Product Description

William Hawley (born 1950) is one of the central figures in today’s renaissance of American choral music. Born in upstate New York to a literarily minded family, he studied at Ithaca College and the California Institute of the Arts. There, he composed avant-garde instrumental works in the shadow of Morton Subotnick, Earle Brown, and Morton Feldman, and even flirted with minimalism. However, the launch of his Two Motets in 1981 demonstrated a shift to vocal music and to a more emotionally direct style. This new approach, unusual among his fellow composers based in New York City, was particularly well-suited to unaccompanied choirs, with their natural penchant for rich textures, sonorous but dissonant harmonies, unresolved suspensions, and subtle counterpoint. His catalog also includes an extensive corpus of music for women’s chorus, major works for chorus and orchestra (including a Mass and a Requiem), and several pieces for solo voice. He has composed for such noted ensembles as New York’s Gregg Smith Singers, the Dale Warland Singers in St. Paul, the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston, and Chanticleer, San Francisco’s all-male professional choir. In recent years, Hawley has traded the hubbub of Manhattan for the calm of coastal Maine, but his continuing output demonstrates an influential and timely voice in American choral music. Indeed, his treatment of harmony and counterpoint helped to establish compositional trends that have since been adopted by other major figures such as Morten Lauridsen and Eric Whitacre.