Graham Hair
Born in Geelong, composer Graham Hair has received numerous commissions from such organisations as Duo Contemporain and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1990 he took up the position of Gardiner Professor at the University of Glasgow.
Since 2000, Graham Hair has divided his time between Scotland, Australia and the United States. During this time he has been Professor of Music at Glasgow University and Visiting Professor at Monash, ANU and Radford, and has conducted several composition and performance projects in Boston.
He became Professor Emeritus toward the end of 2008, after which he continued research projects in all three countries, including an ARC-funded project on aspects of microtonal music based in Wollongong and an empirical musicology project (using scientific methods to investigate aspects of musical performance) based in Glasgow University's Engineering School and funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Aspects of his research are documented at the Network for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science, Technology and Music.
Most of his music over the last twenty years has been for women's voices, accompanied by harp, piano, percussion, duo, string quartet, ensemble or orchestra, including the ensembles Scottish Voices (which he directs), Halcyon (Sydney), Pandora's Vox (Boston) and Mockingbirds (San Francisco). More information about them is available on Scottish Voices.
His orchestral piece Into the Shores of Light (inspired by poems of Australian poet Mark O'Connor) was released by ERM in Virginia in 2007. Since 1990 he has been based in Glasgow. Before that he was Head of Composition at the Sydney Conservatorium (1980–1990), and taught at La Trobe University (1975–1980). He was born in Geelong in 1943.
Compositions by Graham Hair appear on
The School of Natural Philosophy
Michael Kieran Harvey plays new music for keyboard by Graham Hair, Douglas Knehans, Martin Friedel, Richard Meale and Hilda Paredes, linking science, landscape and modernist piano writing.
Tensile Flame
Michael Kieran Harvey’s two-disc piano programme pairs Liszt’s B minor Sonata and its early twentieth-century echoes in Skryabin, Rachmaninov and Ravel with a second disc of Stravinsky, Carter, Graham Hair and Carl Vine’s 1990 Piano Sonata.
Bridges, Vol. 1
Chamber works by Australian, Korean and Romanian composers, recorded by Monash University staff and guests, mapping cultural bridges across Eastern Europe, North Asia and Australasia after decades of relative isolation.