Ian Keith Harris
Australian composer
Ian Keith Harris (24 June 1936 – 3 April 2024) was an Australian composer of classical music, arranger, oboist, critic and music educator.
Life and career
Ian Keith Harris was born in Melbourne, living there for the first 26 years of his life. He started the piano at the age of five, playing cornet in his school band, then violin for a couple of years at high school, and later was a school pianist. In 1952, he began his Bachelor of Music degree at Melbourne University Conservatorium of Music, taking piano as chief study and oboe as second. Later, he changed to oboe as his chief study and studied composition with Jiři Tancibudek and Arthur Nickson.
He was soon in demand as a freelance orchestral musician, arranger and copyist, working in an eclectic mix of musical spheres from arrangement for television and various theatrical shows to playing in opera, ballet, chamber music and symphony orchestras. He was a founding member of the Glendenian Trio (flute, oboe, bassoon), which gave regular broadcasts over several years. The trio was another area in which his arrangement skills were frequently employed.
He served some years as an oboist for J. C. Williamson theatres, playing musicals, opera, and several Gilbert and Sullivan Opera seasons, several ballet seasons (Borovansky Ballet), Australian tours of the Royal Covent Garden Ballet, and the American Ballet Company, and as a copyist / arranger with GTV channel 9. In 1961 Ian Harris moved to Hobart, Tasmania (Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra), was seconded to the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (cor anglais) for several months, returned to Tasmania only to be seconded again 1964, this time to the Victorian Symphony Orchestra (oboe).
“Ian Keith Harris” enters the record as australian composer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Keith, Harris and Australian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Ian Keith Harris” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Keith, Harris and Australian provides the most credible route into that argument.
Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16104449. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1936, 2024, 1952 and 1961.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ian Keith Harris” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.