Harman, Carter
Harman, Carter
Harman, Carter, American music critic, recording-firm executive, and composer; b. N.Y, June 14, 1918. He studied with Sessions at Princeton Univ. (B.A., 1940) and continued his studies at Columbia Univ. (M.A., 1949). He was a music critic for the N.Y. Times (1947–52) and later music ed. of Time magazine (1952–57); from 1958 to 1967 he lived in Puerto Rico, where he became president of the West Indies Recording Corp. In 1967 Harman became producer and executive vice-president of Composers Recordings, Inc., in N.Y, devoted mainly to recording contemporary American music; was its executive director from 1976 to 1984. He publ. A Popular History of Music from Gregorian Chant to Jazz (N.Y, 1956; rev. 1968). Among his compositions are the ballet Blackface (N.Y, May 18, 1947), 2 children’s operas: Circus at the Opera (1951) and Castles in the Sand (1952), children’s songs, and Alex and the Singing Synthesizer, an entertainment of electronically synthesized nursery rhymes (1974–77).
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire