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Hugh Aitken (b. New York City, 1924)
began his musical studies with his grandmother and his
father, both of whom were musicians. After studying at
New York University for two years, he served as navigator
with the Army Air Corps in Italy during the Second World
War. In 1946 he entered the Juilliard School, where he
studied clarinet with Arthur Christmann, and composition
with Vincent Persichetti, Bernard Wagennar and Robert
Ward. Since graduating in 1950, Aitken has lived and
taught in the New York area. From 1960 to 1970 he taught
theory and music literature at the Juilliard School.
Several summers were spent in residence at The MacDowell
Colony, three on the staff of the Bennington Composers
Conference, and two lecturing on new music at the
Paris-American Academy in Paris.
In 1970 he joined the faculty of William Paterson
University in Wayne, New Jersey as Chair of the Music
Department, where he revamped the curriculum and helped
design several new degree programs. He also served
briefly as Associate Dean for Fine and Performing Arts,
but resigned all administrative posts after a few years
in order to have more time for composing. In 1996 he
retired from teaching. Greenwood Press has published his
"The Piece As A Whole", an auxiliary college
text which integrates technical and expressive analysis.
Devoting most of his time to composing, Aitken lives in
Oakland, N.J. and Lancaster, N.H. with his wife Laura
Tapia. They have two children and two grandchildren.
Aitken has been commissioned by, among others, The
Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation at The Library of
Congress, The Walter W. Naumburg Foundation, Gerard
Schwarz and The Seattle Symphony, The Aspen Music
Festival, The New York Chamber Symphony and the duo of
Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax. Among his nearly ninety works
are three violin concertos, two operas, a number of
orchestral works and ten solo cantatas, four of which are
included on this disc. His publishers are Oxford
University Press, Theodore Presser and ECS Publishers.
My first solo cantata originated when Melvin Kaplan asked
me to write a work for his New York Chamber Soloists -
for tenor and a few instruments. In preparation, I found
myself reading "Gather ye rosebuds while ye
may" type poetry and singing tonal tunes. When
sections of the piece seemed to want to be purely tonal,
without even the obligatory wrong notes, I decided to let
it go its own way. It felt wiser to trust my intuition
than to fret about what sort of music one
"should" be writing.
This music is not parody; I believe we can once again
compose more or less in former styles (I say more or less
because to write entirely in a former style one would
have to turn off one's taste and imagination; that would
be doing homework for a theory class, not composing.) The
past is available to us in ways it has not been before,
and we need not fear using it in our own ways. It is not
at all that I advocate the use of earlier styles by those
who would not find it sympathetic. The world is wide, and
many styles are likely to coexist for some time to come.
Surely, however, one of the truly vital things that is
happening is this inclusion of earlier musical styles -
whether merely as quotation and collage or, more
significantly, as an integral part of the language.
Nine other cantatas have followed, three of which are
included here. From This White Island
was scored for the core touring instrumentation of the
Chamber Soloists: tenor, oboe and viola. It was the
flavor and feel of Barnstone's splendid poetry to which I
responded with music. In Cantata No. 4,
I pay my respects to the strong stark Spanish of Machado.
As for Piano Fantasy, although I was not
consciously thinking in those terms at the time, I
realize now that this work is concerned with greatly
contrasting expressive qualities, such as tense
nervousness and utter calm, or almost bombastic assurance
and hesitancy. These are subsumed under and comprehended
by a formal scheme which, though intuitively arrived at,
makes obvious use of traditional gestures and procedures.
The most recent work on this disc is Cantata No.
6 (1981) Remembering, which was
commissioned by Jan Opalach for the Alice Tully Hall
concert which was a part of his award for winning the
Naumburg Vocal Competition. I wrote it with his marvelous
voice very much in mind, and found it quite gratifying
when dim echoes and memories of German lieder found their
way into the music, summoned up, no doubt, by the
unavoidably evocative German of Rilke’s intense and
moving poetry.
-H. A.
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