Creative Achievement Award

For Harler, teaching plus conducting equals creative achievement

Harler

Alan Harler embarked on his musical career at the tender age of 6, in his grandparents’ farmhouse in the cornfields of Illinois. It was there that he discovered their grand piano.

“I started playing right away,” he recalled. “I also had a collection of marbles, and I’d put them on the strings to see what different sounds I could make.”

Soon he was arranging “concerts,” picking out pieces from The Golden Book of Favorite Songs and putting them together in a program “that I made my parents and my brother sit down and listen to.”

At age 10, he was taking formal piano lessons, and at 14, he had his first professional job, playing the organ in a funeral home. “I played all the wrong music,” he said with a laugh, “like ‘Hawaiian Love Song.’”

Despite those somewhat tentative beginnings, Harler went on to a career as a choral music conductor that has earned him recognition at the highest levels on both the national and international stages.

On Thursday, April 14, Harler, the director of the Temple University Concert Choir, was honored with the University’s Creative Achievement Award for 2005.

He is particularly appreciative of the award’s implicit acknowledgement of the creative aspects of conducting, said Harler, who is also Laura H. Carnell Professor of Music and director of choral activities at the Boyer College of Music and Dance.

“Conductors are often thought of as being re-creators, not creators,” he said. “But creating concert programs, and interpreting words and music in a way that bridges the gap between what the composer wrote and how the audience perceives the piece, are highly creative endeavors, if the resulting work is to have an impact on audiences, and on the art form."

In building a program of choral music, Harler likes to synergistically combine the historic with the contemporary, enriching the resonance of the older pieces while making the new music more understandable.

“And I’m always seeking to put my own imprint on a piece, through my own understanding of the content, and my emotional and intellectual response to it.”

Harler, who had been chair of the choral music department at Indiana University School of Music and on the faculty at the University of Massachusetts, came to Temple in 1981 as a visiting professor — and “I never left,” he said with a smile.

“Temple students are very, very special. I have serious, hardworking students who are serious about their careers, who have a passion for what they want to do. They are a delight. As a teacher, there is nothing that could be more rewarding.”

Harler counts the teaching experience as one of the most important creative elements of his work. “One of the strongest characteristics of a good conductor is the ability to teach. You teach as you conduct. I’m really a teacher at heart,” he said.

In addition to bringing his creative teaching talents to Temple’s Concert Choir, Harler is in his 17th season as music director of the 140-member Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, where he has also built a reputation for innovation and leadership.

“He has ... allowed us to carve a distinctive niche in a city filled with fine choral organizations, and is bringing us to the forefront nationally in the creation of new work that contributes to the vitality of choral music as an art form,” said Lynn Z. Faust, the Mendelssohn Club’s executive director.

Boyer Dean Robert Stroker hails Harler’s "extraordinary work as a conductor and his commissioning of 27 new works of music by American composers — an extraordinary achievement.”

He lauds the ongoing successes of Temple’s Concert Choir under Harler’s direction: invitations to perform at the prestigious American Choral Directors Association conference last year and an Asian tour with sold-out performances in Taipei and Kaohsiung in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Harler’s professional credits also include preparing choruses for many of the country’s leading orchestras and conductors, including Riccardo Muti, Klaus Tennstedt, Charles Dutoit, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Zubin Mehta, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos and Loren Maazel, and making recordings on the Nonesuch, Enharmonic and Argo/London labels.

At Temple, Harler praises the creative and cooperative spirit of his colleagues at the Boyer College, many of whom he has collaborated with. Among the Philadelphia premieres he has presented are works by Temple composers Jan Krzywicki, Cynthia Folio, Jay Krush, Richard Brodhead and Maurice Wright.

“Teaching, conducting, commissioning, creating concert programs, collaborating — I am truly blessed to enjoy the rewards of all of these professional worlds,” he said.

- By Harriet Goodheart