Professor Heinz Hartig

Professor Heinz Friedrich Hartig, pioneer electronic composer.

Heinz Friedrich Hartig was my ear training teacher at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. Professor Hartig taught ear training for Composers and conductors at the Hochschule. I came to him from Jean Morel and Nadia Boulanger, two sticklers for ear training, and continued to study with MMe Boulanger during vacations in Paris. Hartig was interested in Boulanger's methods and offered to help me with her lessons while I was in Berlin, so we became close friends.

Hartig was a double amputee, who lost both legs somewhere above the knee during WWII. But he was so marvelous and managed so well that I was in his class over a month before I knew he didn't have his legs. And then, only because another long-time student told me.

Hartig was one of the very first pioneers in using electronic instruments and sounds in music. A generation before Stockhausen and his contemporaries.

Some time later, Hartig heard from others that I had been learning the Hamburg School System of Astrology (known as Uranian Astrology in the US) with the originators of the system in Hamburg. One day his wife called me and asked if I could do his horoscope. I agreed and did his chart. Then, when we visited and I interpreted it for him, with graphs of the coming year, I found some very unpleasant things coming. Strong Saturn influences and more. I warned him very strongly about these times, mentioning to his wife the day when it all came together most strongly, and suggested various possibilities of turning the influences into more positive outcomes....as most astrologers try to do. later, I received a call from his wife, saying on that day, at the time I told her, he died. That event gave me great pause in doing horoscopes for people. Since then I have only done charts for closest friends who I know can handle the truth, for myself, and charts of others, the development of whose lives I can follow for my own thorough study and knowledge. But I never do charts professionally. I learned the discipline simply because I had to "know"......know if it really reflects life and what it reflects. That is why I have done anything in my life: because I had to "know".

This is a Messraster-focused photo (see www.anstendig.org, the papers on focusing). The focus is precisely on the image of the iris of his left eye in his glasses (the eye on the viewer's right). The Messraster focus is so exact that, with some magnification and careful viewing, one can see that the plane of exact focus lies on the image where the eye-glasses have refracted it, and not quite on the level of the eye in the socket. One can see that by comparing the image detail of the iris to that of the eyebrow to the right of the glasses. One can also see that his right eye is not quite as sharp. But the whole photo takes on the character of sharpness and plasticity of the left eye, because it is the most important image point and, when the focal plane is on the most important image point in a photo, a phenomenon occurs and the rest of the photo takes on some of the quality of that focused point.

Also the expression is absolutely exact and authentic due to the correct focus. I have comparison photos that show that a small displacement of the focus from the most important point in a face (the nearest eye, usually) changes the whole expression of the photo.

This photo is the man. He was as marvelous, kind and gently deep as this photo shows him. I miss him very much.

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