PASSAGE OF TIME: THE MUSIC OF MICHAEL F. HUNT

Such are the improbabilities that tell the story of the American composer Michael F. Hunt (b. 1945, New Castle, Indiana). Highly decorated in music academia, Professor Hunt has taught composition, jazz history, orchestration, music theory, and several more demanding disciplines over a career that started in his preteens, playing piano for a local country and western band.

His life as a composer, however, began on a school trip to a performance of Tchaikovsky's Pathétique. The young musician found himself awestruck by a moment of absolute stillness held by the orchestra as the piece closed. Even now, almost seventy years on, Hunt speaks of the sheer, crushing power of that pause. He remembers being moved to tears, awash in silence and placidity amidst great emotive arousal. The experience stayed with him for days, he recalls, igniting in him a new desire to create music that could achieve such gravity. As we view his work now, we find throughout a depth of dynamic shading, silence allowed to hang in negative space in contrast to the richness and vibrancy that emerge as harmonic structures develop, perhaps all inspired by that single moment.

Greatly influenced by Daoist philosophies (and, interestingly enough, holding belts in the accompanying martial art aikido), a yin-yang of quietude and potency shines through Hunt’s compositions. Fluid and mellifluous melodies conjure an Edenic natural world of birdsong, trickling streams, dawnlight, and sky blue, echoing the New Age movement of the 1980s and their crystalline cassette serenity. But the cellular repetition of (for one example) this compilation’s opener “Music for Multiple Keyboards” unfolds with a Rileyian shimmer (Hunt and Riley have been peers and contemporaries for much of their careers) and the gliding, aquiline viola of “Butterfly Dreams” graces the piano’s dark arpeggiation and resonant bass chords with all the austerity and conscientiousness of a conservatoire performance (belying the work’s decidedly outré oversized graphic scores). Indeed, we point to Hunt’s work as a missing link between New Age, large-ensemble composition, and mid-century American minimalism: it is spiritual, wide-eyed, meticulously crafted, and astral in sensitive balance.

Hunt studied music composition with Manus Sasonkin and Graham Hollobon at the St. Louis Institute of Music, from which he graduated in 1968, only to be drafted into the US infantry to fight in Vietnam. Contracting pneumonia and from his hospital bed pleading the Army Band to accept him as a trombonist, he was eventually transferred away from the front line and back into musicianship. He remained at Fort Leonard Wood until the war ended. Returning to civilian life, he earned his PhD from Washington University in St. Louis in 1974, where he tested the limits of the era’s technology, experimenting with algae-prompted tone generation and programming Paul Hindemith’s extensive “rules of composition” into a 3,000-card IBM 360 deck. This pursuit of abstract timbre eventually led to the aforementioned “Music for Multiple Keyboards” and its many-layered ensemble of synthesisers.

In 1972 he was invited by the Gold Baton composer-conductor Leonard Slatkin to submit a postgraduate composition to the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Hunt remembers “I had to buy a suit but I forgot to buy shoes, so I showed up in a suit and hiking boots.” The LA Times were in attendance, describing the performance as “sounds and structures emerging from single lines…Colours drifting in and out…Clear, sparse, disarming.”

Michael F. Hunt spent the following decades as a pillar of musical academia, holding prestigious posts at Washington University, Saint Louis University, and Fontbonne, as well as acting as Senior Visiting Fulbright Scholar at Trinity College, Dublin. And though his works have been performed in Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, China, Ireland, Serbia, and the USA, his compositional catalogue has long remained a hidden treasure, largely unrecorded and, remarkably, never before released.