USC composer Stephen Hartke at home, doing what he does best. Photograph by Philip Channing

Issue: Winter 2004

Pure of Hartke

New-music cognoscenti have prized his purposeful, inventive voice for nearly 25 years. But since 2003 – the year one critic dubbed his “coming-out party” – even the uninitiated have started to spark to the ism-less art of Stephen Hartke.

By Diane Krieger

Stephen Hartke isn’t prone to sentimentality, but there was something downright poignant about ascending this stage, with this orchestra, under these circumstances. On the podium stood maestro Lorin Maazel; behind him, the New York Philharmonic. Straight ahead, on its feet and clapping hard, a crowd of urbane New Yorkers. There had been more than a few world premieres in the 51-year-old composer’s life, but nothing quite like this. It felt like a homecoming.

The date: Thursday, September 18, 2003.

The occasion: opening night at the New York Philharmonic.

Headlining the program: Stephen Hartke’s newly composed Symphony No. 3, commissioned by Maazel in commemoration of the 9/11 attacks of two years before. Scored for orchestra and four voices, it featured Hartke’s favorite a cappella group, the all-male Hilliard Ensemble.

Hartke takes his bow with the New York Philharmonic at the world premiere of his Symphony No. 3. Photo by Chris Lee

In his review published a few days later, New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini would all but genuflect: “That [Hartke] is one of the most accomplished and interesting composers working today was clear during every moment of the Philharmonic’s luminous and involving account of this 30-minute, single-movement symphony.”

But Hartke didn’t know or much care about that on Thursday night. He’d been writing music to please himself and his audiences all his life, critics be damned. There had been fat years and lean years, accolades and snubs. And it had all pretty much started here, at Avery Fisher Hall.

Forty years ago, a 10-year-old Hartke had climbed this stage for the first time, a singer with the city’s esteemed Church of the Transfiguration Boys Choir. Thomas Schippers had held the baton back then. It had been the New York Phil’s very first season in Lincoln Center, and the work being premiered was Francis Poulenc’s majestic Sept Repons des Tenebres, what would be his last choral work.

“And 40 years down the road, there I was having a world premiere of a big, bold piece with the New York Philharmonic,” Hartke reflects, sitting back in the study of his Glendale home nearly a year later. “I have a special feeling for this big work, being done by this band, in that hall, being on the stage and part of it, on opening night.”

Writing a year ago, music critic Mark Stryker of the Detroit Free Press described fall 2003 as Stephen Hartke’s “coming-out party.” But to those in the know, Hartke is no Johnny-come-lately. With nearly 30 major works and a dozen professional recordings to his credit, Hartke is every bit the “young lion” that the New York Times’ Paul Griffiths calls him. (“It’s funny,” Hartke says, musing on the “young” epithet. “When Brahms was 50, he felt that he was done. In his letters he described himself as an old man.”)

Hartke is just hitting his stride. In the hopper right now is a piano concerto, a piece for chorus, oboe and strings and an opera based on a short story by Guy de Maupassant. Hartke says he and librettist Philip Littel, a frequent collaborator, have five more operas plotted out and awaiting commissions.

Behind him, there’s a trail of achievements. A Fulbright in São Paolo in 1984 and the Kennedy Center Friedheim Award in 1985, a composer-in-residency at the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra beginning in 1988, the Prix de Rome in 1991, a Guggenheim in 1997, and a win in the Masterprize International Composing Competition in 1998. His Tituli was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2001. In 2002, he was tapped for the Pulitzer’s judging panel. And early in 2003, three new all-Hartke CDs on different labels arrived in record stores. Then, a month after his new symphony’s world premiere, Hartke got the call from the New York-based American Academy of Arts and Letters notifying him that its coveted Charles Ives Living Award was his. A composer’s dream come true, the Ives guarantees three years of uninterrupted creativity. The $225,000 stipend frees (indeed, obliges) Hartke to drop everything, including his teaching duties at USC, and work exclusively on new commissions through 2007.

You won’t find the home of composer Stephen Hartke on an architectural tour of Los Angeles. It’s an unassuming three-bedroom ranch, with a converted garage where his wife, Lisa Stidham, has her voice studio.

