Michael Harrison

Harrison has been on faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design, Manhattan School of Music’s Contemporary Performance Program, and the Bang on a Can Summer Institute at MASS MoCA. He is music director at Arts, Letters & Numbers.

Michael Harrison is an American contemporary classical music composer and pianist living in New York City. He was a Guggenheim Fellow for the academic year 2018–2019 (Anon. 2018).

He studied piano from the age of 6, composition from the age of 17, and North Indian classical vocal music from the age of 18, and attended Phillips Academy Andover. Early passions also included backpacking and mountain climbing in the Oregon Cascades and Himalayas, downhill and cross-country skiing, and chess. He graduated from the University of Oregon with a B.M. in Composition, where he later received the Distinguished Alumnus of the Year Award, and then moved to New York City to study with La Monte Young through a Dia Art Foundation Apprenticeship-in Residency (Wise 2005). He later received an M.M. in composition from the Manhattan School of Music, studying with Reiko Fueting.

In 1986, Harrison designed and produced the "harmonic piano", an extensively modified grand piano with the ability to play 24 notes per octave. Critic Kyle Gann referred to it as "an indisputable landmark in the history of Western tuning" (Gann 1990, 86). The instrument is described in the second edition of the Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments (Libin 2010). Harrison has been a serious student of Indian music, first as a disciple of master Indian vocalist Pandit Pran Nath (1979–1996), and currently, a protégé of Ustad Mashkoor Ali Khan (1999–present). He is also the co-founder and president of the American Academy of Indian Classical Music (AAICM).

Born in Bryn Mawr, PA, Harrison grew up in Eugene, OR, where his father, David Kent Harrison was a professor of mathematics at the University of Oregon and a Guggenheim Fellow for the academic year 1963–1964 (Anon. n.d.). As a child and teenager, he spent summers in both Chatham and Concord, MA with his grandfather, George R. Harrison, a professor of experimental physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1930), and Dean of Science (1942–64).