Obituary of Michael Kent Harrison

April 17, 2026

It is with great sadness that we share the passing of Michael Harrison on April 17, 2026 at the age of 67. Known for helping re-define the role of Just Intonation in the American canon, classical composer Michael Harrison is survived by his wife Marina, his sister JoEllen, two nieces and two nephews.

Funeral services will be held on Friday, April 24, 2026 at 11am at Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, 302 West 91st Street, New York, NY.

Donations in Michael's memory can be made to the Michael Harrison Foundation for Just Music, information at JustMusic.org.

Michael Harrison, the classical composer who helped re-define the role of Just Intonation in the American canon, died in New York City on April 17, 2026 at the age of 67. The cause of death was complication from pancreatic cancer.

One of Harrison’s most famous works, Revelation (2005), was described by the music critic Tim Page as, “the most brilliant and original extended composition for solo piano since the early works of Frederic Rzewski.” It placed him directly in the lineage of his teachers, La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Pandit Pran Nath, the Indian classical vocalist known for his profound influence on American minimalist composers. His work with Pran Nath became the foundation for Harrison combining Eastern and Western musical traditions.

Prior to the creation of Revelation, Harrison participated in the 1996 PianoForte Concert, in Rome, Italy. The legendary event included Harrison alongside Philip Glass, Terry Riley and Charlemagne Palestine. His insights from that concert were the genesis for Revelation.

Michael Harrison was born to David and Ann Hill Harrison on October 24, 1958 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. His father was a prominent mathematician on faculty at Princeton University and the University of Oregon at Eugene, where Harrison spent his childhood. His mother was a homemaker. Harrison’s paternal grandfather, George Russell Harrison, a physicist and professor of experimental physics at MIT, where he remained as the Dean of Sciences until his retirement and where the George R. Harrison Spectroscopy Laboratory is named for him.

Harrison attended Philips Academy, Andover and then the University of Oregon, Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music. He remained in New York to study with La Monte Young, living in Young’s loft alongside him and his wife, the artist Marian Zazeela. Harrison learned to tune Young’s custom Bösendorfer piano in Young’s Just Intonation tuning, sat next to the composer in concert when he performed his epic solo piano piece, The Well-Tuned Piano, and became the only other person to ever perform Young’s marathon work.

Among Harrison’s pedagogical accomplishments are the founding of the American Academy of Indian Classical Music in New York City and the Creative Music Intensive program at Arts, Letters & Numbers in Troy, New York. Among his awards and honors were numerous fellowships, including a Guggenheim in composition (2018).

Harrison created the “harmonic piano,” a modified grand piano capable of playing 24 notes per octave using just intonation. The instrument allows for “pure” tuning, creating rich, resonant, and often orchestral-sounding chords that combine Indian classical music ragas with Western classical and minimalist traditions. The piano is located in the archives of the Manhattan School of Music in New York City for study by composition students.

Appreciation of Harrison’s work was largely concentrated in music circles, where its other worldly sophistication was most fully recognized. Beginning with the trailer for the film Awakenings, however, he began to be identified for his collaborations with artists in other media. There was in 2012, Bill Morrison’s short film, Time Loops, in which Harrison’s score was performed by the cellist Maya Beiser. More recently, in 2024, he collaborated on an immersive installation with the Turner Award-winning artist, Laure Prouvost for the exhibition, ‘Au fort, les âmes sont’ [In the fort, souls are], presented at the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée (Mucem) in Marseille, France in 2025.

At the time of his death he was working on his Raga Cycle, an ambitious summation and synthesis of his lifetime of study and practice of Hindustani raga, which he received from his teachers Pandit Pran Nath and Ustad Mashkoor Ali Khan. The complete Cycle was to be a series of albums and book of piano compositions designed to chart the hours of the day; the first installment, Evening Light, was released in March on Cantaloupe Records.

Michael Harrison is survived by his wife Marina, his sister JoEllen, two nieces and two nephews.

Funeral Services