Huck Hodge writes music that explores the liminality of perceptual illusion and the threshold between design and intuition. 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). There is a dramatic interplay of color, light, and darkness in much of his music, which emerges from an uncanny blending of pure and dissonant harmonies, widely spaced orchestrations and vast, diffuse timbres.
Hodge is the recipient of many of the highest distinctions in the field of contemporary music. This year, he was honored with the Charles Ives Living, the largest and most prestigious music award conferred by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Other major awards include the Rome Prize, the Gaudeamus Compositieprijs, a Guggenheim Fellowship, commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation in the Library of Congress, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, the American Composers Forum (JFund), the Barlow Endowment, Music at the Anthology (MATA), Muziek Centrum Nederland, Musik der Jahrhunderte, the National Theater and Concert Hall of Taiwan, as well as numerous grants and awards from ASCAP (Rudolf Nissim, ASCAPlus), New Music USA, Copland House, the Yaddo Corporation, the Bogliasco Foundation (Aaron Copland fellowship), the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, and the Siemens Musikstiftung.
His music has been performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and at numerous major festivals — the New York Philharmonic Biennial, Berliner Festspiele, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, Shanghai New Music Week (上海当代音乐周), ISCM World Music Days, and many others in over twenty countries on five continents. His musical collaborations include those with members of the Berlin Philharmonic and Ensemble Modern, the ASKO|Schönberg Ensemble, the Seattle Symphony, and the Orchestra of the League of Composers. His chamber music has been premiered, performed and recorded by a long list of soloists and ensembles such as the Daedalus, JACK, Mivos, and Pacifica string quartets, the Aleph, 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 distributed by Alexander Street Press and Babel Scores (Paris). Recordings of his music appear on the New World and Albany record labels.
Before joining the University of Washington, Hodge taught compositon at Columbia University in New York City, where he earned his M.A. and D.M.A. studying with Fred Lerdahl and Tristan Murail. Prior to this, he studied composition, 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. He also received formative instruction from Mario Davidovsky, Georg Friedrich Haas, Robert Kyr, George Lewis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Walter Zimmermann, and many other notable composers. He has been an invited lecturer on music and aesthetics at a variety of institutions including the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Eastman School of Music, Manhattan School of Music, and the Universität der Künste in Berlin, and served for three years as the director of the Merriman Young Composers Workshop at the Seattle Symphony. He is currently associate professor and chair of the composition program in the school of music.
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