Donald Harris (composer)

Donald Harris (April 7, 1931, in St. Paul, Minnesota  – March 29, 2016, in Columbus, Ohio) was an American composer who taught music at Ohio State University for 22 years. He was Dean of the College of the Arts from 1988 to 1997.

Harris earned a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in Music from the University of Michigan. He completed further studies at the Tanglewood Music Center and the Centre Français d'Humanisme Musical in Aix-en-Provence. He studied with Ross Lee Finney, Max Deutsch, Nadia Boulanger, Boris Blacher, Lukas Foss, and André Jolivet. He founded the Contemporary Music Festival at Ohio State in 2000. Prior to joining the faculty at Ohio State, he served on the faculties and as an administrator of the New England Conservatory of Music and the Hartt School of Music. From 1954 to 1968, Harris lived in Paris, where he served as music consultant to the United States Information Agency and produced the city's first postwar Festival of Contemporary American Music. A documentary about Harris entitled Sonata 1957 was produced by Daniel Beliavsky through opus1films in 2011. It explores Harris's development in mid-20th-century Paris, when pre-war musical thought bridged with post-war experimentation.