Travel souvenirs and bric-a-brac decorate the mantle. The bookshelves are tightly packed with classics of world literature, ancient history tomes, dictionaries and grammars of exotic languages. A child’s assorted pinch pots, Lego fortresses and penguin collection share space with finer folk objects, like the wood-carved Peruvian coatimundi that was Hartke’s 50th birthday gift from his wife. There’s nothing to give away that here dwells a celebrated artist, a bonafide genius and a living American treasure. But then very little about Stephen Hartke is the way it seems on the surface.

A baby-boomer, Hartke was born in Orange, N. J., the son of a salesman with Bethlehem Steel. His family swam against the tide of urban flight, leaving the suburbs for the Big Apple just as the 1960s were getting interesting. Tired of commuting, Hartke’s father sold the car and rented a place on the East Side of Manhattan. Though George Hartke had little formal musical education, he had a keen ear. An early audiophile, he built his own stereos and collected jazz and classical albums.

As far back as Hartke can remember, he was mesmerized by concert music. At 6, his favorite recording was Benjamin Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.” His idea of fun with crayons was copying instruments from the Harvard Dictionary of Music. He recalls fashioning a toy bassoon out of a mailing tube and pipe cleaner. It wasn’t just the shapes he adored; it was the sounds. A favorite was the pipe organ at church, where George Hartke sang in the choir.

Soon young Stephen was in a choir of his own – a rather good one. At age 9, he became a professional boy chorister at the historic “Little Church Around the Corner.”

“The standards were very high, and the repertoire was excellent, especially in early music,” he says. “It turned out to be really my key musical training ground.” When not chanting masses, the boys choir freelanced with orchestras and opera companies around the city. Hartke never got solo parts; in time his voice would mature to a serviceable baritone, but it was never anything to write home about.

He didn’t mind: being in the limelight wasn’t important. “I just wanted to be around the music,” he says, “to hear the pieces and be a part of it, to hang out with other professional musicians.”

Composition clearly was where he was headed. “I tried to write music about as soon as I could read it,” Hartke recalls. “At first, I didn’t know what one was supposed to compose.” Since the boys choir sang masses, at 10 Hartke dashed off his first opus: a four-page mass that, happily, was never performed. Then one day the choirmaster handed him a recording of a symphony by Samuel Barber. Hartke remembers his shock: “You mean, Americans can write classical music?” he marveled at the time. “I thought we could only write rock ’n’ roll and musicals” – genres that distinctly did not appeal.

Suddenly new vistas opened. Emulating Barber, Hartke tried his hand at a symphony. That childish effort, along with much of his juvenilia, sadly was lost in an apartment fire.

Music wasn’t Hartke’s only interest, however. His erudite mom, Priscilla Elfrey, nurtured in him a passion for world literature. “She is an indefatigable seeker after knowledge, a thinker of the first order,” he says of his mother. “It was from watching her own single-mindedness and concentration that I learned to focus on what mattered most to me.”

As a scholarship student attending New York’s elite United Nations International School, Hartke received an unusually rich education. Steeped in the city’s avant-garde art scene, he made a reputation for himself as a maverick in a school full of mavericks. He started up a literary journal, and he experimented with pop-art collages. He editorialized in the school newspaper under a pseudonym and organized elaborate “happenings” at school assemblies. One year he staged a spoof of Verdi’s Macbeth, setting classmates to lip-synch in Italian while fighting hanky battles and fencing with a plumber’s helper. “Stephen has never accepted the general view of things,” says Carl Miller, his best friend from UNIS and now a molecular biologist at UCLA.

Instruction at the polyglot UNIS was a mix of French and English; teachers came from places like Nigeria, Ireland, Austria. None influenced Hartke more than the middle school music director, an up-and-coming composer from Barcelona named Leonardo Balada. Desperate to learn, Hartke offered his services to Balada as copyist and amanuensis. Short on cash, he bartered for the composer’s time: “We had a deal: I babysat his kid on demand and he gave me private lessons.”

For all his drive and persistence, no one ever accused Hartke of being a prodigy. “I grew up in an era and a place where praise was doled out very sparingly,” he says. “Words like ‘talent’ were not bandied about. I went to a school where the teachers said, ‘A’s are for God.’ I try to get my students at USC to understand that,” he cracks.

Stephen Hartke’s music is original. The New York Times’ Anthony Tommasini counts him among a handful of “exciting younger composers who defy categorization.” Other critics have described him as “paying no dues to specific compositional schools or isms” – that was the Los Angeles Times’ Josef Woodard, reviewing an all-Hartke CD in 1998. “It’s beside the point to try to classify Mr. Hartke’s harmonic language, which is loosely grounded in tonality but spiked with atonal complexities,” Woodard wrote. “What matters is that every sound in a Hartke piece has been precisely realized by a composer with an extraordinary ear.”

