JOHN HARBISON (b. 1938)Mirabai Songs (1982)

This chapter explores Mirabai Songs, a song cycle by one of America’s major composers, John Harbison. It asserts that this piece can already be termed a classic of the genre. Despite a relatively conservative musical language, Harbison maintains a distinctive and memorable voice, and his musical integrity shines through at every point. The six songs here provide plenty of contrast. Piano parts are arresting, many featuring continuous ostinatos; they bear echoes of minimalism, but with greater thematic interest than is customary for that genre. Rhythmic verve is always present—the pulse rarely slackens. Subtle dynamic markings, if observed closely, will contribute strongly to the overall effect.

JOHN HARBISON'S ‘MIRABAI SONGS’: RELIGION, RITUAL, LOVE AND EROTICISM

Captured by the 16th-century Indian poetess Mirabai and her works (transcribed by Robert Bly), John Harbison was especially intrigued with the manner in which she combined religion with ritual and eroticism. He has stated:Her answers involved the ecstatic, the devotional and the artistic, but her independence and resolve and her dancer's vitality led my setting toward narrative and characterization, unusual territory for a song cycle.

Boston & New York: Harbison, Wuorinen, Ueno and Sanford

The last two of the works commissioned by the Boston Symphony to celebrate the first season of James Levine as its Music Director were unveiled by Levine and the orchestra in Symphony Hall in Boston and Carnegie Hall in New York in April. John Harbison, whose The Great Gatsby was written for Levine and the Metropolitan Opera, had been working on an opera based on Lolita by Nabokov. He eventually decided that the problems presented by the staging of the work were insurmountable, and has, at least for the moment, abandoned the project, which he now considers misguided. He made the same decision in regard to the Fitzgerald novel about ten years before actually completing that project, so in the future this opera may also eventually see the light of day. Meanwhile, just as Harbison's aborted first attempt at Gatsby produced his ‘fox-trot for orchestra’, Remembering Gatsby, the work at Lolita has resulted in his most recent work for the BSO, a seven-minute overture based on material intended for the opera, entitled Darkbloom. Harbison's program note for the work does not name either Lolita or Nabokov, but speaks only of ‘a famous and infamous American novel’ in which Vivian Darkbloom (an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov) ‘is a just a secondary character’. Harbison chose Darkbloom as a title for the work ‘because it effectively conjures up the mood of this overture’, and ‘serves as an emblem or anagram for the complex tragic-comic spirit of the story and its author’. Darkbloom itself is attractive and skilfully wrought. A balletic section which portrays two young women playing tennis is the most memorable music in the work.

Boston: Elliott Carter's ‘Micomicón’

Next season James Levine ceases to be Music Director Designate of the Boston Symphony, and becomes the orchestra's Music Director and Conductor. Due to previous commitments, Levine has conducted only one program in each of the three seasons since he was named to the post. Celebration of his ascendency to the directorship of the orchestra has already begun, though, with the commissioning of works from a number of composers, including Milton Babbitt, John Harbison, and Yehudi Wyner, for his first season, restoring one of the proudest traditions of the BSO – that of the music director's active and enthusiastic promotion of contemporary orchestral compositions. It is not insignificant that this first season of the directorship of this American orchestra by an American conductor features American composers at a time when classical concert music seems to be about the only area of American life resistant to overt jingoism. Levine's earliest plans for the season included performing Elliott Carter's Symphonia: Sum fluxae pretium spei, and, hoping to link the occasion and the BSO to the triptych, he commissioned from Carter a short introductory fantasy to that work, entitled Micomicón. This pendant received its première, preceding a performance of Partita, the first part of the Symphonia triptych, at Symphony Hall in January.

John Harbison and his music

At any point in history there are always a few solid, value-for-money composers who ignore all vogue and convention and just quietly get on with the job of composing the music that is inside them, waiting to be written down. Abjuring all fashions and trends, all movements and isms, they defy the bizarre human compulsion to categorize and pigeon-hole and lump into groups. I have a strong feeling that it is these unclassifiable, dogged individualists who carry the flag of music history forward: who form the handful of composers by whom each epoch is remembered and represented in centuries to come. While second-guessing posterity is one of the more fatuously pointless of human activities, it is a reasonable certainty that John Harbison is one such figure.

Ethics and Drug Testing in Human Beings

In late May 1984, Irish citizens were perturbed to hear that a thirty-one year old man died while participating, as a paid volunteer, in a clinical drug trial at the Institute of Clinical Pharmacology in Dublin. At the inquest, held in September 1984, the State Pathologist, Dr John Harbison, affirmed that the cause of death was the reaction of the trial drug Eproxindine 4/0091 with a major tranquillizer which had been given less than fifteen hours earlier as part of regular treatment for a psychiatric disorder. The mixture of the two drugs, he went on to say, increased their effect by between twenty and thirty times their normal strength, and the volunteer had died of cardiac depression.

Ethics and Drug Testing in Human Beings

In late May 1984, Irish citizens were perturbed to hear that a thirty-one year old man died while participating, as a paid volunteer, in a clinical drug trial at the Institute of Clinical Pharmacology in Dublin. At the inquest, held in September 1984, the State Pathologist, Dr John Harbison, affirmed that the cause of death was the reaction of the trial drug Eproxindine 4/0091 with a major tranquillizer which had been given less than fifteen hours earlier as part of regular treatment for a psychiatric disorder. The mixture of the two drugs, he went on to say, increased their effect by between twenty and thirty times their normal strength, and the volunteer had died of cardiac depression.