The music of
Karl Korte has a scope and a variety that makes
classification of it difficult. Professor Emeritus of
Composition at the University of Texas at Austin and
recently a Visiting Professor of Music at Williams College,
he is now retired from teaching and lives in Cambridge,
N.Y. Raised in Englewood, N.J. his father was a sculptor
and was responsible for his earliest exposure to classical
music. In high school, his musical influences and
activities were mostly in the areas of jazz and popular
music, and he played the trumpet in a variety of bands and
orchestras. After discharge from the Army, where he played
trumpet with the First Army Band, he entered the Juilliard
School where his teachers included Peter Mennin, William
Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti. Later teachers include
Geofreddo Petrassi, Otto Luening and Aaron Copland. Over
the years he has created a body of work that ranges from
chamber music to symphonies, as well as choral works
ranging from oratorios to a number of short works intended
for school and church use. Much of this music has attracted
attention through publication, performance, recordings and
many significant national and international prizes and
awards: two Guggenheim Fellowships, Fulbright Grants to
Italy and New Zealand, Grants from the Ford Foundation
Young Composer's in Residence Program, a gold medal in the
Queen Elizabeth International Composition Competition,
Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, First
Prize in the Missouri Contemporary Music Competition, as
well as awards from the National Flute Association, the
Vanguard Arts competition and the Tampa Bay Composer's
Forum. In 2002 his Four Songs of Experience (Blake) for
treble voices and piano won "Top Honors" in the
Waging Peace Through Singing international
competition.
In addition to his acoustic compositions, Korte has written
many works making use of electronic media. (One of his
earliest efforts in this respect was
Remembrances for flute and
tape. Recorded by flutist Samuel Baron for the Nonesuch
label in 1971) In the mid '80s, with the ready availability
of digital recording and processing equipment, the composer
returned to electronic music, and created a number of
compositions using this new technology. Although several of
these works are for tape alone, most of his compositions in
this area involve the use of a live instrumentalist whose
pallet of sounds has been "extended" through the addition
of a taped electronic accompaniment.
"For me, one of the most interesting aspects of using the
computer as a compositional tool is its powerful ability to
extend the vocabulary of existing musical instruments by
blurring the distinctions between sounds which have been
acoustically ("naturally") created by a musical instrument
and those that have been electronically manufactured. For
the performer this may mean extending the boundaries
between what is physically possible on an acoustic
instrument and what is not and for the listener it often
means a blurring of such distinctions. If in listening to
these compositions one sometimes finds it difficult or
impossible to tell where these boundaries lie, at least in
part, I consider that I have been successful." - Karl Korte