Stephen Hartke (b. 1952): Concerto for Clarinet and
Orchestra
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 the most recent work on
this recording, the 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. By rounding out this
disc with the 1998 string octet, The Rose of the Winds, an evocation of the austere
beauty of the American Southwest, and the imaginary landscape of Gradu-s
(1999), a tantalizing image is formed of one of the most singular voices in
American contemporary music.
Born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1952, Stephen Hartke grew up
in Manhattan, where he began his musical career as a professional boy
chorister, encountering 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.”
The earliest of the pieces featured here, Pacific Rim, is,
in many respects, one of the best representations of how Hartke’s fascination
as a listener to non-Western music has deeply informed one of his most widely
performed compositions. Composed in 1988 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary
season of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, with which he was then the newly
appointed composer-in-residence, the work is something of a musical portrait of
his adopted city of Los Angeles, where he had moved in 1987 to join the faculty
of the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California. In
structure the piece is quite straightforward, a prelude and fugue, but the
various musical elements combined within have quite disparate origins. For
example, the high opening chord, floating first in the strings, then in the
winds, is reminiscent of Japanese gagaku music. The pair of oboes stating the
basic melodic idea work with a scale related to that of the Javanese gamelan,
while the lively tread of their rhythm seems to breathe the atmosphere of a
Chinese New Year procession. Further, the formality of both the verse and
refrain structure and the use of the percussion to mark off in an almost
ritualistic way the beginnings of phrases, calls to mind many of the various
court musics of Asia, but here subsumed into a wholly new sort of sound world
which the composer has sometimes described as being “ethnomusicological
fiction”. But then the music suddenly turns a corner, and in a soft string
interlude crosses back over the Pacific, before ushering in the fugue. It
starts, quite arrestingly, with the initial statement of the subject played by
a pair of tuned cowbells, clearly drawing its rhythmic energy and layering
technique from the music of Latin America. In so doing, Hartke reminds us in
but the span of ten minutes of the complex cultural interplay, not only Asian
and Latino, but European-American as well, in America’s second city.
The string octet, The Rose of the Winds, represents
something of a shift away, if perhaps only a temporary one, from the bright
colors and exuberance of Pacific Rim. Commissioned for the 1998 Music from
Angel Fire chamber music festival, held near Taos, New Mexico, it was composed,
as the composer writes, “in anticipation of my first visit to northern New Mexico,
a place I had long wanted to see first-hand. While composing it, I kept a
beautiful book of photographs of the area propped open near my desk to a
wonderful shot of a single desert flower perched at the top of a dune against a
bright blue sky”. The piece unfolds then as an evocation of a journey in that
imagined landscape, with its quiet spaciousness, moving through ever more
animated phases suggesting various sounds of nature: insects, birds, wind and
rain. In the end, serenity reigns, with gentle singing and sonorous textures
not unlike the tolling of bells.
The small chamber sextet, Gradu-s, as with both of the
preceding pieces, has a celebrational aspect in that it was written as a gift
in honor of the 25th anniversary season of Anthony Korf’s New York-based
ensemble, Parnassus. The title makes a gently punning reference to both the
dedicatee and the musical treatise Gradu-s ad Parnassum.
It also invokes the idea of journey, for Hartke noted that
he saw in the piece an “image of a group of friends making their cheerful way
up to the abode of the Muses, pausing halfway along to gaze at the summit
before continuing on with renewed energy. I took the word gradus, Latin for
‘steps,’ to mean ‘dance-steps’ rather than ‘stairs,’ so my little processional
ends up being quite a bit more Dionysian than Apollonian”.
The most recent and longest of the works heard here quite
possibly makes the longest musical journey as well. The Clarinet Concerto
(2001), subtitled Landscape with Blues, was commissioned by the IRIS Chamber
Orchestra for Richard Stoltzman. In offering the commission, the orchestra’s
Executive Director, Albert Pertalion, asked for a work that might reflect in
some way on the heritage of Mississippi Delta Blues. As the composer notes
fondly, “he even took me on a whirlwind tour of blues country to get a feel for
the birthplace of one of America’s greatest musical traditions. From that trip,
I took away an indelible sense of the countryside, the heat and humidity, the
purple martens chasing mosquitoes at twilight”. But in its realization, the
piece goes much farther afield than that. It starts in the West African nations
of Senegal and The Gambia, or “Senegambia” as they are sometimes known, with
their great musical story-telling tradition known as griot singing, audibly one
of the roots of American blues. These audible links are heard in their
repetitive accompaniment patterns and rhythmically free, declamatory vocal
melodies that tend to begin high then work themselves down to a lower register.
Here, Hartke casts the clarinet solo as the griot, with the woodwinds engaging
in a sort of call and response chorus, all built over a repeated five-note bass
line.
The second movement, entitled Delta Nights recalls Hartke’s
impressions of the Delta, but just as importantly owes much to the novel, Train
Whistle Guitar, by Albert Murray, about his boyhood in a small African-American
community near the Delta during the heyday of the great itinerant bluesmen.
Hartke writes: “In Delta Nights, the soloist evokes a blues harmonica wailing
away in the night, and even the structure of the movement is loosely related to
a series of blues choruses. Moreover, some of the soloist’s turns of phrase are
derived from the opening motive of Cool Drink of Water Blues by Tommy Johnson,
one of my favorite bluesmen. But the predominant influence here was Murray’s
recollection of the excitement which fired his boyhood imagination, hearing the
distant sound of blues music drifting across the fields from juke joints that
he was too young to visit.”
The final movement, Philamayork, takes its title from Albert
Murray, a compound word he uses to denote the nearly mythical cities of the
North, where blues had gone and become a hard-driving urban music. Here
Hartke’s own New York roots are most apparent, and the movement unfolds almost
like a nightclub dance-set, starting with a blues, then a faster dance number,
a slow torchy ballad and some travelling music at the finish.
P.F. Bapp