The American Academy of Arts and Letters has named 91探花 School of Music faculty composer the recipient of the Charles Ives Living Award, the largest monetary award granted exclusively to American composers. The cash award of $200,000 enables 鈥� and in fact requires 鈥� the recipient to 鈥渜uit his day job鈥� for two years to focus solely on composing, a luxury not afforded Ives himself, who composed the body of his work in relative obscurity while earning a living in the insurance trade.

While on leave from the 91探花starting July 1, Hodge — who currently serves as chair of the school鈥檚 composition program — plans to continue his prolific output of new works developed in his eight years on the 91探花faculty. We caught up with the composer recently for a look into his creative process and his plans for the two years ahead.

The Charles Ives Living Award literally buys you time to devote entirely to your composing. It鈥檚 too soon for you to have the next two years all mapped out, but will we see much of you, or do you plan to retreat or travel?

H.H.: I will still be around the 91探花from time to time curating some concerts and other performance activities in the composition program. This award will enable me to start thinking in depth about some larger-scale projects that I have had in mind for a while. Some of these are currently under commission and others are more open-ended. I plan to travel extensively, but I will continue to reside in Seattle.

Who are some of the composers, artists, or philosophers who have most deeply influenced your work? What about them draws you?聽

On a technical and stylistic level, I draw inspiration from a very wide variety of sources: free jazz, film noir soundtracks, painting, poetry, non-linear narrative, pretty much anything that I find interesting. I’ve recently been influenced by various philosophical traditions, but not in the most obvious way. There are many composers who write music that, in one way or another, is inspired by specific ideas of a given philosopher, so that you might say that the piece is 鈥渁bout鈥� those ideas. But I see music itself as posing certain interesting philosophical questions in its own way.

Last year you completed a commission titled 鈥�鈥� for solo offstage trumpet and the 91探花Wind Ensemble. In your program note, you refer to a famous work by Ives, 鈥淭he Unanswered Question,鈥� in which there is a somewhat similar arrangement of onstage and offstage performers, though Ives reversed the effect, placed the trumpet onstage and the strings offstage. How directly were you influenced by Ives or this particular work of his when composing this piece? In general, have his pieces inspired you as a composer, and if so, to what extent?

I think Ives is a good example of a composer who was interested in exploring the philosophical implications of music. In the program note to 鈥淭he Unanswered Question鈥� he tells us that the trumpet repeatedly poses the 鈥減erennial question of existence鈥� to which the musical ensemble responds in increasingly frustrated but continuously doubtful musical 鈥渁nswers.鈥�

Ives鈥� piece seems to accord a certain centrality to the individual (the trumpet is onstage, the ensemble is off), suggesting that even though society may tell you one thing, true certainty comes from within. My piece takes a much more skeptical view. The trumpet is offstage the whole time and at the end is in a completely different part of the building, creating a sense of distant, elusive individuality. The idea here is that individuality is only expressible in relation to society and in the modes of expression (language, culture) that the community provides to each of us. To forgo society鈥檚 ready-made answers is to assume a position of exteriority, to give up to a significant degree the power to directly influence those around you. This does not mean we need to exclude others from our lives. Rather, to be an individual is to dwell in this distance, however close our proximity to others may be.

In the same piece you recall a sublime musical experience you had in which the final notes of a piece you heard lingered in such a faint suggestion of sound as to almost be inaudible or imaginary. Do you find 鈥� from the feedback you receive from listeners 鈥� that the personal elements you insert into pieces have the desired effect, or are you sometimes surprised or disappointed with reactions to your music because they weren鈥檛 what you intended to provoke?

Everyone is going to bring their own history and perspective to the music they hear, and that is a wonderful thing. Even so, I like the idea that we can understand each other, however imperfectly. It鈥檚 not like there is some perfect, ideal meaning that is in my mind that simply degrades in the process of transmission to other minds.

Rather, the fact that other people understand my intentions in their own way reveals that my own understanding of those intentions is incomplete. To me, this suggests that no thought, no word, no sound can be grasped by one person in its entirety. No one is entirely self-reliant, but at the same time, no one is entirely alone, either.

