E-mail: 
shartke@oberlin.edu 

Office: 
Kohl 308 
(440) 775-8073 

Personal Web Site: 
http://www.stephenhartke.com/ 

ObieMAPS: 
Stephen Hartke
 

Photo by Tanya Rosen-Jones '97

Educational Background

• BA, Yale University
• MA, University of Pennsylvania
• PhD, University of California, Santa Barbara

Winner of the 2013 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition, Stephen Hartke is widely recognized as one of the leading composers of his generation. His work has been hailed for both its singularity of voice and the inclusive breadth of its inspiration.

Born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1952, Hartke grew up in Manhattan, where he began his musical career as a professional boy chorister, performing with such organizations as the New York Pro Musica, the New York Philharmonic, the American Symphony Orchestra, and the Metropolitan Opera. He studied at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of California at Santa Barbara, then worked as advertising manager for several major music publishers. He was a Fulbright Professor at the Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil before joining the University of Southern California faculty in 1987. He departs USC Thornton School of Music as a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Composition.

Hartke's output is extremely varied, including the medieval-inspired piano quartet The King of the Sun, the abstract liturgy for 10 instruments Wulfstan at the Millennium, the blues-inflected violin duo Oh Them Rats Is Mean in My Kitchen, the surreal trio The Horse with the Lavender Eye, the biblical satire Sons of Noah (for soprano, four flutes, four guitars, and four bassoons), and his recent cycle of motets for chorus, oboe and strings, Precepts. He has composed concerti for renowned clarinetist Richard Stoltzman and violinist Michele Makarski, and his collaboration with the internationally celebrated Hilliard Ensemble has resulted in three substantial works, including his Symphony No. 3, commissioned by Lorin Maazel and the New York Philharmonic.

Hartke’s Symphony No. 4, commissioned for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, made its world premiere in November 2014.

His acclaimed full-length opera, The Greater Good, was premiered and recorded by Glimmerglass Opera. Other major commissions have come from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall and Harvard Musical Association, IRIS Chamber Orchestra, Kansas City Symphony, Library of Congress, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Barlow Endowment, Chamber Music America, Fromm Foundation, Institute for American Music at the Eastman School of Music, Meet the Composer, National Endowment for the Arts, and Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, among others.
 
Hartke won the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, two Koussevitzky Music Foundation Commission Grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Charles Ives Living from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Deutsche Bank Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin. In 2008, Hartke's opera The Greater Good received the first Charles Ives Opera Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 

Most of Hartke's music is available on commercial CDs released by Albany, Bridge, Cedille, Chandos, CRI, Delos, ECM New Series, EMI Classics, Naxos American Classics, New World Records, and Soundbrush Records.

 

Director, Division of Contemporary Music
Professor of Conducting
Director, Contemporary Music Ensemble

E-mail: 
Tim.Weiss@oberlin.edu 

Office: 
Bibbins 217 
(440) 775-8295 

ObieMAPS: 
Tim Weiss
 

Photo by Tanya Rosen-Jones

Educational Background

• First Prize Diploma with Distinction (1986), Royal Music Conservatory (Brussels, Belgium)
• BM, Northwestern University (1990)
• MM, University Michigan Ann Arbor (1997)

 

---

Conductor Tim Weiss has gained critical acclaim for his performances and brave, adventurous programming throughout the United States and abroad.

Since 2005, he has served as music director for the Newark Granville Symphony Orchestra, a professional ensemble in the Columbus, Ohio, area. He has also remained active as a guest conductor with the BBC Scottish Symphony in Glasgow, Scotland; the Britten Sinfonia in London; the Melbourne Symphony in Australia; ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble); and the Detroit Chamber Winds and Strings.

Weiss is committed to exploring the probing connections within and between pieces in his performances and searching for similarities of voice between different composers from seemingly different genres, periods, and backgrounds. Accordingly, his programs often present rare and revealing juxtapositions, offering a broad range of works from the minimalists to the maximalists, from the old to the new, and from the mainstream to the unheard of. His repertoire in contemporary music is vast and fearless, including masterworks, very recent compositions, and an impressive number of premieres and commissions. Recently, he was the recipient of the Adventurous Programming Award from the American Symphony Orchestra League.

Music director of the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble since 1992, Weiss has brought the group to a level of artistry and virtuosity in performance that rivals the finest new music groups. After a concert with the ensemble in Carnegie Hall, Anthony Aibel wrote in a review, “under the direction of Timothy Weiss [the ensemble] presented unbelievably polished, superb performances—impeccable performances—of extremely challenging recent music…Their level of preparation eclipses the highest standard...Each work on the program had something vital to say, something profound, and [Weiss] was able to communicate the music’s message with vitality and insight, despite its extreme difficulty and somewhat foreign language. Weiss conducted with economy of gesture—never over conducting, never distracting from the music…the performance…cohered like one instrument with perfection thanks to the expert preparation by Timothy Weiss.” 

As a committed educator, he is professor of conducting and chair of the Division of Conducting and Ensembles at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he helped create and mentored the ensembles Eighth Blackbird and ICE. He holds degrees from the Royal Conservatory of Music in Brussels, Northwestern University, and the University of Michigan.

