From the NY Times: Looking for Just the Right Bit of Nastiness

From the NY Times:

Stephen Hartke: Looking for Just the Right Bit of Nastiness
http://nytimes.com/2003/08/24/arts/music/24TOMM.html

Looking for Just the Right Bit of Nastiness
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

"YOU have to know how to write a good dissonance," the composer Stephen
Hartke said recently from his home in Glendale, Calif., near Los
Angeles. The statement may sound slightly facetious, but Mr. Hartke
means it.

Typically, fledgling composers are taught harmony and counterpoint
according to more or less rigid, traditional rules, with dissonances
carefully chosen and studiously resolved. But when they write in
contemporary harmonic idioms and a nifty dissonance is called for,
young composers are too quick to think that any old combination of
pitches that produce some abrasive snarl of a chord will do. Not so,
says Mr. Hartke, and it's a point he impresses on composition majors at
the University of Southern California.

"I spend a lot of time with students on clarifying harmony," he said.
"I try to make them understand that even if you are writing post-tonal
music you have to think about voice-leading issues." Write nasty music,
Mr. Hartke would say. Go haywire if you choose, but make the pitches
matter.

His own works provide arresting examples of what he teaches. However
raucous, impish, jerky, fanciful or finespun a passage in a Hartke
composition, notes combine in dynamic ways, textures are lucid, details
are telling and colors are vividly applied. That is why Mr. Hartke,
whose Third Symphony will be given its premiere run by Lorin Maazel and
the New York Philharmonic beginning on Sept. 18 at Avery Fisher Hall,
has been widely praised for his excellent craftsmanship. Almost every
time I hear a Hartke piece on a contemporary-music program, it's the
one that startles, engages and stays with me the most.

Intrigued? Try Mr. Hartke's Violin Concerto, performed by the
Riverside Symphony with Michelle Makarski as soloist on a 1998 New
World CD, which also includes Mr. Hartke's Second Symphony.

The concerto begins with the crackling, almost unnerving sounds of
four percussionists banging drumsticks in unison patterns. The
violinist soon enters, doodling around like some country fiddler,
except that the skittish solo line is so rhythmically charged and
audaciously all over the place that the music sounds utterly serious as
well.

That the concerto is not going to be merely some postmodern romp
becomes clear when, out of nowhere, the orchestral strings play eerily
dissonant stirrings (yes, those nifty Hartke dissonances) in high
harmonics. Ominous stuttering brass chords emerge in the background,
sounding as if they had wandered in from a middle-period Stravinsky
piece, until the restless violin section begins a full-frontal
encounter with the suspiciously breezy soloist.

In this concerto, as in most of his works (the bracing piano quartet
"The King of the Sun"; the modern-day biblical "Sons of Noah," scored
with wondrous eclecticism for soprano and quartets of flutes, guitars
and bassoons), Mr. Hartke seems intent on surprising and amusing us
simultaneously. Bernard Holland aptly described this effect in a New
York Times review of "The Horse With the Lavender Eye," for violin,
clarinet and piano: "Mr. Hartke works hard to impress us, to make us
think, `There's a clever fellow.' He does and he is."

Over the years Mr. Hartke, 51, has had major works performed by the
Los Angeles Philharmonic, the London Symphony, the Moscow State
Philharmonic and other leading ensembles. But for whatever reason
(lingering antipathy between the music scenes on the East and West
Coasts?), New Yorkers have not had as many chances to hear his music.
That will change next month.

The major event will be the new symphony, which was commissioned by
the Philharmonic and features the four vocalists of the Hilliard
Ensemble. On Sept. 21, the Hilliard singers will perform two major
Hartke works written for them, "Tituli" and "Cathedral in the Thrashing
Rain," at Merkin Concert Hall. Around then ECM will release the
Hilliard's new recording of those works, and the same week, Naxos will
issue a Hartke CD featuring the clarinetist Richard Stoltzman and the
Iris Chamber Orchestra in "Landscape With Blues," a concerto for
clarinet and orchestra.

Mr. Hartke received the Philharmonic commission just 18 months ago.
The orchestra suggested, but did not insist, that since the performance
would fall close to the second anniversary of Sept. 11, Mr. Hartke
might want to touch on the occasion in some way, as John Adams did last
September in "On the Transmigration of Souls." Coincidentally, Mr.
Hartke was a member of the jury that awarded Mr. Adams's work the 2003
Pulitzer Prize for music.

Mr. Hartke wanted to write a symphony that dealt with Sept. 11 in some
manner, but he was not happy with the initial results.

"It was coming out like a big overblown statement," he said, "a New
York Philharmonic piece instead of a Stephen Hartke piece."

His composer colleague Joan Tower cautioned him about succumbing to the
grandeur of a major commission. "I thought incorporating a text into
the work would help," he said. "I found out that the Hilliard Ensemble
was available. Then I remembered this text I had long wanted to set."

The text was "The Ruin," an Old English elegy from the eighth or ninth
century, which Mr. Hartke first encountered in an undergraduate
literature class at Yale. The poet describes the ruins of a Roman city,
possibly Bath, and contrasts the observed decay with the imagined
splendor of what must have been. The poem "does not moralize," Mr.
Hartke said, but rather "celebrates the creative spirit of the city's
vanished residents."

