tanglewood as a conductor or to the Lenox School Jazz, which was a new school, turned out to be a very distinguished one. And it's a long, complicated story why I didn't, but having almost to do with a case of mistaken identity. And, in any case, I wound up in Tanglewood in conducting, right down the road from the Lenox School of Jazz. Occasionally went over to hear something they were doing, and it was a very interesting year at that school with some extremely unusual players. Ornette Coleman showed up. I mean, people doing some stuff I didn't really understand. And I thought, well, this is for the best. I don't think as a jazzer I was ready to take certain kinds of steps. And I was a conductor at Tanglewood, though, I wasn't very active. I was learning. And I felt that almost accidental, very decisive moment probably was the right choice.

INTERVIEWER: So the fork in the road was between conducting and playing jazz. What about composer--

HARBISON: Well, it was more between concert music and jazz music. And I perceived that jazz, they were both hard livings. They were both hard choices in the sense that I wasn't looking at anybody, from a career path, having anything easy going on. And my very great friend from high school that I played with in our little [INAUDIBLE] septet band in school, who has been a jazz musician through his career, and with whom I've been playing in recent years, Tom Artin, as great as he plays, and as incredibly, totally gifted he is as a musician, it's not an easy-- as I thought it wouldn't be-- not an easy life.

INTERVIEWER: So you have cited Bach, Stravinsky and jazz as essential sources of inspiration for your own music. Could you tell us how these disparate sources inform your compositions?

HARBISON: Well they were the early preoccupations of-- that was the music I was listening to and trying to put together in my head. Schoenberg was also a force because, of course, both Stravinsky and Schoenberg were in the US of A, when I was a young kid, and I was aware of them. My father went to Schoenberg's lectures a couple times and Stravinsky I saw conduct. And, of course, I was sent out to Santa Fe from Princeton graduate school to be one of a very few composers who were supposed to hang around Stravinsky and watch him coach his operas. I would say Charles [? Warden ?] and I were the most devoted Stravinsky-ites in that group of 10 or 12 composers. We really knew a lot of his music well. And I must say, hearing all the operatic pieces in one summer, some of them him conducting, was just so much more Stravinsky into the bloodstream. And then they forgot to cover all of his rides to the opera house, and I had this, actually Rosie was with me, and I had her--

INTERVIEWER: That's your wife?

HARBISON: --her can convertible and I drove Vera Stravinsky, and Stravinsky, and Robert Craft out to the opera house quite often. I think they didn't regard me as anything but a driver, except that we did, all of us composers, we did present did present a piece to Stravinsky, a variation on one of his marches from Rernard.

INTERVIEWER: But the point is you also, you do have the classical and the jazz influences throughout your work.

HARBISON: Yeah, I wasn't as conscious at the time of what was going to be a problem, which is what, how to fit things together. And it took a long time to get the sense that my ear, which had been formed by years of teenage jazz playing and improvising and following certain kinds of chordal thinking, I had to be fitted into what I call more concert music discourses. And not just as a dialogue or a kind of a shock discontinuity, but it had to become a continuity. And that took many, many years.

But at that time, I was just really interested in all of these disciplines as being the place that I wanted to spend time on. And I didn't really try, for instance, the music that I learned as a fundamental book, sort of in my head, concert music, were the 200 Bach cantatas. I was very motivated to learn them because I got this job quite early in my life actually. Really after I'd come back here, just to study and compose for the Harvard Junior Fellowship, I got a job as conductor of cantata singers.

INTERVIEWER: This is at Tanglewood?

HARBISON: No, this was up here in Boston. And I thought well what do they do. Well, they perform Bach cantatas. So I spent one summer just studying every Bach cantata. So some people I guess would choose Beethoven quartets or some basic text. But that turned out to be my reference point, having just spent the days for three months or two months, just turning the page and okay next.

INTERVIEWER: So you do-- a portion of your work does combine music and text. And how do you select text for your music? And sometimes you compose the text. And when do you choose to write? Like you did the libretto for the opera the Great Gatsby. So what is-- how would you describe your working with text?