Some have pointed to the influence of Stravinsky, bebop, rock and Balinese gamelan. But whenever someone asks about the imprint of his teachers – who have included composers George Crumb, George Rochberg, Leonardo Balada, Ed Applebaum and Peter Racine Fricker – Hartke takes a figurative step back: “You can learn from your teachers without the teacher being ‘an influence’ on you,” he retorts. “Crumb was embarrassed when composers imitated him. He tended to choose students who were not aping his style.”

For lack of an ism, it’s safest to say that Hartke’s music is quintessentially Hartkean.

“He very definitely has his own personal style,” says USC composer Donald Crockett, who characterizes that style as tonal, in an abstract way. “There’s a sense of one note of a chord being important,” he says. “There’s a sense of writing in a diatonic scale with chromatic inflection, rather than all 12 tones being present and equal.”

Crockett vividly recalls the first time he saw a Hartke score. It was 23 years ago; they were both doctoral students at UC Santa Barbara. Over coffee at the student union, they exchanged sheets of music. “I noticed right off that Stephen’s had key signatures,” recalls Crockett. “In the early ’80s, that was a very bold political statement.”

Hartke is no neo-Romantic though. “His love is for a kind of lyricism you find before Bach, even before the Renaissance,” says Crockett. He compares Hartke’s use of musical sources to that of Béla Bartók, whose great achievement had been injecting folk themes deep into his music without resorting to parody or pastiche. “Stephen doesn’t quote Purcell; he just infuses his music with that influence. In the same way, Stephen takes his love of the Renaissance and Stravinsky, Ives or Messiaen, and puts those things into his music.”

That’s as it should be. “The composer’s job is to transcend the models,” Hartke told the New York Times’ Tommasini in 2003, pointing out that “there is nothing Anglo-Saxon about my symphony [No. 3].” (The work is a setting of “The Ruin,” an anonymous 9th-century elegy that Hartke himself translated from the Old English. The text describes the narrator coming upon the ruins of an ancient Roman city and responding with awe, pity and wonder.)

The Los Angeles Times’ Herbert Glass described Hartke’s music as “instantly appealing (without populist pandering).” That was with reference to Hartke’s The King of the Sun, a set of musical tableaux based on paintings by Joan Miró. Reviewing the work’s 1990 West Coast premiere in UCLA’s Royce Hall, Glass detected, among other things, “a medieval hoedown, patches of plainchant and at nearly every turn, rhythmic vitality and respect for the audience’s intelligence as well as its desire to be entertained.”

Remarkably well-read and proficient in a half-dozen languages – including several dead ones – is it any wonder that Hartke has no taste for pandering to the lowest common denominator? Quite the opposite, really.

With his penchant for obscure medieval references, Roman antiquities and translations from Portuguese, Japanese and Anglo-Saxon poets, he would seem to run a greater risk of pretentious effetism. But there’s very little danger of that happening, thanks to a dry, sometimes wicked sense of humor.

Hartke tends to give his pieces playful names, in line with the whimsical sources of his inspiration. His Ascent of the Equestrian in a Balloon, for example, draws on a favorite 18th-century engraving depicting, absurdly, a mounted rider on a platform being lifted skyward by hot-air balloons. A violin duo titled Oh Them Rats Is Mean in My Kitchen, inspired by a traditional blues tune, imagines the impudence of rodents who know they run the place. At the end of Tituli (Latin for “inscriptions”), Hartke anachronistically “inscribes” himself and collaborators Michelle Makarski and the Hilliard Ensemble into the libretto’s otherwise authentic Roman fragments.

Stephanus scripsit. Hilliardi canerunt.
Makarska sociique modulati sunt. Salve.

Yet this playfulness is deceptive. Hartke takes music, his own in particular, very, very seriously.

“However raucous, impish, jerky, fanciful or finespun a passage in a Hartke composition, notes combine in dynamic ways, textures are lucid, details are telling and colors are vividly applied. That is why Mr. Hartke … has been widely praised for his excellent craftsmanship,” the New York Times’ Tommasini wrote in an overview of the composer’s career a month before the much-anticipated Symphony No. 3 premiere. “For all the punch and fun,” Tommasini wrote in an earlier 1998 review of The Horse With the Lavender Eye, “this is rigorous, lean and modern music.”

