Stephen Hartke has served as chair of the Composition department for the past 11 years, after an accomplished and varied career. He won the 2013 Best Contemporary Classical Composition Grammy for his piece Meanwhile — Incidental Music to Imaginary Puppet Plays, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, and the very first Charles Ives Opera Prize for his 2008 opera The Greater Good. Over 50 years of his compositional career will be represented during his faculty recital tomorrow evening, featuring Oberlin’s Quartet-in-Residence, Verona Quartet.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What was your path into composition? 

I joined a professional boys’ choir when I was nine-and-a-half years old. I was lucky that we had a choirmaster with good taste, so we sang wonderful repertoire. One day, he was cleaning out a storage closet full of records and giving them out to us. I was one of the newer kids, so I couldn’t go for the prime offerings. I did, however, get a Samuel Barber record. It was a revelation — I already loved classical music, but I thought that Americans wrote pop songs and musicals, not symphonies. I fell in love with that piece, and I became a big Barber fan. That was the beginning. 

How did this journey bring you to Oberlin?

When I was a teenager, my piano teacher got frustrated with me composing instead of practicing, so she found me a composition teacher. From there, I went to Yale. I went briefly to Cambridge but ran out of money, which is probably a good thing. I came back to the States and went to the University of Pennsylvania to get a Master’s in Composition. After I got a doctorate at the University of California in Santa Barbara, I got a Fulbright Grant to go to Brazil. I did some adjunct teaching until I finally landed my first full-time job at the University of Southern California at the Thornton School of Music. Eleven years ago, Professor of Conducting and Director of Contemporary Music Ensemble and Oberlin Sinfonietta Timothy Weiss invited me out to Oberlin for a residency, and sometime between the original invite and the residency, he asked if I was interested in being considered for this job.

My mother lives in Florida. For the 35 years I lived in California, she would always say she wished that we lived in the same time zone. So I thought after 35 years of her saying that, I owed it to her to make that possible.

Who or what do you consider to be your musical influences? 

Pre-Baroque and 20th century music. Medieval and Renaissance music has had a big effect on my approach to rhythm design. 18th- and 19th-century music is less of an influence on me than others. It’s not like I don’t know my Brahms — it’s just that it’s not as much of an influence on me as some other things, with the exception of Mahler, who was a big influence on my thinking. Some people talk about the three B’s — Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, right? I talk about the M’s — Machaut, Monteverdi, Mahler, Messiaen, and Thelonious Munk. 

Do you have examples of how you utilize your influences in your music? 

Usually, when I’m going from one project to the next, I’m hoping that the next project won’t echo the previous one too much, so I shift my focus quite a lot. For example, I have a piece that’s called “Wulfstan at the Millennium,” an abstract musical liturgy. I imagined that we had skipped from medieval music straight to 20th-century music. I borrowed turns of phrase, rhythmic characters, and sonorous characters. Some parts imitate Gregorian chants — I like to say that no actual Gregorian chant was harmed in the making of this piece. I use the instruments echoing each other so it sounds like a single line is being sung in a very resonant space.

On the other hand, I have two pieces that are about blues, one of which I wrote in Brazil, because I realized I kind of missed it, and the other was an armchair travelogue for a commission about delta blues. In order to write this piece, I was taken on the blues trail. We went to clubs in Memphis; then we went to Mississippi and saw Muddy Waters, went to a roadhouse and heard some very raw blues. It was great to see people feel their way around the form.

You’re a very well-renowned and decorated composer. Which of your achievements are you most proud of?

I worked with the Hilliard Ensemble, a male vocal ensemble — usually four singers, sometimes five. I approached them to see if they would be interested in my piece about Rome. They wrote back right away and asked if I could write a piece for a festival in Austria. While in the rehearsal process, the Hilliard Ensemble said, “Could you write us another one?” Then I got a last-minute commission from the New York Philharmonic to write a piece for the second anniversary of 9/11. They said that I could add anything I want: soloists, electronics, children’s choir. I said I wanted the Hilliard Ensemble. That was my third symphony.

Is there an instrument or sound that you’ve always wanted to work with? 

I’ve been working through my bucket list. The first piece that I wrote for an ensemble here at Oberlin used a flugelhorn. Pedal steel guitar is on my list. Sometimes, I would like to write for a Renaissance ensemble. 

What’s changed about your music? 

The music that I was writing tended to be more on the serious and mournful side, so I’ve been recovering a certain kind of whimsy that I had before I got so serious. If you have a meter that’s the whimsical versus the serious, they kind of oscillate. I believe very much in striving for variety and affect within a piece. I could say I’m in my late period right now, characterized by an I-don’t-care attitude. You have a body of work behind you, no need to prove yourself.

Where do you see yourself going from here?

I’m working on an opera: Eugène Ionesco’s play, Rhinoceros, which is an allegory for people slipping into fascism. This is my second full-length opera. I’ve thought about writing another symphony — my fifth. I also have a piece that’s being done in May, called Sons of Noah, for soprano, four flutes, four guitars, and four bassoons. It’s the only piece that’s written for that combination of instruments. I always say, “This is the best and the worst piece for this instrumentation.” I’ve thought about writing a companion piece to it, so there can be a best and a worst.