HARBISON: Well in high school and in college I was for a while thinking of myself as combining writing words and writing music. And I was in the kind of poetry world at Harvard. And I was actually, I think i seemed to be doing well there. I mean I won some big poetry prizes. And I went to this convention, I can't remember, it was some college. There were all kinds of college poets there. I represented my own college.

And it was tempting to think I was actually good at it. But I didn't think so. I thought the reason that I was doing this must have been to have some way of evaluating poetic texts. And which is really what I've then done. I continue to read poetry a lot. I've certainly always been friendly with poets. And I always enjoyed the process of even getting permissions from poets to set their poems. But the choice really doesn't come out as a choice for me. It's really just I've read a bunch of stuff, and stuff starts to be kind of distracting. And I can get haunted by it. And then I decide well it's time to try to work with it.

INTERVIEWER: So what was the process with the Great Gatsby? Were you commissioned to do an opera, and then you decided to do the libretto as well? Or was it all a piece? How did that work?

HARBISON: With opera, the reason I've done my text for the opera has nothing really to do with thinking of myself as a poet or a writer. It's that the practical issue of making an opera has always seemed to me to have to do with the difficulty of negotiating with a writer who has a great pride in their skill. And I'd heard enough and known enough, studied enough, about the process of making operas to know that I didn't feel that aspect of the collaboration would work for me. So I became the librettist with whom I can negotiate, and change anything that I wanted. And that was the biggest reason for each time fitting together my own libretto.

The Gatsby, I did look around for a while because I thought the advantage of a librettist is to have someone else who goes out and takes the heat. But I couldn't quite find anyone who was going to buy into my idea that their text was in some ways always temporary. Whereas when I work with myself, anything I wanted to cross out and start over on textually, that was easy to do.

INTERVIEWER: And you had that freedom? You were commissioned to do whatever it was whether-- that was your decision in other words?

HARBISON: Well it was not the-- in the case of The Great Gatsby, my commissioner didn't like that at all. They kept trying to-- they said "Please don't write the libretto." And they kept suggesting people. And I went. I talked to very profitably and interestingly to some really great people. Ruth Jhabvala, who was a great screenwriter and great novelist and we discussed the Gatsby libretto for a long time, the very specific problem with her was that she had no background in opera. And had to start thinking about opera from square one, and that looked difficult to me.

But I talked to other really wonderful people. The problem also was that with each time I've written an opera, the music has moved ahead. I heard what I wanted in certain scenes, and I needed the words fast because I felt like I was progressing into the piece, and really didn't want to wait. So I could think that was another factor.

INTERVIEWER: I could see that as an organic process, yeah.

HARBISON: So you could get too far advanced on the writing side. I know that's happened to other composers in the past. I've actually, I did a lot of sort of background study about composers and librettists. I was very interested in the case of Aida for instance, where Verdi actually sent his version of the text and just said, "Do this better," to the librettist.

I could see doing that. I actually tried to interest a poet friend of mine in doing exactly that piece I'd been sort of thinking about trying to do. And she turned it down. She said "I don't want to do that."

INTERVIEWER: You've talked a little bit about the sacred mu-- the religious music that you've also, has been part of your repertoire. And you were involved in several important ecumenical music events at the Vatican. Could you tell us just a bit more about your inspiration on religious themes, and the way that ecumenical message is transmitted through your music?

HARBISON: Yeah, I've had some amazing opportunities to do something that doesn't feel at all uncomfortable for me, which is to represent some message which is I take to be quite a broad message, that say not restricted to any particular interest or faith. So when I got the commission to write the piece for the 50th anniversary of the State of Israel, which was a committee in Chicago of the consulate, and they went-- the way they chose me was they just went through a bunch of stuff and offered me the commission. So I thought well they've done that thinking about whether I should do this.

And I know there were lots of people who thought, particularly back in Israel, that why was a Protestant quasi-Lutheran composer doing this. But I was-- I felt the subject matter was of incredibly powerful interest. And everything about that project-- I took it on when I was very strapped for time. I had almost no window for it. And I just thought I had to, just had to make this piece. Because first of all, the study part of it, the background work was going to be so interesting and rewarding.

