Lee Hyla, who mixed rock and jazz into classical works, dies
Lee Hyla, an American composer whose work marries the formal rigor of classical music with the driving energy of rock and the improvisational abandon of jazz, died June 6 in Chicago. He was 61.
His death, from complications of pneumonia, was announced by Northwestern University, where he held the Harry N. and Ruth F. Wyatt chair in music theory and composition.
Hyla, whose music was commissioned and performed by some of the world’s most celebrated ensembles, was considered “among the most accomplished American composers of the baby boomer generation,” as Anthony Tommasini wrote in The New York Times in 1999.
Known in particular for his chamber music, Hyla — who cited influences ranging from Beethoven to the freejazz pianist Cecil Taylor to the contemporary composer Elliott Carter — was praised for compositions that were i narguably modern but which lacked the forbidding qualities that can alienate listeners from modernist music.
What made his work so captivating, critics said, was its eclectic originality, propulsive rhythmic force, companionable combination of dissonance and consonance and its masterly command of sonorities from the lush to the spare.
“His music wrestles extremes of sound and energy into a form of sagely controlled chaos,” The Boston Globe wrote in 2007. “It is packed with brainy structures and rigorous forms, but at its best it hurls through space with the visceral immediacy of the genres that first sparked his imagination. Moments of surprising beauty arrive like clearings in a forest. He is an uptown composer with a downtown soul, a 12- tone rebel who never gave up on modernism.”
Another hallmark of Hyla’s style was his exquisite attention to the timbre of instruments, including those — like bass clarinet and hammered dulcimer — typically neglected by concert composers. In one piece, “Wilson’s Ivory-bill,” based on the writings of the 19thcentury ornithologist Alexander Wilson, he recruited an ivory-billed woodpecker (on tape) as a member of the ensemble.