Zeke Hecker

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Zeke Hecker

for RealAudio comments by the composer, [not yet available].
for RealAudio version of first of Three Waltzes, 1:36/94K.
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for MPEG-2 audio version of first of Three Waltzes, 375K.
for On Composing for Woodwind Quintet, essay by the composer.

Zeke Hecker was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1947, and attended the Lawrenceville School and Harvard College. Since 1971 he has lived in Guilford, Vermont, and taught English at Brattleboro Union High School. He is principal oboist of the Pioneer Valley Symphony and the Windham Orchestra, co-founder of Friends of Music at Guilford, and a member of the board of directors of the Consortium of Vermont Composers. His wife, Linda, is a college administrator, as well as a violinist and violist; their teenage daughter, Anna, studies ballet and theater.

Primarily self-taught as a composer, Zeke Hecker has written 90 works, including the operas Mushrooms, Kafka Quintet, and Pericles, Prince of Tyre; "My Last Duchess" and "Landscapes", both for voice and orchestra, "Icebreaker", "The Birthmark", and "Elijah Variations", for orchestra; incidental music for plays and films; chamber music, mainly for woodwinds; numerous songs and song cycles. His works have been performed by the aforementioned musical organizations as well as the Sage City Symphony, Vermont Philharmonic, Carson City Chamber Orchestra, Craftsbury Chamber Players, Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble, Constitution Brass Quintet, and Hale/Goodrich duo, and have been heard at the Warebrook Festival of Contemporary Music. They have been broadcast on Vermont and Massachusetts Public Radio and Dartmouth College Radio. His suite from The Tempest, conducted by Blanche Moyse, was featured on the soundtrack of the award-winning documentary film The Stuff of Dreams.

He is interested in those realms where words and music meet.

Representative musical compositions:

• Landscapes: Six Songs for Mezzo-Soprano and String Orchestra. Poems by Jenny Stewart. 1976, 15 minutes.
• Mushrooms: Chamber Opera in Three Scenes. Soprano, baritone, and woodwind quintet. 1978, 40 minutes.
• Pericles, Price of Tyre: Opera in Three Acts. From the play by William Shakespeare. 10 singers (minimum, with doublings); 2 sopranos, 2 altos, 2 tenors, 2 baritones, 2 basses; 1(picc)1(EH)11 - 1100 - 1 perc - string quintet; onstage: viola da gamba and lute. 1980, 130 minutes.
• Variations for Orchestra on the Passover Hymn "Elijah the Prophet". 2(picc)2(EH)22cbn -4331 - perc.(3) - strings; harp and piano optional. 1988, 15 minutes.
• Trio for Oboe, Clarinet, and Bassoon. I. Pastorale II. Lament III. Variations. 1990, 13 minutes.
• The Weather Forecast: Theme and Six Meteorological Variations for Violin and Cello. 1990, 10 minutes.
• 3 x 5: Three Miniatures for Brass Quintet. I. Fanfare II. Romance III. Whimsy. 1991, 6 minutes.
• The Elements for flute and harp. I. Air II. Fire III. Water IV. Earth. 1992, 5 minutes.
• Three Waltzes and Three More Waltzes for piano. 1991-2, 12 minutes.
• Kafka Quintet: Chamber Opera in Five Parts on stories and parables of Franz Kafka. I. An Imperial Message II. The Hunter III. At Night IV. The Judgment V. Before the Law. For tenor and baritone, with brass quintet. 1994, 40 minutes.

An autobiography originally published in Consorting, newsletter of the Consortium of Vermont Composers:

One of my inspirations to begin composing was Don McLean, former schoolmate and current neighbor. The first music of his I heard -- clean, unpretentious, witty -- made me realize that a composer doesn't have to be a conservatory graduate. If Don could do it, so could I. America has a healthy tradition of demystifying music. Think of William Billings and the other colonial psalmodists, of Otto Luening and his Bennington progeny, of Gershwin the autodidact. (A character in a Vonnegut novel asks an artist, "Self-taught?" to which the artist responds, "Isn't everybody?")

I have no formal musical training beyond a few years each of clarinet and oboe lessons and a few weeks of counterpoint. Everything I know has come from playing in orchestras, chamber groups, and theater pits; from listening to records and broadcasts; from reading the back of record jackets. I recommend all these activities. But I still regret missing the formal study. Writing music is hard, slow work for me. (When Richard Strauss was told that Pfitzner agonized over every note while composing, the facile Strauss replied, "Then why does he bother?")

Until recently most of my works have been vocal: "art" song, orchestral songs, operas. There have also been a few short choral works, some chamber music (mostly for woodwinds), and lots of incidental music for plays. The perspicacious reader will notice unmistakable traces of the unschooled composer: preoccupation with short forms, avoidance of abstract ones like fugue and sonata. At least a poem or a play interlude suggests its own musical character, so I don't have to invent one.

The stress on vocal music is partly a crusade. Among musicians, the English language has a bum rap. Even English-speaking critics and performers still call it unsingable (as though German, with its contorted umlauts and collision-course consonants, were somehow superior). As a student and teacher of literature, I began writing music intending to set American and English texts as naturally as possible, to make them singable (and intelligible) by following the natural tempos, rhythms, and inflections of the language. Usually I take Ned Rorem's example: one note to each syllable and no repetitions unsanctioned by the text.

Extremes of vocal range may be thrilling, but I avoid them if the words will be lost. (I really hate the contemporary trend towards stratospheric soprano tessitura.) My favorite voices are mezzo-soprano and baritone, the ones that come closest to the sound of speech.

As for the widely held notion that only second-rate literature can be ennobled by music: why spend endless hours turning bad poetry into song? I take texts from the best writers I can find, living or dead. If I can collaborate directly with a like-minded writer, so much the better.

After a while the pieces I wrote began getting longer and fatter. I built up to orchestral writing gradually: strings only, then classical orchestra with paired winds, now full orchestra with its embarrassment of riches. Luckily, I have had a kind of training for this: three decades of playing in orchestras in front of the wind section (best seat in the house) where I can watch everyone sweat and hear all manner of ways to mix instruments together. Maybe it's the result of those galley years, but my main principle of orchestration is to give each player something interesting to do, instead of treating instruments as aural ballast. Happy players perform better than makework drudges.

(My opera Pericles, a setting of the Shakespeare play, requires a twelve-piece orchestra: string quintet, wind quintet, trumpet and percussion. When the opera was staged in Brattleboro in 1981, it received two reviews. One, from New Hampshire, called the orchestration "thin". The Brattleboro Reformer's critic said that the "rich" orchestration made the ensemble sound Wagnerian in proportion. In accordance, then, with the Three Bears theory of asesthetic criticism, I guess it was just right.)

There has never been a professional performance of my music -- which is, I suppose, only appropriate, since I'm an amateur composer. But most of my works have been performed, because they've been written for specific performers or occasions, almost always local: high school groups, theater companies, community orchestras. I like it that way. I would certainly welcome a professional performance or two, but at what price? The very notion of competitions is odious, and randomly sending material to musicians of established reputation is like throwing it at a black hole.

The best way to get your music performed is to produce your own concerts. That's partly what Friends of Music at Guilford is -- an outlet for local composers. Every town should have one. If it weren't for FOMAG and a couple of kindred organizations, I doubt that I would have written much music. Now I'm hooked.

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