Hartke entered Yale in 1970, thinking to major in history. Though he ultimately concentrated in composition, he managed a fair number of courses in history and medieval studies, including Old and Middle English. An outstanding student, he qualified for the elite Scholar of the House program, which basically allowed him to design his own major.

For his senior thesis, Hartke wrote a 25-minute chamber symphony scored for 20 instruments. He called it Passion, Poison and Petrifaction, after a play by G.B. Shaw. Passion premiered at a New York music festival and was later reprised in New Haven. Alas, laments the composer, “it’s not a great piece. But it was ambitious.”

The New York Times disrespectfully agreed. “Horn calls evoke Mahler and Bruckner, strings whine soulfully, and in the midst of a cheap semi-classical cadenza, the solo piano blandly quotes the ‘Tristan’ prelude…” wrote critic Donal Henahan in his scathing 1973 review. “Less predictably, Hartke stirs some bad 1950-ish jazz into his aspic, along with many heavy allusions to 19th-century clichés.”

Three new CDs, released within months of each other, helped make 2003 a banner year for Stephen Hartke. To hear a sample of his music, go to http://uscnews.usc.edu/music Photo by Mark Tanner

To be sure, Hartke has little use for critics, but it’s surely a mark of his level-headedness – and his offbeat sense of humor – that his Web site, which Hartke himself authored, faithfully presents reviews both negative and positive. (Select “Reviews” from his homepage at http://home.earthlink.net/~stephenhartke/New/Home.html to see the hurrahs. Finding the stinkers requires a bit more ingenuity: Click on the unlabeled iridescent button at the bottom of the “Review” page to see where Hartke stores more pans than a pie shop.)

But he gives as good as he gets. He has more than once publicly critiqued the critics. In a 2001 column for the Los Angeles Times’ Counterpunch section – responding to a scathing review of a USC Thornton School student concert – he fearlessly accosted the Times’ own Mark Swed for “sneering condescension” and got in a poke for good measure at “the deadly hatchet-wielding technique” of the retired Martin Bernheimer.

“I just got irritated by him,” says Hartke, when asked whether that was such a smart move. “And I have to tell you, I have never gotten so many e-mails and letters about something I’d done. I sort of wish people reacted to my music as positively.”

After graduating from Yale, Hartke temporarily turned his back on music, heading instead for Cambridge to study Anglo-Saxon along with a bit of Old Irish, Old Norse and Middle Welsh. “I had this strange idea that I would support myself by teaching Old English,” he grins. “I was trying to avoid having to teach music.” When he ran out of funds, Hartke came back home to study composition with George Rochberg at the University of Pennsylvania.

Hartke’s first symphony – not counting that childish opus inspired by Barber – was his master’s thesis. It has never been recorded, and Hartke fervently hopes it never will be. “If I could take the number back, I would. But the piece is registered with BMI, and that’s that,” he sighs.

Then Hartke took a long hiatus: four years as an advertising manager with different New York music publishing houses. The composer isn’t ashamed of this detour. “I like music publishing,” he says. “I enjoyed being in the business, and I was actually rather good at it. I had a great memory for the catalogue.” But the eight-hour days and trade shows left little space for creativity. “I wasn’t getting anything done,” he confides.

In 1980, he applied for a fellowship in UC Santa Barbara’s composition doctoral program. “I kind of did it on a lark,” he says. “I didn’t come out here with any intention of staying – just to get my doctorate, get my union card and see what happens.”

The lark turned out to be the most important move of his life. “Curiously enough, even though I went to two other fancy schools, the important contacts of my life were all made at Santa Barbara.”

He is referring to wife Lisa Stidham, USC Thornton School colleague Don Crockett and professional violinists Ron Copes and Michelle Makarski.

It was music historian Alejandro Planchart, now an emeritus professor at UC Santa Barbara, who brought this nucleus of artist-friends together. Planchart had been Hartke’s composition professor at Yale. When the young composer first came to Isla Vista, Planchart gave him a place to sleep and hooked him up with a few musicians. Among them was Hartke’s future wife, then a graduate student in musicology. “I’ve never told Stephen this,” confides the Venezuelan music historian, who was best man at their wedding, “but I could tell right away that Lisa had made quite an impression. When Stephen was talking about her later that night, he switched to Portuguese – which is his favorite language, and for him, the language of poetry and emotion.”

