This interview originally appeared in the May 2013 New York Flute Club Newsletter. Copyright 2013 by The New York Flute Club, Inc.

The flute world knows Katherine Hoover (www.katherinehoover.com) as a groundbreaking composer of wonderful music for the flute. She began her life as a composer when it was very unusual for women to consider composing as a career. Equally boldly, she started a publishing company, Papagena Press, to get her music out into the world. I first met Katherine in the early ’90s when I was at Barnard College, working on both her Suite for two flutes and Kokopeli for my senior thesis project on women composers. She was one of the first “real” (that is, non-student) composers I had ever met, and I am so pleased that we have worked together quite a bit in the years since! For this profile, we got together last year at her Upper West Side apartment, and I used the opportunity to ask her all sorts of nosy questions about the nitty-gritty of her life as a composer, and how it compares to the life of a flutist...continued.

This interview originally appeared in the May 2013 New York Flute Club Newsletter. Copyright 2013 by The New York Flute Club, Inc.

If the morning is about getting ideas out of Katherine’s head and onto paper, the afternoon is about getting her music out of her apartment and onto music stands everywhere…

ZL: So, you’ve composed until you’re done for the day, then what?

KH: Well, I head for the computer: there are always things to answer like somebody wants a lesson on Kokopeli, and that has to be scheduled. I go to the post office a reasonable amount. I’m very, very lucky that Papagena Press has been enough of a success that about five years ago Theodore Presser came to me and asked to be my distributor, and offered me a very nice deal. So I have to get stuff off to them, from time to time, and then there are a ton of other things, a lot of inquiries. So in the afternoon, I handle things like inquiries and the business level of it...continued.

When the award-winning flutist and composer Katherine Hoover starts writing a new piece of music, she’s never sure where it’s going to go. And she’s okay with that.

“You never know where it’s going to take you,” Hoover said in a recent phone interview. “You just have to work and express it and let it be and let it take you there.”

As Hoover launches a career as a poet, she says working with words is much the same way. And she's okay with that, too.

Embracing the mystery and uncertainty of the creative life has come to define Hoover as an artist. Her first collection of poems, This Way About (2015) gives voice to the mysteries of creativity – and of life in general – in its first poem, “Vaguely Philosophical.” That poem tells of life twisting, turning and looping back on itself with no clear outcome in sight – “Who is to say/that backward is not/where forward will go?/Let someone else decide;/ I abstain,/knowing simply myself/that this way about/is only (or also) mine.”...continued.

When I interviewed flutist, poet, and composer Katherine Hoover for the July/August 2016 issue (Fanfare 39:6) I commented that Parnassus records had, with its several releases, touched on every aspect of Hoover’s art. I was wrong, as this new CD proves. Hoover is a fine composer of choral music as well, and thanks to a new recording initiative by Harold Rosenbaum and his acclaimed chorus, The New York Virtuoso Singers, we are now able to hear a good sampling of her small but significant body of work for vocal ensemble. That includes a striking setting of poetry by Walt Whitman, in the form of a liturgy for the dead, titled Requiem for the Innocent.

The last interview was with Hoover alone, but this time the composer asked that her partner in this project be a partner in the conversation. So we got a three-way email discussion of the music and the recording started even as the audio and documentation were in final preparations for publication.

Hoover wrote in her program notes that the Requiem for the Innocent was inspired by the attacks of September 11, 2001, but that she withdrew the work as a result of the military campaign against Baghdad in 2003. To start with, I asked her to say a little about her response to both events, and why she decided to pursue a recording of the Requiem, and a performance in concert, 13 years after it was withdrawn.

“I live in Manhattan, about seven miles above the 9/11 site. There was no avoiding the shock and consequences of this, and the first poem I actually had published is called ‘Dust’ and is about that tragedy. I began the Requiem not long after that. The poetry of Walt Whitman which I used was originally written about the Johnstown flood, which was also entirely human-caused, and killed about the same number as the 9/11 attacks.

“Then, when we began our tremendous bombardment in 2003 of a city whose country had nothing to do with 9/11, using that as some kind of strange excuse, I was appalled. Many, many more innocents were victimized. Morally, I could not mourn the 3,000 when my country was bombing tens of thousands who were just as innocent. So I put it away...continued.