And as the piece evolved, first of all, I wanted to learn a lot about Israel. One of the things they offered was that I would come for quite a long time, and meet anyone I wanted to talk to and so forth, which I found irresistible. Which did happen. I thought that I would probably use Israeli poets. And I had a big collection of poems which I thought would work with the piece. And I asked to meet them, among others. I met many politicians. But as I spent the time in Israel, the whole thing shifted, and it became a kind of more journalistic kind of piece.

I found that I wasn't going to use the poems. But I might use things that those people, or the people, anyone I met, was saying to me about the situation of Israel at that moment.

INTERVIEWER: So contemporary? You're saying contemporary--

HARBISON: So what the piece eventually consisted of is my settings of very ancient texts, psalms in Hebrew, which took a lot of work for me because I had to just listen to the accent. And I had tapes of four or five readers of every text, trying to get the stresses in the right place. And trying not to get the wrong words liturgically next to each other and so forth. But also the rest of the piece is, I think it's 10 or 12 people that I just met. And then because I'd never taken diary notes in my life. But every day there, I had some kind of encounter I thought I have to write down what these people said.

And that's the rest of the piece. And a lot of my friends said, "Don't do that because it will be not relevant in 10 years because that's now." Well it turns out it is.

INTERVIEWER: Unfortunately it's still.

HARBISON: Yeah, and the piece for me, I measure a lot of my projects in sort of what does it take to get there? Does something interesting have to be done to get into position to really have a hold of it? And in the case of that piece, that was very high on that level. Amazingly interesting trip and met-- I just sent this list of like 30 people I wanted to meet. And since it's a small country, and since I was the guest of the State Department of Israel, everyone turned up. And so that little brief period as sort of this journalist hyphen composer, it was a piece that I-- it was even more essential to do it than I thought.

With the papal thing, that was very different. But also the same kind of idea that I would learn a lot, that I'd be working for an institution, which was extremely complicated. Most of my communication with them was so formal, and by couriers, and sending documents in a certain form. And it was very-- everything was completely unusual.

And the pope, this was the Polish pope, was planning this event in which it would be a reconciliation of the faiths conference. And he had invited a whole bunch of rabbis and mullahs and priests. And they were to be discussing a whole bunch of really big issues, and among them the recent recognition of the guilt for the Shoah and the part of the Catholics and so forth. And so the whole-- for me the real dramatic part was trying to come up with a text which would be accepted. And I had my dealings with that Vatican committee were very interesting. They sent me a full account of their meetings. They listened to a whole bunch of my music.

And I sent them the text I decided on. Looked at lots of poetry and lots of passages. And eventually, the passage about Abraham was the father of many nations, which they made me take a certain part out, which I stuck in just instrumentally anyway. So if know the version I used, you would recognize it. But I sent them the King James version, and they had a big discussion. They said, "No we do not use the King James version. It represents a version which is inimical to us. But we'll try to find another." And they discussed this at great length. And apparently they deadlocked, had a terrible time. And at the end of the meeting they were very tired and they said, "Well look, let's just use the version that the composer sent."

INTERVIEWER: So had--

HARBISON: So that was the King James version. So I just took that, okay. And I did set that version. It's the first time that the King James version has ever been sung. I guess yeah, at the Vatican. And it was a very interesting event. Leading with an interesting statement by that pope about a few days before as the encyclical saying that they had neglected their great tradition of liturgical music. That in the reforms, which were mostly the folksong guitar tradition, which they had embraced since John the 22nd, that that Palestrina and [INAUDIBLE] and Lassus and the great composers that they had employed, creating the greatest music of their time, needed to be brought back into the consciousness of the church. Which actually has been since being put into place, where the music directors are interested, it's happening.

So this was in connection to this event. This was directly connected.

INTERVIEWER: Incredible, it's like your--

HARBISON: And of course I-- just out of curiosity, I was just very interested in various things that pope was doing. Now clearly there were things he wasn't doing. We're finding out more and more about that. But there were things I admired about him, particularly in the direction of this conference.

