Draft:Stephen Dankner (composer)

Stephen Dankner (b. 1944) is an American composer/pianist of contemporary classical music. His works encompass the traditional forms and genres of classical music, with the exception of opera.

Dankner is, at heart, conservative, and has specialized in string quartet composition. His 30 string quartets were composed over the period from 1991- 2024. Other important genres of composition include three piano quintets (piano and string quartet); four sonatas for violin and piano; chamber music for the saxophone family of instruments and much chamber music for winds and/or strings with piano; numerous piano solo works, electronic and computer music and in the orchestral medium, five tone-poems and nine symphonies.

Dankner earned his B.Mus. at New York University (1966); M.A. at Queens College (1968) and the D.M.A. in Composition at The Juilliard School (1971). His composition teachers were Vittorio Rieti, Paul Creston, Leo Kraft, Hugo Weisgall, Roger Sessions and Vincent Persichetti.

After receiving his terminal degree from The Juilliard School, where he held a music theory teaching fellowship, Dankner taught at Brooklyn College (1971-’73) and Williams College (1973-’79). He also held part-time teaching positions at Loyola University’s College of Music and at the University of New Orleans.

Dankner served as senior classical faculty member and Chair of the Music Department of the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, an arts-focused high school, from 1986-2005, where he taught composition, music history and music theory. He also taught these subjects, as well as computer music notation, 16th and 18th century counterpoint and orchestration at Loyola University of the South (New Orleans) during those years.

Dankner’s early works date from 1968-1982 and are freely atonal. His “Three Concert Etudes for Piano” (1972/’82) and “Fantasy for Violin, Cello and Piano” (1970) are representative examples. Within his brief, two-year period studying with Paul Creston (1965-’66) however, he composed in his mentor’s neo- Romantic-‘Americana’ style.

Beginning in 1985 Dankner returned to composing neo-tonally, as he was eager to find a receptive listening public for his music yet to be written. In 1985, he began working in an idiom suffused with both compositional and expressive elements inherited from the “classical” past, but modified to be more advanced than mid-19th century functional harmony would allow. Dankner’s style is, indeed, “romantic,” featuring widely-arched themes, luxuriant orchestration, rich harmonies and abundant contrapuntal textures, and is intuitively forged from these elements; but it is as if hearing Romanticism from afar; his music suggests, but does not imitate or reproduce past models; it is not a simulacrum of past composers’ styles. With that understanding, his works cannot be considered derivative; rather, Dankner’s intrinsic creativity and appeal essentially lies in its highly personal freshness of expression, while still confronting modernism and meeting it halfway, and in many works, coming to grips with it and confronting it directly, fully on its own terms. Two examples: Symphony No. 8 (2005 ) and Violin Sonata No. 3 (2014).

The first major work to demonstrate this new compositional/stylistic approach was his “Dance Suite” (1985) - a 22 minute, four-movement work for solo piano. Other important works from this period include his Piano Concerto (1990), Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano (1991) and his first group of six string quartets (1991- ’93).

Dankner began composing for the saxophone(s) in 1997 as a result of his collaboration with Dr. Lawrence Gwozdz, who was professor of saxophone at the University of Southern Mississippi. This fruitful relationship began with his Sonata for Alto Saxophone and Piano, followed soon after by a Concerto for alto saxophone and orchestra (1998), and a Symphony for saxophone chamber orchestra (1998). He has contributed many subsequent works to the instrument’s repertoire, including two saxophone quartets, solo compositions, and several virtuoso chamber works.

From 2004-2007 Dankner was Composer-in-Residence with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra. During the period 1998-2010 he composed six symphonies and two tone-poems for the Orchestra – all premièred by Conductor/Music Director Klauspeter Seibel. Major works during these years are his tone-poem “Hurricane!” and symphonies nos. 3,4,5,7, 8 and 9.

Since 2005, Dankner’s compositional style has evolved to incorporate the atonality of his early years within a varied and flexible tonal language, which also includes jazz elements, occasionally calling for performer improvisation. These can be heard in works such as the String Quartets Nos. 16 and 17, Piano Quintets Nos. 2 and 3, and Saxophone Quartet No. 1.

Stephen Dankner is an avid cultivator of rare, rhizomatous tropical begonias. He is also a visual artist, with juried exhibitions of his experimental digital art, much of it taking inspiration from mathematical manipulations of both Julia and Mandelbrot fractal patterns found in nature. He is a guest columnist for the online website iberkshires.com, for which he writes weekly previews of concerts for the Tanglewood Music Festival and other regional Western Massachusetts summer classical music venues.

The composer and his wife, Laura, a retired soprano, music librarian and Past- President of the Music Library Association, and their tuxedo cat, Subwoofer, reside in Williamstown, Massachusetts.