HARTKE, STEPHEN (b 1952 )
Much of Stephen Hartke’s music is concerned with
communicating a sense of place, from the cultural mix
of Asian and Latin elements in the concert overture
Pacific Rim of 1988 to his Clarinet Concerto “Landscapes with
Blues,” a piece that reflects his interest in the rhythms
of West...
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Much of Stephen Hartke’s music is concerned with
communicating a sense of place, from the cultural mix
of Asian and Latin elements in the concert overture
Pacific Rim of 1988 to his Clarinet Concerto “Landscapes with
Blues,” a piece that reflects his interest in the rhythms
of West Africa, his own New York roots, and the great
blues tradition of the Mississippi Delta. One of
the most singular voices in American contemporary
music, Stephen Hartke was born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1952, and grew up in Manhattan, where he began his
musical career as a professional boy chorister.
He encountered at an early age much of the music which
has shaped his language ever since: the plainchant of
medieval liturgical drama, the music of Machaut and
Dufay, the great Tudor composers, especially Tallis
and Weelkes, as well as the music of Britten and
Stravinsky. But equally important to his evolution as a
composer, he came of age in the New York of the
Uptown/Downtown divide of the late 1960s, in which
the structuralist atonality of Carter and Babbitt was
pitted against the chance music of Cage and the
happenings of Kaprow. While enjoying many aspects
of both, Hartke has written that his sense of the
expressive limitations inherent in these approaches
sharpened his awareness of a “need for variety of
effect, not just from piece to piece but within
individual pieces, such as one encounters all the time
in Beethoven, but never, for example, in the high
modernism of Boulez”, and while not alone in
reacting against the excesses of the various avant
garde movements, Hartke’s response has not been to
move in a neo-romantic direction; indeed, as Alex
Ross observed in his article in the New Grove on
Hartke, “his music tends to avoid the lush textures and
cinematic gestures common to many composers of
that school.” Rather he has constructed a highly
personal language based on an often-stated objective
of wanting to write music reflective of his “personal
experience as a listener, as a fellow member of the
audience.”