Harriet Steinke is an American composer from Michigan.
Her work has premiered across the U.S. and some of her favorite performances have been those in her hometown city of Detroit. Her music has had multiple premieres at the Detroit Institute of Arts’ reverberate Diego Rivera courtyard, including her work for six grand pianos, Let Everything Ring, which was premiered by the NYC-based piano sextet Grand Band in 2018. During 2018-2020, she was composer-in-residence for the Ann Arbor-based ensemble Virago, who released their debut EP of Steinke’s concert length Listening for Bells in March of 2022.
During the 2023-2024 season she will have brand new works premiered by the Albany Symphony Orchestra, the Voyager Reed Quintet, the Civic Orchestra of New Haven, the saxophonist Zach Arthur, and cellist Kellen Degnan; and, in the (not so) distant future, she also looks forward to new works for the Akropolis Reed Quintet and the Bowling Green State University Wind Symphony. This year will also see the first full premieres of her song cycle Hymnal, a 50-minute work for the vocalist Molly McGuire that sets Alessandra Lynch’s beautiful and evocative poem “Hymnal” in a cycle of 10 songs. She also looks forward to first performances in Australia, Detroit, and NYC of her new work Rituals for clarinet and piano by the fantastic duo of pianist Lisa Moore and clarinetist Lloyd Van’t Hoff.
Harriet has received composition fellowships from the Norfolk and Tanglewood summer festivals and she most recently received a Charles Ives Scholarship award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She studied harmony and counterpoint at the EAMA-Nadia Boulanger Institute in Paris, France as well as German language and literature at the Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany. She studied composition and english at Butler University where her primary mentor was composer Michael Schelle and she completed graduate studies in music composition at the Yale School of Music where she studied with composers Martin Bresnick, David Lang, Aaron Jay Kernis, and Chris Theofanidis.