So I wrote the piece based on a communication from the committee, telling me which of my motets they approved of. And you would think that's a restriction. But that seemed to be fascinating because it spoke to my sense of music history, which is that the pope had sent a letter like that to Palestrina, very specific about what kind of music he should be writing for their purposes. And it was almost the same letter. I mean, I thought okay. I embrace it.

So I wrote a piece which was quite tricky to do, which really used only the harmonic content that they seemed to want to approve of.

INTERVIEWER: Seems like a delicate, diplomatic, historical, cultural--

HARBISON: It was an age-old composer's problem, as an employee, which I was I guess. So that was again, as a run-up, deeply educational. I came out on the other side of that having really learned a lot. And of course the event itself was fascinating. It was like a huge, I think the largest indoor audience I'd ever heard my music played for.

INTERVIEWER: And then in '87, you won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished music composition for the sacred ricercar piece "Flight from Egypt." Could you tell me about the experience of writing that piece, and how it came to be considered for a Pulitzer Prize? Was that a commission? Was that--

HARBISON: No, it wasn't. I was working very closely with-- oh wait a minute. I think it-- I think there might have been a commission, a small commission. This involved cantata singers, the group I'd been a music director for previously. But it came out of a conversation with Craig Smith, who was the music director at Emmanuel Church, were I was much more engaged at that time. And he said no one-- everyone writes joyful, Christmas pieces. But the story of the slaughter of the innocence, this really kind of quite horrifying story, of Herod trying to kill all the firstborn, is there's not very much represented musically. Not a big surprise about that. But that's true. And the only one we could think of was a piece by Henry Schutz, of course a great, favorite composer of mine.

He was saying as a music director in a church, what you found around Christmas season was a lot of darkness, particularly people who don't have much family or who are alone. And you know that there should be some music which takes on that subject. And that the flight into Egypt was a very haunted, dangerous story. It's a homeless couple who is just on the run and somehow. And Herod is out there trying to kill every firstborn. Great text for setting, and almost no precedent in the literature which has always appealed to me. So that's why I decided not to go with that direction in the piece.

Then I had a policy with my publisher that she would write to me every year, Susan Fader, and say do I-- is there anything she should submit for the Pulitzer. And I would say usually no, I don't-- I had sort of an aversion to that whole kind of process. But she just took it on herself. She said, "Well I like this piece, and I'm going to send it in anyway." So the surprise to me was that we had agreed nothing was going to be submitted. And she had just herself sent that piece in.

And it was a little off the beaten track for such an award. But in the long run, I can't think of any piece I would rather be represented by, because that's an aspect of the work I do that's probably the most unfashionable.

INTERVIEWER: What do you mean?

HARBISON: Liturgical music is like total backwater. And much of what goes on in that field is extremely undemanding entertainment. Kind of megachurch music, you know? And this piece is in the tradition of liturgical music that goes back through Palestrina, and Lassus and Schutz and Bach and on into Beethoven. Where the purpose was extremely integral to the life of the community that it's written for. The Bach cantatas for instance were the big focal event of the week for most of that population. And those stories were the stories they were trying to understand. And that's the tradition that this piece wants to attach to. So that's a very, very at this point, become a very rare rarely cultivated.

Ironically, some of the composers, in spite of the fact that in the early mid 20th century this tradition was always already quite atrophied...

INTERVIEWER: The liturgical tradition?

HARBISON: Yeah, and we had Stravinsky and Messiaen and Schoenberg all deeply engaged in writing that. So some of the greatest figures of concert music who against the grain, were writing major efforts in that field.

INTERVIEWER: Interesting what you said about being an employee. So I'm interested in commissions versus those that are not, for the-- what you compose that it is just because you are moved to do it. And so what is your process for composing in general? Do you have a routine? How do you... how do you...

HARBISON: No, I wish I did. I--

INTERVIEWER: Maybe it's different answer for whether they're commissioned or not.