 

 

 

 

Clinical Assistant Professor of Composition

 

E-mail: 
aaron.helgeson@oberlin.edu 

Office: 
Robertson 122 
(440) 775-5238 

Personal Web Site: 
http://www.aaronhelgeson.com 

ObieMAPS: 
Aaron Helgeson
 

Educational Background

• PhD in Composition, University of California, San Diego (2013)
• MA in Composition, University of California, San Diego (2007)
• BMus in Composition, Oberlin Conservatory of Music (2005)
• BA in Theater, Oberlin College (2005)

 

---

Aaron Helgeson is an internationally recognized composer for the stage and concert hall, bringing a cutting-edge sensibility to acoustic instrumental and vocal music. His work—described by critics as "timeless" and “nothing short of mesmerizing”—explores the poetic boundaries of musical perception, drawing on the diverse fields of phenomenology, acoustics, literature, and cognitive science to create surreal and evocative sonic universes.

With recent and upcoming performances across the U.S. and Europe at venues including the Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles, IRCAM’s Manifeste 2012, the 2013 World New Music Days in Vienna, and the 2014 MATA Festival in New York, his music has been championed by such ensembles as the Arditti String Quartet, the New York piano and percussion quartet Yarn/Wire, acclaimed French chamber choir Les Cris de Paris, and Austrian new music group Ensemble Reconsil. Recordings of Helgeson's music are available on Carrier Records and Oberlin Music.

A former Fletcher Jones Fellow at the University of California, Helgeson has received prizes and accolades from ASCAP, the Fulbright Institute, American Composers Forum, and the Eiler Foundation. Also an occassional essayist, he recently penned an article for Perspectives of New Music titled "What is Phenomenological Music and What Does It Have to Do with Salvatore Sciarrino?"

His latest projects include a song cycle on fragments from medieval French troubadour poetry commissioned by Grammy-winning soprano Susan Narucki, the title track for renown clarinetist Richard Hawkins' 2013 CD A place toward other places, and an oratorio for choir and orchestra based on the lives and music of Norwegian immigrants in the American Midwest during the Children's Blizzard of 1888.

Helgeson began writing music at the age of 14, initially studying at the American Music Institute and Interlochen Center for the Arts. He holds bachelor’s degrees in composition and theater from Oberlin College and Conservatory, and a PhD from UC San Diego where he studied with Chaya Czernowin and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Roger Reynolds.

 

 

 

 

Visiting Assistant Professor of Composition

 

E-mail: 
eogonek@oberlin.edu 

Office: 
Robertson 122 
(440) 775-8074 

ObieMAPS: 
Elizabeth Ogonek
 

Educational Background

• BM, Indiana University Jacobs School of Music (2009)
• MM, University of Southern California Thornton School of Music (2012)
• DMus, Guildhall School of Music and Drama (expected 2015)

 

---

Composer Elizabeth Ogonek strives to create music that is energetic, dramatic, vivid, and colorful. Often inspired by text, her work explores the transference of words and poetic imagery to music. The nature of her interests has led to several collaborations with emerging writers including Sophia Veltfort, Ghazal Mosadeq, and Jonathan Dubow. Collaborative projects include her Three Pieces for guitar and narrator, which received its premiere at the Barbican Centre’s Milton Court Theatre in April 2014; Three Biographies, a song cycle for countertenor and cello, which was premiered at Wigmore Hall in May 2014; and a 10-minute adaptation of Dubow’s full-length play The Mysteries of Jacob, for narrator and clarinet, which was premiered by members of explorensemble and soprano Sophie Wingland at the Royal College of Music in January 2014. Ogonek has also worked extensively with Indian poet Ralph Nazareth to set both his work and the work of his poetry students at Green Haven Correctional Facility.

Recent and upcoming commissions include works for the London Symphony Orchestra and François-Xavier Roth, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Riccardo Muti, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and Fulcrum Point New Music Project for the Ear Taxi Festival in Chicago. Past commissions include works for Ensemble 360, the Flux Quartet, the Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra, and the Brillaner Duo. Other highlights include performances by the Tanglewood Fromm Players, Tim Munro, formerly of eighth blackbird, the Britten-Pears Ensemble at the Aldeburgh Festival, Dinosaur Annex, and the Wellesley Sinfonietta with Miranda Cuckson.

Ogonek is the recipient of awards from the ASCAP Foundation, Indiana University, the University of Southern California, the Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Royal Philharmonic Society. Her graduate education was supported by the Beinecke Foundation and the Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission. She has received fellowships to attend the Wellesley Composers’ Conference and the Tanglewood Music Center. In 2013, she was a Young Composer in Residence at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and in 2015 she was in residence at MacDowell Colony.

Born in 1989 in Anoka, Minnesota, and raised in New York City, Ogonek began studying music in the Preparatory Division at Manhattan School of Music. Her primary teachers have included Matthew Van Brink, Don Freund, Claude Baker, Michael Gandolfi, Donald Crockett, Stephen Hartke, and Julian Anderson. She has received further mentorship from Samuel Adler, Derek Bermel, John Harbison, Oliver Knussen, and Colin Matthews. She holds degrees from Indiana University, Jacobs School of Music (BM, 2009) and the University of Southern California, Thornton School of Music (MM, 2012). In 2015 she will complete her doctoral studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. She is a Mead Composer in Residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in addition to her role at Oberlin.