Update Title: E94FE534-7F29-484E-9210-C4A05E28A01C

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Of the five and one half movements that comprise my piano quartet, The King of the Sun, it was the second ("Dutch Interior") that was composed last, and thus, because it was written with the benefit of hindsight regarding the rest of the work, it is in some ways the key to the whole.  To begin, it bears the work "Phantasmagorically" as its tempo marking to suggest the constant shifting of musical images that drives the piece.  The musical materials derive from a late medieval canon entitled " Le ray au soleyl" ("the Sun's ray") that was jotted down on some empty staves at the foot of a manuscript page otherwise devoted to a chanson by the Flemish composer Johannes Ciconia.  The movement title itself, as is the case with the other four, is taken from a painting by Joan Miro. In Miro's "Dutch Interior," he based the composition of his work on a picture postcard of a painting by the 17th century Dutch genre painter Jan Steen, but his treatment is so delightfully willful and whimsical that the original is barely recognizable.  In my "Dutch Interior" I subject the canon (which might be considered Dutch in provenance by some) to similar distortion, most notably rendering it as a violin solo in which its canonic horizontal character is negated by the vertical multiple-stops that must be used to account for all the notes in the original's texture.  The underpinning t o this solo has nothing to do directly with the violin part, but evokes the spirit of medieval music in its form, an estampie, and its isorhythmic structure. All the foregoing may seem somewhat convoluted and even arcane, but I put the piece together this way, because it was fun to do.  Just as Miro's painting is both whimsical and serious, I wished to do the same thing in my music.  --Stephen Hartke

The King of the Sun, subtitled "Tableaux for violin, viola, cello and piano," was composed on commission from the Los Angeles Piano Quartet with the assistance of a grant from Chamber Music America.  Its individual movements take their titles from paintings by Joan Miro, being musical reflections both on the titles and on the arrangement of pictorial elements within.  The aim was to create a work that, like the painting, is whimsical and serious by turns.  The overall title, however, comes from a different source:  a late 14th century canon doubtfully ascribed to Flemish composer Johannes Cinconia.  The exact solution to the canon has proved elusive, even controversial, but one version published in the 1950's while audibly incorrect, produces such delightfully spiky collisions between its three parts that Hartke decided to use it as raw compositional material in the second and fourth movements, much as Miro used a painting by Jan Steen as a basis for his "Dutch Interior."

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"From present evidence, Hartke's an exemplar of the postmodernist stance, and I say so in admiration for what he's achieved. The discovery of the good and valid voice lines up as First Delight in one's involvement with new music. ...Hartke's unique voice, and a subtly poetic voice it is, speaks a broad range of dialects: each of [The King of the Sun's] five movements has its own string character, all of them lit by a predominantly golden-amber radiance. His deft manipulations of atonality, for example, exist not as exercise but rather to serve a mood that, while here and there urgent, never departs the work's deep-napped mysteries." --Fanfare

"...What was impressive about [The King of the Sun's] was the way disparate debts had been subsumed into a personal style. Here and there, one could hear intimations of composers as diverse as Olivier Messiaen and Steve Reich, and idioms as far afield as gospel and jazz. Yet the writing sounded coherent and vigorously expressive, not afraid of dissonance but not obsessed with chromatic fragmentation, either..." --John Rockwell, The New York Times

"...For all the fierce complexity of this work, for all its surreal musical and visual references and for all its tricky sound effects, Hartke manages the ultimate magic: He creates a work that folds these ingredients into a coherent whole. The performance...was a delight..." --Travis Rivers

"...Mysterious in mood, [The King of the Sun's] is flavored with the medieval character of the 14tth century Flemish canon that generated the musical materials. The composer draws expressive sonorities from the strings and treats the piano like a percussion instrument. The blending of contemporary techniques with the spirit of ancient music results in transporting tonal pictures..." --Wilma Salisbury

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