To extend that question, how much does it matter to you what listeners might think or feel about your music and how much effect does the intended audience for a piece have on you while you are in the process of creation?

This does play an important role in the way that I shape my music. In fact, this may be another expression of a certain ethical impulse I feel as a composer. But again, I want to allow enough space for everyone to form their own unique interpretation about what they hear. My intention is not to manipulate listeners into a specific viewpoint about the music. At the same time, I like to set up expectations in the listeners that may be fulfilled, elided or even thwarted over the course of a piece. I generally want the listeners to enjoy my music, but in a way that proves elusive to articulate.

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Learn more about Hodge and his music at .

At the end of his well-known last May, longtime School of Music Professor returned to the stage alone 鈥� but not for a final bow.

Rather, he asked the audience to bear with him for one more song. “Forty-four years ago today, I married the love of my life, my wife Cheryl,” he said, gesturing to a woman in the center of the second row of Meany Studio Theater.

Having absent-mindedly booked a concert for the night of his anniversary, Collier wanted to observe the milestone 鈥� and make it up to his life partner 鈥� by performing a well-known ’60s era hit by Carole King, arranged for vibraphone.

If you missed that sentimental show, you can catch another this week in the annual Mallethead percussion series. Collier will mark six decades of performance, to the day, with “,” a concert at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 2, again in the Meany Studio Theater. The evening also will feature guitarist Larry Coryell, percussionist Emil Richards, clarinetist (and emeritus faculty member) Bill Smith, bassist Dan Dean, and pianist Marc Seales. Tickets are available .

His anniversary tribute was perfectly in tune with the occasion, given the constant presence of music in the lives of both Tom and Cheryl Collier, from well before their meeting as 91探花music students more than four decades ago.

He remembers his first public performance, at age 5, on April 2, 1954, playing marimba and tap dancing at the VFWs “Kiddie Karnival” at Puyallup High School. And he remembers that long ago day in the stairwell of the Music Building after orchestra rehearsal when he asked Cheryl out on a date and she said yes.

Two children and two grandchildren later, they are still spotted around the campus, hand in hand. Cheryl, a flutist who still performs often, enjoyed a long career as a music teacher in the Federal Way school system. Collier has spent more than 30 years teaching percussion and jazz studies students at the 91探花in addition to his active performance and recording career in the Seattle area and beyond.

Though it may seem that he has spent most of his life at the 91探花鈥� he notes with amusement that “Bow Down to Washington” was among the three pieces he played at that debut performance 鈥� Collier in fact worked with many leading recording musicians in Los Angeles after graduating from the 91探花in 1971. These include Barbra Streisand, Harry Nilsson, Della Reese, Peggy Lee and even Frank Zappa, among many others.

He also had a notable performance career long before all of that, appearing on the nationally televised Lawrence Welk Show several times as a young tap-dancing marimba player.

Collier’s earliest musical ventures were encouraged by his musician parents, Ward and Ethel, a trumpeter and pianist who performed in various lounge bands around Seattle and Tacoma. He says Ethel was a bit of a stage mom, while his father carefully documented his son’s earliest musical milestones.

“My dad had a direct-to-disc home recorder and he made a lot of 78 rpm records of the family during that time, before he bought a tape recorder,” Collier says.

He recently unearthed a vinyl recording his father made in January of 1954 featuring the three songs he performed in his stage debut, as well as the audition recording he made for the Welk show. With such an early start on establishing his identity as a musician, it’s no surprise that Collier’s elementary school classmates called him “Tommy Marimba.”

Some of those former classmates can be spotted in the audience when Collier performs on campus and around the Puget Sound, often with bassist Dean, his longtime friend and musical partner, who will be on hand for the April 2 concert as well.

Will “Bow Down to Washington” be on the program this time?

Collier smiles and delivers an emphatic “No.”聽But knowing this musician and his propensity for observing musical milestones, it’s a sure bet that notes from Collier鈥檚 life in music 鈥� so far, that is 鈥� will figure prominently.

• This is an edited version of an article that appeared on the School of Music .