Crockett and Hartke also struck up an instant and lasting friendship: a few years later, he helped bring Hartke to USC. As for Copes and Makarski, the former premiered Hartke’s solo violin piece, Caoine (pronounced “keen,” from the Gaelic for “dirge”), and the latter recorded it on her 2000 album of the same name. When Hartke’s son was born, they named him Alexander (Sandy) for Alejandro Planchart.

Despite his early reluctance to teach music, Hartke has matured into an exceptional teacher. Crockett describes him as “incredibly brilliant, scary brilliant.” USC composition student Tom Osborne acknowledges that “some people misread Hartke. Because he’s such a highly respected musician, people take what he says too seriously sometimes. He can be brutally honest.” But Osborne, who says he has greatly enjoyed studying with him, says Hartke is nothing like the “stuffy old European model of composers, who expect their students to worship them like pagan gods. I disagree with him sometimes, and that doesn’t get under his skin.”

Hartke responds: “I’m certainly not trying to get my students to be versions of me. God, that would be awful!”

Such candor is one of Hartke’s striking idiosyncracies. Ask and you’ll learn that he cordially dislikes all Brahms’ symphonies, yet he prides himself on never letting personal tastes get in the way. Once he gave a pre-concert lecture at the L.A. Phil on Dvorák’s Symphony No. 7. “I think people came away with the impression that I love the piece, when in fact I can barely stay awake through it,” he says.

“Stephen is both one of the most learned and most articulate composers I know,” says his old mentor, Planchart.

“His knowledge of the entire repertoire, from Gregorian chant to post-modernism, is enormous. It’s even greater than that of somebody like Pierre Boulez. The only other composer with that kind of cultural background is Elliott Carter.”

Hartke frequently brings this erudition to bear as a USC Thornton School faculty member. Besides one-on-one teaching in composition, Hartke is noted for original graduate courses in special topics, like the one on Stravinsky and the Ballets Russes that he team-taught with USC theater and Slavic languages professor Sharon Carnicke.

“He has a deep understanding of music’s place in a research university,” says music historian Janet Johnson. She and Hartke both joined the USC faculty in 1987 and have been close friends ever since. She calls him “my most respected colleague at the music school,” and that’s saying quite a lot given USC Thornton’s long list of superstars. “It’s fantastic to talk over courses with him,” Johnson says. “He has ideas about music and shares them generously.”

Not only ideas, actually. Two years ago, when Johnson was planning her wedding, Hartke presented her with an unpublished arrangement of two Shetland bridal tunes he’d written for his own nuptials. “It was wonderful and very meaningful,” says Johnson, who hired USC musicians to play the piece in her processional. “I love Stephen’s music. It’s full of texture and craft and personality, and there’s always ‘something old’ and ‘something new.’”

Such musical gestures are not uncommon, say Hartke’s relatives and friends. There was the time he first asked Stidham out on a date: The invitation took the form of a mini-cantata for voice and small chamber ensemble, folded and stuffed in her department mailbox. Years later he surprised her with a major composition on her birthday. When she sat down to breakfast that morning, Stidham found a libretto and partial score by her cereal bowl: It was Hartke’s Sons of Noah, a dramatic cantata for lyric soprano (Stidham) and chamber ensemble.

Crockett recalls the time his friend presented him with a new arrangement of Occhi del’Alma Mia. It was the first composition he had ever shown Hartke back in their student days. Crockett had scored the love song for soprano and guitar; Hartke’s new arrangement called for marching band.

“That’s a very Hartkean gesture, both bizarre and wonderful and extremely adept and profound in its own way,” Crockett says.

Hartke isn’t above the occasional practical joke. Once, when Stidham was boning up on German for an important audition, her trickster husband switched out her Berlitz tape for a dupe he had created, fake label and all. Instead of innocuous dialogue about hiring a taxi and making hotel reservations, the tape contained blood-thirsty excerpts from the libretto of Alban Berg’s opera, Wozzeck.

Last spring, when the paint on the kitchen ceiling bubbled and cracked after a roof leak, Hartke dressed it up with a label inspired by visits to the Museum of Contemporary Art. It reads:

“He is and always has been very silly and very childlike that way,” says Stidham, “I think a lot of people don’t realize how youthful he is in spirit.”

