Composers’ Presentations
The other side of Music10 – the composing side – revolves around the festival’s principal composers: Joel Hoffman, Stephen Hartke, and Martin Bresnick. These three composers give presentations on their music and masterclasses in which they critique the student composers’ works, and eighth blackbird performs works by each of the resident composers in various concerts.
Stephen Hartke presented on his own music Tuesday evening, and Joel Hoffman presented on Friday (Martin Bresnick presents later this week). Both of the composers discussed and played recordings of several of their own works.
The part of Hartke’s presentation that I enjoyed the most was his discussion of Tituli, a work he composed in 1999 for the Hilliard Ensemble, a violinist, and two percussionists. The work is based on some of the oldest surviving Latin texts: fragments of inscriptions found on everything from jars used in religious ceremonies to shop signs. He discussed not only the circumstances of his life that led him to want to compose a piece based on these texts, but also how these experiences affected his aesthetic approach to the texts.
Hartke first got the idea for the piece while he was a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Apparently, the Academy, through its connections to various academic circles, organises trips for its scholars to archaeological sites that are closed to the public. Hartke said that the idea of people visiting the ruins, looking at what is left of them, imagining a monumental structure that used to stand in that spot but no longer does, inspired not only his choice of texts but also his approach in setting the texts to music. He sought to compose a piece that similarly was made up of fragments, recreating in sound the effect of looking at these incomplete ruins.
I also enjoyed hearing what Hartke had to say about orchestration. One of the things I have learned at Music10 is that composers discuss orchestration and timbre in far greater detail, and in far more practical terms, than any musicologists or theorists that I know. So naturally, one of the students’ questions toward the end of his presentation had to deal with his choice of instruments. Hartke tends to compose pieces for very unconventional groupings – I believe the point in the presentation when he began discussing orchestration was just after he played an excerpt from his oratorio, scored for soprano, four flutes, four guitars, and four bassoons. He said that in order to get his students to think critically about different instruments’ capabilities, he encourages them to perform thought experiments. For example: if you have two notes, and you want them to be played by a flute and an oboe, how would the specific overtones of each instrument affect the composite sound of the two notes together, if the oboe played the higher and the flute the lower note, or vice versa?
Hoffman began his presentation by talking about a “radical shift” in his compositional style that began about ten months ago. He said that he felt the need for a completely different approach to timbre, and especially to the use of silence. In his own words, before this shift, the silence in his pieces would be carved out of sound; now, he is carving sound out of silence, sometimes composing only one sonority for every ten or twenty seconds of silence. I was impressed that he would talk so candidly to all of the students about what must be a very personal and difficult process to undertake at this point in his career.
Although the two composers talked about quite different topics, one idea that recurred throughout both of their presentations was the importance of intuition. Hartke said that he didn’t really think about form before composing, but rather allowed the form to emerge from the materials he was working with. He also said that he didn’t much care to “justify” his choice of notes at any particular moment. As he put it: “You can justify anything in music by saying ‘this note is here because it is not over there!’ ” Hoffman came back to this idea in his own presentation when discussing his recent stylistic shift. He said he had no real explanation or justification for his new approach to composition, but at the same time, he said that he absolutely had to do it. Both agreed that the point of learning the craft of composition and studying the music of other composers was to make it possible to compose using “informed intuition” – and as Hoffman and Hartke have matured, they have both relied increasingly on their own intuition.
As great as performing all this new music is, I think my favourite part of the festival so far is gaining these kinds of insights into the world of composition.
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