Bio
Kevin Hartnett is composer of instrumental, choral, and electro-acoustic music. He has received honors from the American String Teachers Association, the Music Educators National Conference, and the Mizzou New Music Initiative and was a finalist for The American Prize in Composition in 2020. In 2018, his choral work De profundis was recorded by The Zurich Chamber Singers as part of their debut album Passio and was praised by BBC Music Magazine as “a superb centrepiece" of the album.
Kevin’s music has been performed and recorded across the United States and around the world by ensembles such as the Zurich Chamber Singers, Kantorei of Kansas City, the Pasadena Chorale, the Zelter String Quartet, and Room 1078. His work has been featured at the Midwest Clinic, the MENC national convention, and the Missouri Music Educators Association conference and has been presented by the Hear Now Music Festival in Los Angeles, the Kansas Ambassadors of Music in Europe, and American Voices in Iraq, Jordan, and Thailand.
Kevin earned a Bachelor of Music in Composition from the USC Thornton School of Music, a Master of Music in Composition from the IU Jacobs School of Music, and has completed additional studies at Bowdoin International Music Festival, Brevard Music Center, and Orford Musique. He is a co-founder and co-director of the performance series Resonant Frequencies, a performing member of the Pasadena Chorale, and composer-in-residence at Renaissance Arts Academy in Los Angeles. His work is published by Just A Theory Press.
Featured Works
Immiscible Figures
Instrumentation: Violin 1, Violin 2, Viola, Cello
Duration: 6:00
Program Notes: Immiscible Figures is composed of four soundscapes that each contain distinct gestures, textures, and colors. As the piece unfolds, the musical figures within them mix continuously with one another in various combinations, but, like oil and water, they are unable to form a stable, homogenous mixture. At a few key moments—including during the swirling, climactic rush of energy near the end of the piece—the figures appear to finally hold together, only to eventually separate back out into their original, distinct selves.
Instrumentation: SATB choir
Duration: 10:00
Program Notes: De profundis was commissioned by the Zurich Chamber Singers and premiered in the chapel at the Grossmünster church in Zurich, Switzerland on March 19, 2016. The text, drawn from the Seven Penitential Psalms, consists of short fragments which are assembled to form a mosaic texture. Throughout most of the piece, each section of the ensemble sings different fragments, making De profundis an impression of the psalms and a meditation on the themes of desperation and redemption.
Instrumentation: Viola
Duration: 15:00
Program Notes: These pieces are an exploration of the various timbres, textures, and colors of the viola and the moods they suggest. Each piece is built from one or more kernels of material that, both on their own and all together, are intended to embody its descriptive title. While the titles offer some clues as to the pieces’ characters, they stop short of identifying them explicitly, leaving it up to the listener to construct in their own mind the character of each piece.
Instrumentation: SATB choir
Duration: 4:30
Program Notes: Full Moon is a setting of a poem of the same name by William Carlos Williams. While the text is brief, Williams’s words convey vivid contrasts between darkness and light, coldness and warmth, proximity and distance, and the observed and the envisioned. These contrasts are explored musically over the course of the piece through variations in loudness, tonality, texture and color.
Complete Works
Discography
Passio
“Passio” by the Zurich Chamber Singers
Conducted by Christian Erny
Works by Tallis, Purcell, Bach, and Hartnett
Ars Produktion
Released May 18, 2018
EAN: 4260052385517
“Combining the music of Passiontide with funeral pieces, this disc is rich and meditative. Hartnett’s De profundis is a superb centrepiece.”
—BBC Music Magazine (UK), March 22, 2018
“The motets and chorales of Purcell, Tallis and Bach face the haunting composition De profundis of 27-year-old American Kevin Hartnett. This is music of beguiling beauty, presented in tonal perfection.”
—Frank von Niederhäusern, Kultur-tipp (Switzerland), February 28, 2018
“The almost simple but all the more insistent four-part harmony developed by Hartnett in this work becomes, in the interpretation of the Zurich singers, a sound experience that is as sophisticated as it is transfiguring.”
—Guy Engels, Pizzicato (Luxembourg), April 17, 2018
“De profundis is a commission from the ensemble to the composer born in 1990, and the stringent linearity of the music, the splendor of polyphony, the power of dynamic extremes is impressive.”
—Aachener Zeitung (Germany), March 2018
“Kevin Hartnett's De profundis from the year 2016 does not act as a new music foreign body, which would blow up the dramaturgical arc. On the contrary, the ten-minute choral piece is a perfect link to draw something absolutely timeless from the overall context of all pieces. Deep-seated and highly concentrated, the singers swear by repetitive patterns, let phrases breathe organically and build up excitation curves full of subtle high tension. Erny's refined art of mixing the timbre can once again move the famed mountains—especially when subtle shifts in tonality and harmony produce poignant turning points as well as expanding association with Eastern music cultures.”
