Frederick E. Harris, Jr.

  • Senior Lecturer in Music
  • Director of Wind and Jazz Ensembles
Email
fharris@mit.edu
Office
W18-3314
Phone
(617) 452-2283

Dr. Frederick E. Harris, Jr. is the Director of Wind and Jazz Ensembles at MIT, where he serves as Music Director of the MIT Wind Ensemble, MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble, and Jazz Coordinator, overseeing MIT jazz performance and the Emerson/Harris Jazz Scholars program.

Harris has been highly active with public school students and music educators throughout his career, leading seminars, guest conducting, and coordinating enrichment events at MIT and beyond. He is founder/conductor of the Groton Hill Wind Ensemble, a youth ensemble at the Groton Hill (MA) Music Center. 

At MIT he has created and led various projects on themes of social and environmental justice including It Must Be Now!, creating music and visual art on themes of racial justice, Hearing Amazonia, combining Brazilian music and environmental research, and Solar Return for Change, amplifying the climate challenge through music, research, and advocacy. He has led music-science-impact trips for MIT music students to Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and the Brazilian Amazon. 

Harris and the MIT Wind Ensemble have been featured on NPR and PBS in the 2014 Emmy-winning documentary Awakening: Evoking the Arab Spring through Music, with music by Jamshied Sharifi. Harris and his students also are featured in the 2018 Emmy-winning documentary Imagination Off The Charts: Jacob Collier Comes to MIT, and the Emmy-nominated documentaries The Great Clarinet Summit and We Are The Forest.

Harris is a strong advocate for the creation and performance of new music, having commissioned and/or premiered over 200 works for wind, jazz, and mixed ensembles, leading pieces by John Harbison, Gunther Schuller, Jamshied Sharifi, Chick Corea, Don Byron, Guillermo Klein, Jacob Collier, and Miguel Zenón, among others. The joint MIT Wind Ensemble and MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble recording Infinite Winds on Sunnyside Records, was awarded the highest rating by DownBeat magazine (5 stars), and was chosen as one of DownBeat magazine’s “Best Albums of 2015: Masterpieces.” 

Author of Conducting with Feeling and Seeking the Infinite: The Musical Life of Stanisław Skrowaczewski, Harris is currently is writing a biography of Herb Pomeroy. He has published articles/book chapters related to conducting, jazz, and wind ensemble performance.

Nominated by his students, Harris is a 2013 and 2019 recipient of the James A. and Ruth Levitan Award for Excellence in Teaching in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at MIT. He was awarded the 2010 Paul Smith Hall of Fame Award from the Massachusetts Instrumental and Choral Conductors Association. In 2025 he received the Dennis Wrenn Distinguished Music Educator Advocacy Award presented by Boston’s Arts Learning, and in 2026 he became the first MIT music faculty member to receive the 2026 MIT Martin Luther King, Jr. Leadership Award for advancing equity, compassion, and community empowerment. 

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