Biography

Richard Ratner is a Providence, RI based composer, teacher and pianist. His teachers include John Lessard (composition) at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and Menahem Pressler (piano), for whom he was the teaching assistant at Indiana University for many years. He has served as a member of the piano faculty at the Chicago Musical College of Roosevelt University, taught piano at the Conservatoires of Montbelliard and Belfort in France, and been a chamber music coach at Boston Conservatory. His compositions have been performed across the U.S. by groups including the Avanti Ensemble, Solomania, Luminus, KassiaMusic, the Bavarde Quartet, the Argus Quartet, the Walden Ensemble, and the Flint Symphony Orchestra. Venues include Boston's Jordan Hall, the Plymouth (Massachusetts) Chamber Music Festival, Musica Viva in Blacksburg, Virginia, Flint's Whiting Auditorium, NYC's Carnegie Hall, Prague's Dvorak Hall, and The Schubert Club in St Paul, Minnesota, which commissioned A Song for St. Cecilia's Day, 1687 for soprano Dinah Bryant and pianist Daniel Blumenthal. In February, 2011 his Andante for Strings (now the Barber movement from Homages) premiered at the Kennedy Center and was done a week later at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. It has since enjoyed numerous performances across the US. In Summer, 2012, his Todesfuge premiered in Dvorak Hall. . His Quintet for Piano and Strings premiered in 2013 on a faculty concert at the Interlochen Arts Academy. In 2017 it was performed on the Kalliroscope Gallery Chamber Music Series in Groton, Massachusetts, by the Walden Chamber Players, and in 2019 at the International Society of Bassists convention in Bloomington, IN. In 2020, his Second String Quartet premiered by the wonderful, young Argus Quartet. In 2022 it was performed in the D.C. area by Kassia Music as the winner of its first composition competition. In 2023, his Violin Concerto premiered with the Flint (MI) Symphony conducted by Enrique Diemecke, and the 2022 gold medalist of the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis, Sirena Huang, playing the solo.

Manifesto

Many have gotten accustomed to the idea that educated musicians scoff at something like my Andante for Strings because it employs tonal vocabulary and was written recently. Music is simply frequencies impinging on the listener's eardrums. Music's function, like that of all art, is to move the perceiver through its beauty, feeling, meaning, emotion, novelty, etc. How wonderful it is that we have the capacity to be moved, to receive meaning, from sounds which, unlike words, refer to nothing but each other. The time of composition is irrelevant to the function of music. Either a piece is capable of moving a listener or it isn't, and a listener who refuses to be moved due only to something other than the impinging frequencies is the loser.

Tonality is a language. Over the course of many centuries it has developed a rich and complex vocabulary of pitch relationships that has meaning for a great number of people. This vocabulary derives primarily from the consonant or dissonant qualities of intervals that are themselves likely products of the overtone series, and is capable of imparting meaning over a wide variety of time spans. The suggestion that the language of tonality is stale is exactly as silly as making that statement about any other language, e.g. English. If music is hackneyed or trite, it's not the fault of the language. The blame lies with the composer - it's simply bad music.

The reason that new concert music has floundered in the last few decades is because the pernicious idea that it can move a listener without audible pitch organization has persisted although serialism, which introduced this idea, is thankfully all but dead. It is important to note that atonality, via exploitation of, among other things, the very same consonance/dissonance relationships present in all intervals that tonality exploits, is capable of moving a listener similarly, but it is much more difficult to accomplish, being the product of the intuition of the composer and his hope that a listener will "get" his message, rather than of an established system.

Finally, my belief is that music is remembered first and foremost for strong, memorable, relatively short and well-defined themes. Composers who spend their time inventing "systems" or "concepts" do so primarily because, whatever other compositional skills they may have mastered, they are unable to invent great themes and hope that that fact will be masked in the music generated by their "system".

It is so sad when a listener assumes that fresh, new music cannot move him to a degree similar to that achievable by old music. I am doing my best to change that perception.