After finishing their degrees, Hartke and Stidham left Santa Barbara. She had been admitted to the San Francisco Conservatory’s graduate voice program. Hartke took a job as a typesetter and paste-up artist for a small Bay Area print shop, applying for grants and composing music in his spare time.

In 1984, Hartke hit pay dirt with a Fulbright that took him to São Paolo. The program required that Hartke be fluent in Portuguese – which, as it happens, he was. The exotic language had appealed since high school: Hartke’s best friend, Carl Miller, had lived in Brazil as a boy.

Years later, to leaven the tedium of his life in the music publishing trade, the composer started taking classes in Portuguese. Already proficient in French, Latin, Italian and Anglo-Saxon, it wasn’t hard for him to acquire another language. Even when he returned for his doctorate in composition, Hartke continued to study what had become his favorite modern language. By the time he came to São Paolo, he could comfortably lecture in Portuguese on Stravinsky and the history of American music.

Hartke’s studio isn’t what you’d expect. For one thing, the walls are blue. “I chose the color myself,” he says. “I like being in a dark room. It’s easier to stay focused.

“I’m not a Californian,” he adds. “I have the opposite of seasonal affect disorder. Going for so long with all this stupid sunshine drives me crazy.”

With the blinds shut and the pocket door closed, only the dim light from Hartke’s two computers illuminates his work area. One is an antique DOS machine that runs Score, the granddaddy of composing software. Newer graphic-interface programs exist, but, says the erstwhile music publishing pro, “I have certain graphic standards that I maintain. The big commercial programs make compromises that I’m not prepared to accept.” He zooms in to demo the stripped-down system’s plump, crisp-edged notes glowing orange against the monochrome screen.

Nearby, a newer Windows machine handles all other computing tasks. Two drafting tables contain piles of marked-up orchestral scoring paper. A marker board charts the sequence of five consecutive arias he’s got sketched out for the second act of his opera. A vintage electric-piano interface and a swivel chair round out the tools of Hartke’s trade. There are no other instruments in the room – unless you count the “bowl-tree” hanging from a closet door.

It consists of eight plastic bowls, harnessed by the rims and rigged to bounce and clap drunkenly at the pull of a cord. Hartke got the idea for this original percussion instrument on a trip to Ikea. The bowl-tree solves an ambient problem in the first act of Boule de Suif, Hartke’s current project for the distinguished Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, N.Y. Based on a short story by Guy de Maupassant, the plot revolves around a famous prostitute (Boule de Suif roughly translates to “butterball”) whose patriotic principles clash with the pragmatism of her bourgeois traveling companions. Fleeing the Prussian Army, a group of well-to-do French citizens are headed for the coast when their trip comes to a halt in a town controlled by an amorous Prussian officer. You can guess the rest.

Because the first act takes place in a moving stagecoach, Hartke wants to musically suggest a team of horses. One traditional solution would be coconut shells – but Hartke is looking for something more specific: the muffled clatter of hooves and carriage wheels riding over snow. Hence the bowl-tree.

“I wanted it to sound more like a jumble,” he says. The sound he’s looking for should also have what Hartke calls “an internal musical quality. It’s not supposed to be literal, just a reminder of that environmental sound.”

When you think about it, not much has changed since he was a little boy constructing toy bassoons out of shipping materials.

In fact, Hartke admits that much of his musical inspiration comes from this lifelong fascination with instruments. The act of composing always begins with Hartke “sitting quietly and thinking about what could happen, especially about the relationship between the instruments available in the ensemble.

“What are their potential interactions?” he asks. “What kinds of things do I like those instruments to do, and what sorts of things do I not like them to do, and why don’t I like those things?”

One day, engaged in this intellectual exercise, Hartke got to thinking about a combination he really dislikes: the piano and clarinet. “It can be a pretty clangorous thing,” he says, pulling a face. Hartke devoted an entire movement of his clarinet, violin and piano trio, The Horse with the Lavender Eye, to exploring the resulting palette of jarring sounds.

Hartke isn’t interested in the brave new world of digital sampling and electronic manipulation of noise. “I like to create natural sounds,” he says. “I like to do that with instruments. That’s the fun part, suggesting rather than replicating.”

With any luck, he’ll be suggesting for another 50 years.

Lisa Stidham, Stephen Hartke and their 10-year-old son Sandy in the family’s Glendale home. Photograph by Philip Channing