Mr. Hartke has always seemed constitutionally incapable of writing
overblown or grandiose music. His language is far too tart, incisive
and economical for that. His harmonic thinking was strongly influenced
by his graduate studies with George Rochberg at the University of
Pennsylvania. At the time, postwar serialist composers claimed the
intellectual high ground and dominated many influential university
music departments. Mr. Rochberg had broken away and begun to write
works in a neo-Romantic vein.

During his university years, Mr. Hartke said, there seemed to be "a
mad rush to turn music into an academic discipline along the lines of
the sciences."

"I like to say they were being scientistic, since what they did
mimicked science but wasn't science," he added. "Our generation was
made to feel we had to come to grips with 12-tone music. We had a
psychic investment in it. I have to say my students today don't feel
any such obligation. Back then we would have considered them yahoos.
But my students have a lot of honesty."

Still, Mr. Hartke's musical language is spiked with astringent
harmony, and his impetuous thematic lines often zigzag in ways that
echo the 12-tone idiom. Does he consider himself a tonal composer?

"Yes," he answered without hesitation. "Music that makes sense to me
has a tonal glue. You need to feel that the pitches have working
relationships to other pitches hierarchically. I have a sense that all
my pieces have a key, which doesn't mean I can identify it."

Mr. Hartke freely admits that he does not like 12-tone music, even
Schoenberg's works in that style. Yet while he sticks it to the
serialists in his dynamic harmonic language, you may also sense a
composer working out the impact of their challenging aesthetic on his
own hearing.

The myriad styles Mr. Hartke heard as a Manhattan-raised baby boomer
strongly imprinted his ear, he says. Critics have pointed to the
influence of Stravinsky, bebop, rock, Balinese gamelan music and the
lush-textured Minimalism of the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen. Maybe
so.

"But I'm not a jazzer," Mr. Hartke said. "And I don't really like rock
music very much, though it was all around when I grew up and my music
totally reflects my experience as a listener. I just happen to write
music about my listening experience."

With notable exceptions, like the clarinet concerto, which has clearly
jazzy elements, Mr. Hartke's work rarely replicates any specific
musical style. "A composer's job is to transcend the models," he said.
"There is nothing Anglo-Saxon about my new symphony."

As an example of a composer who ingeniously absorbed yet transcended
diverse musical influences, Mr. Hartke picks, of all people, Haydn.
Haydn inherited "a rich variety of different affects, of expressive
musical characters," Mr. Hartke said. Think about it: Germanic
counterpoint, Italian opera, the bygone but still popular Rococo style,
Austro-German folk music, the sacred-music tradition of the Roman
Catholic Church, even the Viennese craze for Turkish music. But Haydn
juggled these elements into a new form of expression.

"Composers are at the same moment today, trying to juggle the rich
inheritance of modernism, world music and pop," Mr. Hartke said.
"Except it's no longer taboo to cross boundaries. We can sit back,
enjoy it all and let it come out through our personal filters."

Mr. Hartke's increasing East Coast presence was to have included the
premiere next summer of "Boule de Suif, or The Good Whore," a
full-length opera with a libretto by Philip Littell, adapted from the
short story by Guy de Maupassant. This production has already been
advertised by the Glimmerglass opera in Cooperstown, N.Y. But because
of a health concern within his family, Mr. Hartke cannot complete the
opera on schedule, he said. Since Glimmerglass's 2005 season is already
set, the premiere has been put off until 2006.

Mr. Hartke is so far pleased with his progress on the opera, a tale of
10 travelers fleeing the Prussian advance at the end of the
Franco-Prussian War. "Trying to get out of town with their wealth," Mr.
Hartke said, "they find themselves in the company of a famous
prostitute and wind up using her to secure their release."

Thinking back to our discussion of transcending musical influences,
Mr. Hartke reports that there is "nothing remotely 19th-century French"
about the work's harmonic language. Instead, listeners can expect lots
of those good Hartke dissonances.

---
Hanuman Zhang, musical mad scientist

"Welcome and explore and inquire into everything, new or old, that comes
your way, and then build your own music on whatever your inner life has been able
to take in and offer you back again." - Henry Cowell

"Music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but a
copy of the will itself, the objectivity of which are the Ideas. For this
reason, the effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is
that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music
of the essence." - Schopenhauer, _The World as Will and Representation_

"His music, far from being in the background of my life, was in the
foreground. It was he as a musician who accomplished what I dreamed of, and
I followed as well as I could with the inferior power of words. The ear is
purer than the eye, which reads only relative meaning into words. Whereas
the distillation of experience into pure sound, a state of music, is
timeless and absolute." -Anais Nin on her brother Joaquin Nin-Culmell

"...improvisation is about change, about flux rather than stasis. ...
improvisation is about a constant change." - Steve Beresford

improvisation: "a process of liberation, a working around the assumptions
that define our civilization, and the results are open-ended." - John Berndt

> >"Any sufficiently advanced music is indistinguishable from noise"

> >(after Arthur C. Clarke's aphorism that any sufficiently advanced

> >technology is indistinguisable from magic.) - John Chalmers, in response
to the quote "the difference between music and noise is all in your head"

"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the dream. Wandering by
lone sea breakers, and sitting by desolate streams. World losers and world
forsakers, for whom the pale moon gleams. Yet we are movers and the shakers of
the world forever it seems."
-<A HREF="http://www.quoteland.com/author.asp?AUTHOR_ID=708">Arthur
O'Shaunessey</A>