By RAYMOND LUSTIG

"Get your inscriptions here," reads the storefront sign for the inscriber's shop in Imperial Roman Palermo. Or something like that. It's difficult to know, really, because the sign is written in a combination of Latin and Greek and is grammatically correct in neither language—indicating that the business owner may have been a Carthaginian, left over from the days of the Punic War invasions into what is now Italy. No matter; the essential information is all there, and the meaning is communicated in spite of the words. Barriers of language have always existed in close quarters, and have always been overcome. This is not just a modern, American melting-pot phenomenon.

Stephen Hartke

Subjects like these—everyday meaning and communication, with the expansion and interactions of cultures throughout history—provide artistic inspiration for composer Stephen Hartke. Himself a deft communicator, Hartke's precise language and engaging manner reveal a man obsessed with meaning, an obsession borne out in every level in his work, from the clarity with which he sets text in vocal writing to the descriptive titles he chooses to invite the listener into his creative world.

Juilliard was pleased to welcome Hartke when he visited the Composition Forum on September 22, as part of what composer Robert Beaser (head of the composition department) referred to as a "mini-festival" of Hartke's music from September 18 through the 23. The six-day period saw the premiere of his Symphony No. 3 by the New York Philharmonic (joined by the Hilliard Ensemble), as well as the Merkin Hall performance by the Hilliard Ensemble of two vocal works.

Born in Orange, N.J., Hartke grew up in Manhattan and began his musical career as a professional boy chorister. He studied at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has been a Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, Italy (1991), and a Fulbright Senior Scholar. He was composer-in-residence with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra from 1988 to 1992, and has served on the composition and theory faculties at the University of Southern California since 1987. Hartke is one of the most important and regularly commissioned composers working today. Among his most performed works are Pacific Rim (1988) and The King of the Sun (1988).

Hartke's work is distinct from (but not reactionary toward) the high modernism that surrounded him as he came of age in the 1960s—the structuralism of Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt and the aleatoric approach of Cage. He was greatly influenced by George Rochberg's post-modern outlook, which broke with the rigidities of post-war serialism. Hartke pursued neither the hyper-expressivity of neo-romanticism nor the nearly static textures of minimalism, and developed a uniquely personal voice: solemn and humble, yet harmonically rich, vibrant in orchestration, and rhythmically complex. It is highly expressive, yet with a scholarly sense of austerity and restraint that gives his music a remarkably balanced sound. While his works are often for large orchestra, he rarely makes use of its full potential force. He is fond of shifting block sonorities, where chords seem to emerge from one another, and he makes use of choirs of mixed instruments which, in combination with his harmonies, yield rich, bell-like sounds. His orchestrational style has been compared to that of middle-period Stravinsky (whom he has written of as a spiritual mentor).

Introducing Hartke, Robert Beaser spoke of knowing him since 1974 when they were both students at Yale, and recalled Hartke's memorable Mass, performed that year. He was pleased they'd been able to keep in touch, and that he had been able to see Hartke develop and become successful. "He's written works that are really diverse and all totally personal … and always sound wonderful."

“We composers write the music we do because we like it. We do it as an offering to intrigue, please, entertain, stimulate, and move.”

In his talk to Juilliard's composers, Hartke discussed works of his whose processes highlight a particular creative concern of professional composers. The genesis of his Concerto for Clarinet (2001), subtitled Landscape With Blues, was a commission from the Iris Chamber Orchestra (named after the state flower of Tennessee), which Hartke described as "making inroads into turning itself into the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra of the South." The ensemble, conducted by Michael Stern, commissions a new work each year. Hartke's concerto was the commission for their inaugural season, with Richard Stoltzman as the soloist. The challenge Hartke faced was in reconciling the specificity of the commission with his own creative process. "Because it was their first season, they decided they wanted a piece that was more 'site-specific.' They wanted me to write a piece that would somehow reflect on American blues, paying tribute to delta blues in particular." As a composer inclined to immerse himself in a project and pursue it exhaustively, Hartke wasn't concerned with assimilating the sound world of the blues, but with the assignment's redundancy (as he perceived it at the time). "This was a little bit of a tough assignment for me in that I had already written a piece a long time ago called Oh Them Rats Is Mean in My Kitchen, which is about Tennessee blues. It meant I had to revisit the topic, and I usually don't like to revisit topics." Richard Stoltzman was instrumental in convincing Hartke that the blues could be freshly explored as an "integral part of the American musical landscape." Determined to make the new project completely distinct from the earlier work (which had focused on a specific blues song), Hartke, always a scholar, devised a composition about the "geographical trajectory" of the blues, illustrating something of the genre's history through the places from which it came.

He began with field research (selections from which he played at the Composition Forum). "The piece starts in West Africa with a reflection on a certain kind of West African music called griot, which is a tradition of praise singing that comes from the Senegal/Gambia region, one of many known sources for the blues." Griot has in common with American blues an extensive use of the pentatonic scale, and a speech rhythm that often runs counter to the rhythm of the instrumental ensemble. And, as in the blues, tension is often established with non-harmonic and sliding tones.

Hartke's experience with early music endowed him with a reverence for codified styles of a place and period, and a fascination with the merger (or lack thereof) between styles or languages, musical or otherwise, when they come in contact. He chose not to invoke earlier musical practices directly, but to evoke something of the world from which they were generated. Rather than trying to recreate the sound of blues from his own voice, he has created a work that takes more of a tone of tribute to this style and its practitioners.

This approach stands refreshingly apart from that of many post-modern composers, who are known to make liberal use of earlier styles as if they were their own. Hartke merges selected elements of blues—such as rhythmic incongruity of melody and accompaniment, use of the pentatonic, and texture based on ostinato—with his own singular voice. This is not always easy. Building a movement on an ostinato, for example, stands in stark contrast to his characteristically through-composed style. "It was tough to allow myself that," he admitted.

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Discussing his second selection—Tituli (1999), for five solo voices, violin, and percussion—Hartke wished to convey to us "the joy of writing for non-standard ensembles." Composers, especially young and emerging composers, are often concerned that their works receive multiple performances by different groups. One way to facilitate this is to write for a standard instrumentation, such as string quartet or brass quintet. Hartke rejects this notion as confining. "If the work is good, it will be performed," he asserted, pointing to Stravinsky's

L' Histoire du Soldat and his Octet, and to Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, as legendary works written for non-standard ensembles. Hartke's Tituli, performed the previous evening at Merkin Hall (and a frequently performed work in general), uses a unique ensemble including the elusive five-octave marimba. His latest symphony is also unusual in calling for a quartet of men's voices as soloists in a symphonic setting. "About half of what I do is for less-than-common ensembles," he observes. Yet he points out that this arises not from prankish obstinacy. "We composers write the music we do because we like it. We do it as an offering to intrigue, please, entertain, stimulate, and move."

It is clear that something in the challenge of inspiring repeated performances despite pragmatic concerns functions to spark Hartke's creativity. The Juilliard composers—with a wealth of eager performers available here—are in an ideal position to put Hartke's insights and advice to the test.

Raymond Lustig is a first-year master's student in composition.