Musicatlas
Music
David Hahn composed some seventy-five diverse pieces of music, many of which have been commissioned and performed by established professional ensembles and soloists including the Minneapolis Guitar Quartet and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, guitarist Cem Duruöz, the University of Washington Singers, Duo46, and Trio LiveOak. Recent performances of his music include the world premieres of Ostraka for voice and guitar at the 2005 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Kindergarten Word Ring for octaphonic stereo system at the Spectrum Press Electronic Music Odyssey Concert Series, in Los Angeles, March, 2005, Passionate Isolation (a 1st Prize Winner of the 2004 Composition Contest of the American Classical Mandolin Society) in Denver, CO, and three performances of my Concerto alla Barocco for 4 guitars and strings in March 2004 with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. His music has been released on Centaur Records, commissioned for the debut of the Annas Music Festival in Union, Washington, and is regularly broadcast on independent radio shows such as The New Edge (WMBR FM, Cambridge, MA) and Martian Gardens (WMUA FM, Amherst, MA). It has been performed throughout the United States—including the 2004 Carnegie Hall debut of guitarist Cem Duruöz—and in Canada, Chile, Turkey, Croatia, France, Germany and Cyprus.
Sometimes David Hahn’s music focuses attention on contemporary events or things happening to us (as in the experimental electric guitar pieces Brainwash or Vukovar), sometimes it is humorous (Ookaa Fokoo, a caveman pop song), satirical (Giraffes, a suite of electronic pieces including Apocalypse Cow, Be So Sweet, and Corporate Coitus), festive (as in the choir piece Tirlee! Tirloo!, which mimes the spirited play of shepherds’ pipes to honor the birth of a child), and sometimes plainly music- or life-affirming, as in his recent pieces Concerto alla Barocco or Ostraka, a song cycle based on eighteen fragments of poetry from Greek Archaic poets such as Sappho.
Life
David Hahn is an eclectic composer who creates diverse styles of music ranging from the experimental sounds of electronically-processed guitars to real-life sound collages to instrumental and vocal music featuring traditional instruments and voices. His education took place at Brown University, The New England Conservatory of Music, The Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, and Stanford University where he received the doctorate in historical musicology in 1993. David Hahn began his career in music in the 1980’s as an active performer (on lute, guitar and mandolin), and performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony and Opera Orchestras, Boston Musica Viva, the Seattle Symphony, Musica Nel Chiostro in Florence, and the City of London Festival. In the 1980’s he co-founded the Boston Renaissance Ensemble which performed widely in the US and Europe and received the Noah Greenberg Award for "excellence in the performance of Early Music" from the American Musicological Society. He served as a faculty member in the Early Music Department at The New England Conservatory and at several independent schools. He was invited as a Distinguished Speaker to discuss his music with students at the William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia for their Year of the Performing Arts celebration, and his career was recently profiled in the July/August 2005 issue of the Brown Alumni Magazine.