Clarke, Henry Leland

Clarke, Henry Leland, American composer and teacher; b. Dover, N.H., March 9, 1907; d. March 30, 1992. He received training in piano, organ, and violin before pursuing his education at Harvard Univ. (M.A., 1929), where he studied composition with Hoist (1931–32; Ph.D., 1947, with a diss. on John Blow). He also studied with Boulanger at the École Normale de Musique in Paris (1929–31) and with Weisse and Luening in Bennington, Vt., and N.Y. (1932–38). Clarke taught at Bennington (Vt.) Coll. (1936–38), Westminster Choir Coll. in Princeton, N.J. (1938–42), the Univ. of Calif, at Los Angeles (1947–58), and the Univ. of Wash, in Seattle (1958–77). He publ. the book Sound and Unsound: Ideas on Music (Seattle, 1973). In his compositions, he developed such innovations as “Intervalescent Counterpoint” (with interval values constanting changing one voice to another), “Lipophony” (with certain notes systematically omitted), “Word Tones” (whenever a word recurs, it is assigned to the same pitch), and “Rotating Triskaidecaphony” (a 12-tone series returning to note 1 for the 13 th note, with the next row starting and ending on note 2, etc.).