MIT Music Faculty

Music Faculty and Academic Staff

Frederick Harris (fharris@mit.edu), Director of Wind and Jazz Ensembles. M.M., New England Conservatory, Ph.D., University of Minnesota. Frederick Harris is Music Director of the MIT Wind Ensemble and Festival Jazz Ensemble. He is also Music Director of the Summer Music Festival at the South Shore Conservatory (MA). For four summers (2001-2004) he served as Assistant Conductor of the Boston University Tanglewood Institute Young Artists Wind Ensemble. He has also served as an Acting Music Director for the MIT Symphony Orchestra, conductor of the Concerto Grosso Orchestra at the University of Minnesota, and he has guest conducted the New Hampshire Philharmonic and the Chamber Music Society of Minnesota, among others. Dr. Harris is President and Artistic Director of Symbiosis New England, a professional Boston-based wind ensemble dedicated to new music and music education. Since 1992 he has commissioned and/or premiered nearly 60 works for wind, jazz, and chamber ensembles. Dr. Harris’ ensembles at MIT have worked with artists such as Gunther Schuller, John Harbison, Michael Colgrass, Joe Lovano, Kenny Werner, Don Byron, Ran Blake, Guillermo Klein and Evan Ziporyn. His first book, “Conducting with Feeling” was published by Meredith Music in 2001. “Seeking the Infinite,” the biography of renowned conductor and composer Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, will be published by the Polish Music Center at the University of Southern California in 2007. INNOVA Recordings of the American Composers Forum published his first professional recording, Waking Winds, in 2004. The CD features premiere recordings by the MIT Wind Ensemble of works by Schuller, Ziporyn, Child, and Robison. His teachers included Frank Battisti, Gunther Schuller, and Craig Kirchhoff. Dr. Harris was a conducting student at The Schweitzer Institute of Music at the Festival at Sandpoint and an auditor of the Tanglewood Music Center conducting program. He studied percussion with Arthur Press, former principal percussionist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and jazz drums with Alan Dawson.

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