—Stefan Pieper, The New Listener (Germany), March 8, 2018
“The program includes three great names in Renaissance and Baroque polyphony: Thomas Tallis, Henry Purcell and Johann Sebastian Bach, complemented by the young American composer Kevin Hartnett. This spans the arc of the mastery of voice leading from the early modern period to the present day.”
“De profundis by Kevin Hartnett is an enchanting piece that fits in well with the structure of the entire album. One feels the emotional devotion of the singers, who reach an almost ethereal mood through small intervals, atmospheric sonorities, medieval reminiscences and significant moments of rest.”
—Izidor Mendas, Feuilleton Scout (Germany), May 25, 2018
“De profundis by contemporary American composer Kevin Hartnett requires a different approach to the Purcell, and here the choir's attention to detail pays off. Full of sustained lines, the work is an intense meditation, but within this sustained texture we can detect a myriad of little details.”
—Robery Hugill, Planet Hugill (UK), April 24, 2018
“This journey through vocal funeral music features, alongside Purcell and Tallis, a work by Kevin Hartnett, the amazing De Profundis (2016), about which Christian Erny recently told us in an interview: ‘De profundis is a drawing of the seven penitential psalms, which appear fragmented through the texture of the work. The movement is constant and the diatonic clusters make this piece more a meditation on these psalms than a formal sequence of the liturgy.’ ”
—Blanca Gallego, Revista RITMO (Spain), March 2018
Writing
Program notes for Resonant Frequencies
At the Still Point of the Turning World
More than eight centuries separate the oldest music from the newest music on this program. To 21st Century ears, Pérotin’s Viderunt Omnes (1198), Sederunt Principes (1199), and Alleluia Nativitas (c. 1200) may sound strange in the way they seem to defy the now familiar conventions of harmony and voice leading that developed in the centuries that followed. Tonal hierarchy among the notes is nonexistent, and dissonant intervals that composers would later try to avoid occur freely between parts. Yet there are some aspects of this music that closely resemble contemporary compositional practices. Each of these pieces, originally composed for voices, is based on a pre-existing liturgical chant. For select portions of the chant, Pérotin stretches out individual notes—sometimes for as long as a minute—and, with the addition of newly composed material, reveals an entirely new world within them. In the arrangements made for this concert, this process of transformation is taken a step further by replacing voices with acoustic and electric instruments in order to explore the variety of instrumental colors that this music suggests.
Syntithenai
Central to the act of creation is the assembly of raw materials into newfound forms. In the case of Kevin Hartnett’s Immiscible Figures (2019), the interactions between these materials take center stage. The piece is composed of a collection of distinct, elemental musical gestures that span the expressive range of the string quartet. Accented chords, propulsive sixteenth notes, ethereal tremolo, tenebrous glissandi, and playful harmonics exist in close proximity to one another, and their frequent juxtaposition results in a sonic landscape marked by volatility and turbulence. Despite repeated contact, the gestures largely resist each other's influence. Occasionally, however, their continued interactions produce combinations and alignments that result in the creation of something new. These moments of synthesis—however fleeting—play a major role in the development of the piece.
continuum // discontinuum
Is the nature of reality fundamentally smooth or granular? In Philip Glass’s Two Pages (1968), a simple series of five notes serves as the basis of an entire sonic universe. On its surface, the piece’s limited pitch material, consistent volume, and relentless repetition may suggest an underlying stasis. Indeed, Glass, early in his career, sought to strip his music of traditional forms of expressivity such as harmonic motion and conventional phrase shapes. Yet this music, for all its aspects of sameness, is constantly changing. Glass’s use of “additive process”—a technique in which small, discrete units of notes are inserted into or removed from repeated patterns as the piece unfolds—is the primary driver of this change, and his incremental, arithmetical approach to the changes provides a structural logic to the musical form. Similarly, Kevin Hartnett’s Helix (2020) is also made of discrete units that are combined and recombined over the course of the piece. Rather than progress in a linear fashion, however, the repeated material twists and turns as it moves through various keys, exploring the full registral and dynamic range of the violin, before ultimately arriving back where it started. Particulate Motion (2015), like its title suggests, is built in the same manner. The piece was composed alongside original choreography in a modular fashion, providing considerable flexibility as the music developed with the dance and facilitating a conversational relationship between the violin and bongos.
GLASS THE TRADITIONALIST: SUBJECTIVITY AND TELEOLOGY IN EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH
by Kevin Hartnett
Traditional dialectical music is representational: the musical form relates to an expressive
content and is a means of creating a growing tension; this is what is usually called the
“musical argument.” But repetitive music is not built around such an “argument”; the work is
non-representational and is no longer a medium for the expression of subjective feelings.
Mertens is not alone in describing minimalist music in these terms. Steve Reich’s widely-read 1968 essay “Music As a Gradual Process” outlines the composer’s preference for audible, impersonal processes. Philip Glass later echoed Reich’s sentiment and suggested that “the listener will therefore need a different approach to listening, without the traditional concepts of recollection and anticipation. Music must be listened to as a pure sound-event, an act without any dramatic structure.”
Media
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