Artist description Composer Jeff Harrington's New Orleans-Influenced Classical Music

Music Style Instrumental and Electronic (A)rt Music

Musical Influences Beethoven, Bach, The Meters, Professor Longhair, James Brown, Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok

Similar Artists Professor Longhair, James Brown, Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok

Artist History Kyle Gann of the Village Voice (July 13, 1999) wrote: "Harrington is the most intriguing new figure I've discovered on the Web..." Jeff Harrington was born in 1955 in Forest, Mississippi. His mother and father were amateur musicians who played the popular music of the 40's and 50's for fun. In high school he taught himself blues and boogie-woogie piano and built a synthesizer from parts. He began composing when he was 17 and won a composition contest for a composition using an isorhythm derived from a Billy Cobham song bass line. Harrington continued his composition studies at LSU and at the Juilliard School where he studied in the Master's program with Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions. He has also studied with Morton Subotnick, Jacob Druckman (master class), Joan LaBarbara, James Drew, Barbara Jazwinski and Deborah Drattell. In 1981 he began a series of compositions using the harmonic idiom of the 18th century with rhythms from jazz and African-American music. In 1987 he returned to a more chromatic style of composition while retaining his interest in melody and counterpoint and the dramatic/developmental processes of the music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. In 1990 he retracted all but a few of his compositions written to date (approximately 100). In 1991 he programmed an expert system in C (inspired by a book by Taniiev - Convertible Counterpoint) which assists him in his discovery of the contrapuntal possibilities inherent in his melodies. The system takes up to 6 tracks of music and determines (using a pre-selected harmonic rulebase) the points at which the melodies mesh to produce effective counterpoint. The system produces music files ready to audition in realtime, so he can simultaneously be developing a transition while he produces the next section of counterpoint. Harrington currently supports himself as a Java programmer for ACTV, an interactive television company with a distance learning division. He's also worked at Children's Television Workshop where he wrote a suite of educational, yet silly, Sesame Street Java games and Castanet channels. He has also been a counselor/computer programmer for Choice in Dying: The National Council for the Right to Die and he set up the WWW pages for the American Music Center. He's also worked in the offshore oil fields of Louisiana as a galley hand, in music libraries at Tulane and Loyola University, and at several record stores including the world's first record store, Liberty Music (Madison Ave. behind Saks), where he met Frank Sinatra and learned how to sneak into Carnegie Hall. (Practice, practice, practice). Harrington's music has been performed around the world (from Siberia to St. Louis).

Instruments Piano, Synthesizer

Press Reviews "(Harrington) utilized the entire ensemble in an alternately dark and rhythmic collage of styles, textures and bits and pieces from all over the world." - R.L. Ragsdale, Riverfront Times, St. Louis, Mo. (after the November 19, 1995 premiere by Synchronia, Timothy Vincent Clark, Music Director). "Composer Jeffrey Harrington's 'KaleidoPsychoTropos' set the tone for the evening. The composition, chosen from among 1,060 submitted as a result of a Synchronia call for new scores, was described by the program as a 'boiling pot of gumbo' containing rap-song bass lines, Hungarian and Arabic melodies, ragtime and a little rock 'n roll. Certainly, it is kaleidoscopic, with lots going on all the time, but its development is less like a smooth stew and more like abrupt chunks of sound expertly plastered into place with a little counterpoint." - John Huxhold, Riverfront Times, St. Louis, Mo. (after the May 17, 1996 Synchronia performance). Here's a few comments (translated by my friend Vassily) from members of the Russian audience at a concert by Svetlana Kalinnikova in Noginsk (outside of Moscow) after her premiere of my Prelude #6 in 1993: "... The premier of J. Harrington piece - a real sensation! This expressive and dramatic piece is not contradicted to the music of Skryabin and Rachmaninov sounded in the second part of concert. Quite the reverse, it is close to them in spirit without respect to a stylistic difference." "...To tell the truth, I had not high opinion to American school of composition. But this short work caused me to change my views: master's made, it is a dramatic and spiritual too. I don't know why, but I feel analogy with Taneyev's works." "... The perforamce by Svetlana Kalinnikova of the modern American colleague, to my mind, is followed by the spirit of author and it made response in listeners. The success of modern music in our society is unpredictable."

Location Brooklyn, NY - USA

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