Lee (Leon Joseph) Hyla was born in Niagara Falls, New York (1952), and grew up in Greencastle, Indiana. After graduating from the New England Conservatory of Music (B. Mus., 1975), he studied at SUNY Stony Brook (M.A. 1978), then lived in New York City, returning to New England Conservatory to teach in 1992, where he is currently co-chairman of the composition department. He has written for numerous performers, including the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Kronos Quartet (with Allen Ginsberg), Speculum Musicae, Lydian String Quartet, Tim Smith, Tim Berne, Rhonda Rider, Stephen Drury, Mia Chung, and Judith Gordon. He has received commissions from the Koussevitsky, Fromm, Barlow, and Naumburg Foundations, Mary Flagler Charitable Trust, Concert Artist’s Guild, and is the recipient of two Meet the Composer/Reader’s Consortium Commissions. He has also been the recipient of the Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Goddard Lieberson Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Rome Prize. Hyla’s music has been recorded on the Nonesuch, New World, Avant, CRI, and Tzadik labels.
His music seeks to find a common ground between the postwar American Expressionism of such composers as Stefan Wolpe and Elliott Carter and the gritty urban style of Avant-Garde Jazz musicians such as Cecil Taylor. Hyla also integrates aspects of the rougher styles of Rock, especially Punk into the unique mix of his music. Despite its high energy and raw surface, the music is fully notated, with nothing improvised, nor is there anything haphazard about Hyla’s sense of pitch, or dramatic structure, both of which are meticulous in a way that allows raucousness to achieve elegance. His fairly small compositional output is meticulously wrought and displays great structural variety. Among Hyla’s works for chamber orchestra, the 1984 Pre-Pulse Suspended marks the first thorough integration of the elements of his musical technique. In this pivotal work, the motivic treatment of short-breathed riffs has a Beethovenian intensity and variety of phrase structure. The rhythmic force of this surface allows Hyla to juxtapose musics of contrasting tempo and affect, in an original and personal extension of methods derived from Carter. At the same time, a powerful sense of drama extends over each movement through the adroit manipulation of pedal points, which are presented either as non-transposing chords or as extended repeated notes. Hyla continued to develop these techniques in the Concerto for Piano and Chamber Orchestra No. 2 (1991), the stunning and justly celebrated Howl, written for the Kronos Quartet and Allen Ginsberg’s recitation of his famous poem, and most ambitiously in the 1996 Trans for chamber orchestra. Hyla’s chamber music is a notable exemplification of the composer’s unique and engaging approach to composition: both complex and immediately compelling, substantial, yet visceral, almost elemental in character - always rich in content and eminently direct in expression.
N.B. The second paragraph has been adapted from an appreciation of Lee Hyla originally written by Scott Wheeler for the forthcoming edition of the New Grove Dictionary.