HARRAN (Hirsch), DON

HARRAN (Hirsch ), DON (1936– ), Israeli musicologist. Born in the United States, Harran received his B.A. degree at Yale University in Romance languages, and then gained his M.A. and Ph.D. in musicology at Berkeley. In 1965 he settled in Israel and was among the small group of founders of the Musicology Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the first in the country, and became full professor in 1979. He was chair of the department, president of the Israeli Musicological Society, and vice president of the International Musicological Society. Harran earned a high international reputation as a meticulous, prolific, and original researcher. His primary area of specialization was the music of the Renaissance and early Baroque. His publications include more than a hundred articles and editions of late Italian madrigals and books on humanism in Italy, most importantly, Word-Tone Relations in Musical Thought: From Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century (Musicological Studies & Documents, 40, Neuhausen-Stuttgart: Hänssler-Verlag for the American Institute of Musicology, 1986). His life-long project has been the monumental critical edition of the music of Salamone Rossi (c. 1570–c. 1628), the great Jewish composer, on whom he also published an extensive monograph: Salamone Rossi, Jewish Musician in Late Renaissance (Mantua, Oxford University Press, 1999). In recent years he has focused on the research of Jewish music in later periods, as well as on studies of the setting of Psalm verses.

[Jehoash Hirshberg (2^nd ed.)]