HARBISON: It's pretty much the same. I've been fortunate to occasionally or quite often get commissions that are pieces I wanted to do. Very much had sort of already hoped to do. But I also have done things, big pieces, without commission, a lot. The first two operas. Big song cycle, hour-long songs like a [INAUDIBLE] went away. Just you're lucky, I always feel I'm lucky to get those pieces performed because there's nobody at the other end that wants to take care of them. But the process seems to be, I don't have a very good schedule or work process. And I think that's sort of it.

I noticed that some of the fellows that I teach at Tanglewood are very organized about how they go about it. And very purposeful about what things they're going to do in what order. And I just never have gotten into that phase. And what I look for is what we've been talking about. I'm looking for pieces where I will have to in the sort of study or run-up period, encounter some problems or some issues that I don't-- that I haven't done or had an experience with.

INTERVIEWER: And then, so then you've been so prolific. So obviously you're getting them done. You might put the long-- the ones that are not commissioned-- might be working on several at once? Or--

HARBISON: Yeah, almost always, yeah. Yeah and the virtue of that is that it takes some of the pressure off. Often one or another of them is very hard to do, and you want to be able to get away from it.

INTERVIEWER: And I guess I've read that your wife has inspired a lot of your violin music compositions.

HARBISON: Yeah, she's a very astute musician. And I love the violin. It's probably my favorite instrument. It's first instrument that I wanted-- remember wanting to play. And I think I switched to viola because I wanted to be-- I didn't want to be in front of the texture. I wanted to be in the middle. But it's still the instrument probably I would find the sound I most want to hear.

I think it's also interesting to me that we have some instruments that have been with us such a long time. Concert music has a real devotion to this sort of criteria. Now I did find that historic, electric guitars exist.

INTERVIEWER: How old?

HARBISON: Well, 50 years. But they get huge prices, certain vintages. That is there is something about the mystery of an instrument. And the handcraftedness. even clarinet players feel that though they're machine-made instruments, that they have a personality. I feel a closeness to that issue of the instrument. It sort of talks back to us. That's one of the things that helps me get through these pieces, that I hear someone specific playing a very specific sound.

INTERVIEWER: Even if it's an instrument you don't play.

HARBISON: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: And what you pick up, personally, is viola and piano these days. That's what you actually play.

HARBISON: I'm sort of being forbidden to play the viola. I'd rather keep playing, but--

INTERVIEWER: What do you mean?

HARBISON: We do a chamber festival out in Wisconsin in which I almost always do some playing. And my colleagues there feel like my services as a what we call a continuo, a Baroque fill-in player or pianist, are more valuable than viola. So I'm being definitely dissuaded from the viola.

INTERVIEWER: In your composing work, what's important to you in terms of engaging with the audience? What do you hope to get back? What do you hope their experience might be or do you care?

HARBISON: Well, yeah, sure, I care. But it's all-- it has to do with what the intent of the piece is. And it's sort of what-- every piece seems to have a kind of relationship to the audience. One of the reasons I like writing for church music is that the audience follows the musical action closely but there's no applause and you don't-- and what they take away is following a different track. And that's a big tradition of liturgical music going all the way back to pagan ritual or people beating on drums in pageants and stuff.

It's not-- the response is, in a certain way, more participation and less demonstration, you know? But I've written a lot of music that is-- string quartets for instance-- which is a rather specialized audience. One of my friends used to say "That's the Beethoven audience." He says, "I'm happy to have the Beethoven audience." There are people who have heard quite a lot and have quite a lot of ability to compare what they're listening to, subconsciously at least, to what you've given them. And I like that, but I would be unhappy if I was the only audience.

In my jazz coaching, of course, we've been cultivating another esoteric audience which is the people who really love jazz and would choose that over anything. And there you're reaching at them in a different way. There's a little bit more. You want to get them kind of more physically stirred up. I'm not sure how to describe that.

But I do, yeah. I think about the audience. I think about them not as much when I'm working, as just in between-- just how important it is that there's another end to it. I get very nervous if pieces are having trouble finding their way to the listeners.

INTERVIEWER: But how do you assess that in your process?

HARBISON: If you're listening and you're in the room with them, you assess it by the coughing and fidgeting.

INTERVIEWER: I guess I meant, in other words, once it's complete, yes. But, in other words, not during the writing of it do you-- does that enter--