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Credits: Karen Becker (photograph, top right); James Brisson (theatrical poster designs); Ira Wilner (video and audio recordings of three chamber musicals); Robert Kramsky (production photography for three chamber musicals); Robert Meyer (black and white composer photo); other recording by Robert Bartlett, Dennis Kitsz, Robert Marx, Dave Snyder and Matt Hall of Guilford Sound, and Julian McBrowne. |
Zeke Hecker was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1947, and attended the Lawrenceville School and Harvard College.
He lives in Guilford, Vermont, and taught English at Brattleboro Union High School from 1971 until his retirement in 2004.
A former representative of the Met School Membership Program, he has written study guides to more than 100 broadcast
operas for the Metropolitan Opera website and led teacher workshops at the Met. He is co-founder of Friends of Music at Guilford,
former principal oboist of the Windham Orchestra, Pioneer Valley Symphony, and Connecticut River Valley Orchestra, a member
of the woodwind quintets Windfall and Variable Winds, and a former director of the Consortium of Vermont Composers.
Hecker has composed over 190 works, including operas, orchestral pieces, chamber and choral
music, incidental music for plays and films, and songs. His music has been performed by
orchestras, chamber groups, and choruses in New England as well as in Barcelona and London,
where his chamber opera "Mushrooms" was produced in 1999 and again in
2010. His five
symphonies were commissioned by orchestras in Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. The
opera "Pericles, Prince of Tyre" (from Shakespeare’s play) was staged in 1981, and the
musical "Barataria" (based on a play by 19th century Vermont playwright Royall Tyler) in
1998. Six Waltzes for Piano were choreographed by Kathleen Keller in 1997 for the
ballet “Degas.” Suite from “The Tempest," conducted by Blanche Moyse, was featured on
the soundtrack of the award-winning documentary film “The Stuff of Dreams,” which has been
shown on PBS television. He has received grants from the Vermont Arts Council, New England
Foundation for the Arts, and Meet the Composer.
Other stage works include the musical comedies "Double Exposure" and "Bemused," for which
he wrote book, music, and lyrics; these were staged by Vermont Theatre Company in 2003 and
2005, respectively. His ballet for children "The Unhappy Kingdom" was given in spring
2005 by the Windham Orchestra and the Brattleboro School of Dance, and his children’s opera
"The Forest" was staged that June by the Amato Opera in New York City. His musical "The
Lift" was introduced by Vermont Theatre Company in the spring of 2008 and revived in March
2009. There were two stage premieres in 2014: the musical “Now and Then” was produced at Actors Theatre Playhouse
in New Hampshire (July), and the one-act musical “Cleaning House” in two private performances
(November) and a third in May 2015. In September 2016 came the premiere of the musical
“Not For Profit” at the Monadnock Center for History and Culture in Peterborough, New Hampshire.
Other recent premieres: also in 2016, Symphony #5 (Sage City Symphony, Michael Finckel conducting, Bennington, Vermont, in May) and String Quartet #2
(Wistaria Quartet, Springfield, Massachusetts, in October). 2017 premieres included “Two Portraits for Oboe and Orchestra” (John Vance, oboe, with
David Kidwell conducting the Holyoke Civic Symphony, in March); “When Music Sounds” for chorus and orchestra (Springfield Community Chorus,
Ken Olsson conducting, in May); “The Year of Mourning Was Over” from “Three Poems of Franz Kafka” (Guilford Chamber Singers, Tom Baehr conducting, in June);
and “Family Album” (Julie Olsson, soprano, with Ken Olsson conducting the Guilford Festival Orchestra, in September.) In addition to premieres of several works
for woodwind ensembles, a major event in 2018 was the stage premiere in November of the musical “Profile” (Westminster West, Vermont). A few months later in March
2019, “Profile” was given the rare privilege of an entirely new production in Belfast, Maine, by the Belfast Maskers. Also in 2019 came the premiere of yet another
musical, “Move,” (Guilford, in November), and the song cycle “That Same Light” (Tom Gregg, tenor, with pianist I-Ying Lin, Boston Conservatory, in November).