Innovative works by emerging composers explore unconventional sonic landscapes. With guest musicians from the UW Modern Ensemble.
Director Bio: Huck Hodge
Huck Hodge writes music that explores the embodied poetics of organized sound, perceptual illusion and the threshold between design and intuition. His output is diverse and comprises a wide range of symphonic, chamber, dance and multimedia works. A composer of “harmonically fresh work", "full of both sparkle and thunder” (New York Times), his music has been praised for its “immediate impact” (Chicago Tribune), its "clever, attractive, streamlined" qualities (NRC Handelsblad, Amsterdam) and its ability to "conjure up worlds of musical magic” with “power and charisma" (Gramophone Magazine,London).
Hodge has won an extensive array of national and international awards including the Rome Prize, the Gaudeamus Prize, the ISCM League of Composers Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Aaron Copland Fellowship from the Bogliasco Foundation as well as awards from ASCAP, New Music USA and the Concorso Franco Donatoni in Italy. Among his many commissions are those from the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, the Barlow Endowment, Music at the Anthology, the American Composers Forum, the American Academy in Rome, Musik der Jahrhunderte (Germany), the National Concert Hall of Taiwan, the government of the Netherlands and the Rondò Festival / Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung (Italy/Germany).
His musical collaborations include those with members of Ensemble Modern and the Berlin Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic’s Scharoun Ensemble, the Seattle Symphony, the Orchestra of the League of Composers and the ASKO|Schönberg Ensemble with performances at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and at numerous major festivals throughout the world — the New York Philharmonic Biennial, Gaudeamus Muziekweek (Amsterdam), MaerzMusik (Berlin), ISCM World Music Days, the Shanghai New Music Week (届上海当代音乐周), Laboratoire Instrumentelle Européen (Paris/Amsterdam), Nuova Consonanza (Rome), Contempuls (Prague), Time of Music (Musiikin Aika, Finland), Daegu International (대구국제현대음악제, South Korea), Contempo, Frequency Festival (Chicago), MATA Festival (New York). His chamber music has been premiered, performed and recorded by a long list of notable soloists and ensembles such as the Afiara, Daedalus, JACK and Pacifica string quartets, the Aleph, Argento, Dal Niente, Divertimento, Insomnio, SurPlus and Talea ensembles, the Taipei Chamber Singers, Volti, Tony Arnold and Majella Stockhausen. Hodge has been featured in numerous international radio and television broadcasts (among them, Radio Netherlands, WNYC, WQXR, Taiwan Broadcasting System, Australian Broadcasting Corporation). His published music is licensed and distributed by Alexander Street Press and Babel Scores (Paris). Recordings of his music appear on the New World and Albany record labels.
Hodge currently serves as Associate Professor and Chair of Composition in the School of Music. Before joining the University of Washington, he taught Compositon at Columbia University in New York City, where he earned his MA and DMA studying with Tristan Murail and Fred Lerdahl. Prior to this, he studied Music Theory and Computer Music at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Stuttgart, Germany, where his teachers included Georg Wötzer and Marco Stroppa. During this time, his studies were supported with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD).