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Stephen Hartke, born July 6, 1952, in Orange, New Jersey, was raised in Manhattan, where he began his musical career as a professional boy soprano. As a member of the boys' choir of the Church of the Transfiguration (The Little Church Around the Corner) he sang with the New York Pro Musica, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and other organizations. Hartke began his compositional studies in New York with Leonardo Balada at the United Nations International School. At Yale University, where he received his undergraduate degree, Hartke's principal teachers were James Drew and Alejandro Planchart. He earned advanced degrees in composition at the University of Pennsylvania with George Rochberg and with Edward Applebaum and Peter Racine Fricker at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
After working in music publishing on the East Coast and spending a year in Brazil as visiting professor at the University of São Paulo on a Fulbright Senior Scholars Fellowship, Hartke joined the music faculty of the University of Southern California in 1987. He served four seasons as composer-in-residence with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and in 1991 was awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. Hartke has also received an ASCAP Foundation grant, a Kennedy Center Friedheim Award, a Louisville Orchestra Prize, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and many other honors.
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Stephen Hartke is concerned not with effect, but with affect, not with novel sounds or concepts but with all the sounds, concepts, and experiences that affect him and could affect his listeners. He is not eclectic, but synthesistic. His background, from its precocious beginnings in New York to its professional and scholastic direction ever since, might lead the listener to expect an insular, self-consciously conservative or pretentiously "experimental" style. However, such is not the case. Hartke's music capitalizes not only on the breadth of his musical experience and on his general erudition, but also on the musical experience of his generation, which grew up enjoying access through recordings and broadcasts to many different musical eras, genres and languages. Where another composer might respond to this embarrassment of musical riches with pastiche, theoretical game-playing, technical experiment and elaborate mannerisms of all kinds, Hartke manifests his exposure to myriad musics--and to other modes of expression--by forging an integral musical voice of his own.
One rudimentary but significant synthesis Hartke realizes in his work is that of melody with color. Such a combination might be regarded as a reconciliation of popular and avant garde idioms, but in his composing it is organic. Rather than thinking of color as a substitute for melodic or even harmonic profile, Hartke sees it as a crucial and natural source of resonance and contrast. (In this respect he reflects the influence of two of modern music's great individualists, Bartók and Messiaen.) He achieves his color through astringent instrumentation (the professed influence of Stravinsky) and a liberal employment of unusual (if no longer untraditional) instrumental sounds--high partial string harmonics, for instance, or the manual damping of piano strings. Color for Hartke is at once a harmonic function and a distinctive presence, the spice that brings out melodic piquancy.
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