Hilary Tann

From her childhood in the coal-mining valleys of South Wales, Hilary Tann (born 1947) developed the love of nature which has inspired all her music, whether written for performance in the United States (for example, Adirondack Light for narrator and orchestra, for the Centennial of Adirondack State Park, 1992) or for her home in Wales (for example, the celebratory overture, With the heather and small birds, commissioned by the 1994 Cardiff Festival). A deep interest in the music of Japan has led to study of the ancient Japanese vertical bamboo flute (the shakuhachi) from 1985 to 1991 and to a residency at Kansai Gaidai, near Kyoto, in 1990. A number of works reflect this special interest, most particularly the chamber work, Of erthe and air (1990) and From afar, first performed on 14 October 1996 by the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kirk Trevor and also played by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in 2000. Since 1980, Hilary Tann has lived south of the Adirondacks in upstate New York where she chairs the Department of Performing Arts at Union College in Schenectady. She holds degrees in composition from the University of Wales at Cardiff and from Princeton. From 1982 to 1995 she was active in the International League of Women Composers and served in a number of Executive Committee positions. Since 1989 her music has been published exclusively by Oxford University Press. Numerous organisations have supported her work, including the Welsh Arts Council, the New York State Council on the Arts, and Meet the Composer. She has received several commissions for concertos in the past few years, the most recent of which, for the Romanian cellist Ovidiu Marinescu and the Newark (Delaware) Symphony Orchestra, was performed on 10 December 2000. In March 2001 Hilary Tann and Shulamit Ran were composers-in-residence at the LG&E Energy Corp. New Dimensions Series sponsored by The Louisville Orchestra and the University of Louisville.

Her music, whose stimulus often derives from environmental phenomena, is spare in texture, meticulous in its sensitivity to timbre, and frequently rich in growth patterns; though generally marked by a strong lyrical impulse, there are also moments of vehement expression.