HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

Three of the best and brightest recruited by the GSAS to the Music Department's Ph.D. composing program look over some notations together. From left are Karola Obermueller, Peter Gilbert, and Chris Honett. (Staff photos Kris Snibbe/Harvard News Office)

Honett is one of the handful of composers the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) accepts each year to a Ph.D. program that is increasingly becoming known as a hive of music-writing activity. In the past five years alone, the Music Department has laddered four new composition faculty to overlap the retirements of its two senior composers (Pulitzer Prize winners Bernard Rands and Mario Davidovsky). The new faculty - British composer Julian Anderson (2004), German-born Hans Tutschku (2004), Australian ensemble composer Elliott Gyger (2002), and the American composer Joshua Fineberg (2000) - are all pedagogues with a busy schedule of performances and premieres. To keep pace with a ramped-up level of activity, the department just underwent a $1 million renovation to build acoustically isolated studios and a recording and control room, and to install state-of-the-art composition equipment.

Having a foot in each world, academic and real, is becoming a hallmark of the program. The newest faculty appointment, Anderson, is blunt about his teaching focus: "I want to make sure composers are getting played, and that the outside world knows what's going on at Harvard."

Honett has witnessed departmental changes firsthand. "When I came, there were opportunities," he says "but now we've got Hans [Tutschku] with Hydra - this spectacular, arguably one of the best, electronic music situations in the country. [Hydra is Tutschku's unique 16-speaker sound environment, used recently in a collaborative performance with the Dance Program.] We have three concerts a year with an ensemble-in-residence, currently Eric Hewitt and White Rabbit; and the Fromm Residency, where professional musicians - this year the Arditti String Quartet - spend a week with us rehearsing our pieces prior to their performances. We have the opportunity to meet every week as composers to talk about work. And this is all outside of classes."

Grad student composers Honett (from left), Gilbert, and Obermueller seem to have become fairly comfortable with each other.

Composing, and becoming a better composer, for Honett, is as much about community as it is about academics. "You can obviously make the argument for a performer benefiting from a conservatory environment [for graduate school]. But with composition there's a certain amount of experiencing things other than music that's important: All that's happening in Cambridge, the people I have the opportunity to be friends with, the things they're thinking about."

"We are pretty 'professional' at Harvard, with deadlines and organized rehearsal time, and with professional musicians, it's really comparable to the outside world," says third-year graduate student Karola Obermueller, "or at least the European outside world, which is the one I know." Obermueller is busy this semester, with her pieces being performed in Rheinsberg, Germany, (part of "Dunkelrot," an opera she wrote), Darmstadt, Germany, (a quartet for clarinet, saxophone, piano, and percussion), and Amsterdam (a new work for chamber orchestra).

"I guess we all write more nowadays," she muses.

According to Honett, the autonomy given composers teaches a level of do-it-yourself-ness that's critical to developing compositional style. "It's a different way of thinking than merely having faculty tell us what to do all the time. We are allowed to make decisions, and that's an important lesson for an artist. It's not just handed to you. You have to find your way."

Fellow fifth-year graduate student Peter Gilbert agrees. "No one's going to tell you what to do. They'll help you do what you need to." Thinking about why he came to Harvard for music, Gilbert doesn't hesitate: "This is a research institution. Both within the Music Department and outside it, you're surrounded by the most remarkable collection of minds and curiosities. People are from all over the world. When you go eat your lunch in the Science Center you can find yourself sitting next to [professor of mathematics] Noam Elkies and have a conversation about string quartets."

So how can an artist-in-training find his own voice in an environment where contemporary classical composers like Elliott Carter drop in for an informal seminar or Gunther Schuller joins the weekly composers' get-together?

"That," says Honett "is perhaps the most critical, most fundamental part of this process. We develop our style by being exposed to new information and art - we find the things we like and don't like, and those things that appeal to us, we will tend to use. And as these details collect, style naturally develops. On the craft side, we study how others have written, see what works in their music, but most crucially, write our own music and hear it rehearsed and played, to see for ourselves what works. And what an amazing thing it is to be able to ask individuals like [Elliott] Carter or [composer Bryan] Ferneyhough about their particular journeys!"

Obermueller concurs. "To meet composers who have succeeded in finding their own voice is always encouraging. If they were able to do it, we can do it, too. Of course, there is no help for writing your own music - that is something each composer has to struggle with. We have some of the best circumstances you can think of here, but we still have to discover and struggle with and develop what's inside ourselves."

bannatyn@fas.harvard.edu