I’ve been actively reviewing classical music (and some jazz) since 1982-1994, when my column appeared weekly in Atlanta’s Creative Loafing. I also reviewed for Peter Koch’s magazine Classical DisCDigest, which I credit with broadening my view of the world of the classics. I’ve been posting reviews on the website since 2003, most recently on a montly basis for the Audio Video Club of Atlanta at http://www.a-vcoa.org. Readers can access that website to get a fuller picture of what I love and admire in music (Don’t leave off the hyphen, or you’ll get the Antelope Valley Council on Aging). A composer doesn’t have to have had a long beard or been dead a hundred years to win my admiration. He (or she) only has to be sincere and have something to say to me on some level.

As for my other interests, I love to take nature walks and am an avid collector of old Hollywood films on home video. To paraphrase Will Rogers, “I am not a Republican, nor do I have any other conspicuous bad habits.”

I respond here to Mr. Phil Muse in part because I think that he has crossed a line of civility in his final paragraph by saying that I don’t “play with a full deck of cards.” We all recognize this sort of language as insulting and I take it as nothing less. But beyond his calumny, his review contains lapses of logic (and, as I see it, judgment) that make me wonder what possible good he thinks he is serving the world at large with his blathering.

To begin with paragraph one:

Let’s leave aside his inability to transcribe correctly the title to my “Post-Modern Homages” and move on to the spot where Mr. “Muse” calls me a “modern day Dadaist.” For my part I don’t have a problem with the existence or the work of the Dadaist movement, but I know that my music and my aesthetic are so far removed from that nearly 100-year old anti-artistic movement, I wonder how anyone professing any sort of music historical awareness could associate what he heard on this CD as being in any way akin to it. Mr. Muse’s clever little aside about dissonance, the Agincourt Hymn and the Clavecinistes does little to mitigate the fatuousness of his observations — and what the hell does the Coventry Carol of all things have to do with the notion of irregular rhythm or dissonance? Where are Mr. Muse’s ears?

In the second paragraph, Mr. Muse shows himself to be just too in love with his conceit that I am a Dadaist, and so he summons up a reference to “Le chien andalou,” but to what purpose? To frighten us or to show off that he is so clever as to read some Cliff Notes about 20th century arts history, although failing to note that “Le chien andalou” belongs to the Surrealist movement not to the Dada? I nitpick on this because Mr. Muse is merely nitpicking himself — he doesn’t like my music (which is fine by me) but he seems to need an overarching pseudo-logical reason not to and cannot find one but by resorting to unartfully concealed ad hominem attacks.

The third paragraph plods on with the same sort of “I am the cleverest boy in the class” sort of nonsense, even though he still can’t get the title of my “Post-Modern Homages” quite right. He shows his true aesthetic stripes by finding virtue in the most tonal of the pieces on offer (and I like this piece, too, I must say), but then takes me to task for not living up to a remark made in the CD notes by the exemplary pianist, Xak Bjerken. I have no problem that Xak heard something “light and birdlike” in the finale of my sonata, but the fact that Mr. Muse found “Hartke’s birds … to have leaden wings” has absolutely nothing to do with me, my musical intentions or my music — I’m sorry, Mr. Muse, but you can’t take me to task for not fulfilling an expectation that I myself as the composer of the work never granted you. (And what on earth did you mean by that long aside about Buster Keaton? Are you just showing off the fact that you like to watch silent movies?)

Most of the words in the fourth paragraph derive from the CD notes but have been recast in a way to suggest that Mr. Muse actually understands what he is talking about. But when he says that “it is probably unwise to take Hartke’s clever subtitles too seriously,” he reveals a number of failings including (1) he didn’t read the part of the program notes that acknowledged quite clearly that these titles were taken directly from paintings by Joan Miro, and (2) that I do not make any claim in the same notes that they need to be taken seriously — indeed I talk about my celebration of their whimsy. But, sadly, I have a sense that Mr. Muse has no appreciation for whimsy, despite his inexplicable aside about the “dirty trick nature has played” on snails, which is nothing short of bizarre in its pointlessness.

As for the final paragraph, I’ll give credit to the undoubtedly pseudonymous Mr. Muse for admitting that this constituted his “personal impression” of my work. But what value is his opinion if we know nothing about him? My music and other information about me are all out there, available freely and openly, so who is this person hiding behind a pseudonym who presumes to call me a “composer who doesn’t always play with a full deck of card”? What are his qualifications? The famous pseudonymous critics of the past, Debussy as Monsieur Croche, G.B.Shaw as Cornetto di Bassetto, were actually fairly well known to be writing under noms-de-guerre, because the artistic world they knew was actually quite hermetic. But in the broader world of Internet anonymity I believe that there is reason to call into question the role of pseudonymity within moderated forums such as this one.

There I ask Mr. Muse to reveal his actual identity and to set forth the particulars that make him a qualified music critic.