Hayes Biggs

was born in Huntsville, Alabama and raised in Helena, Arkansas. He holds the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in composition from Columbia University. His teachers have included Don Freund, Mario Davidovsky, Jack Beeson, Fred Lerdahl and Donald Erb. Biggs has been a fellow in composition at the Composers Conference and Chamber Music Center at Wellesley, at the Tanglewood Music Center, at Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony for the Arts and at the MacDowell Colony. Among his honors are a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, as well as the 2001 Aaron Copland Award, which afforded him the opportunity to live and compose at Copland House in upstate New York during  the summer of 2002. Since 1992 he has been on the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music. His Symphonia brevis, commissioned by the Riverside Symphony, received its first performance under the direction of George Rothman in Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall in February of 2010. C4 gave the first performances of a setting of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Caged Skylark” in November of 2011. Biggs’s song cycle on religious poetry, “Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs,” was  premiered at Manhattan School of Music in January 2012 by soprano Susan Narucki and pianist Christopher Oldfather. That same month his Three Hymn Tune Preludes were  given their first performance by Gail Archer at St. Paul’s Chapel at Columbia University. In December of 2006 his String Quartet: O Sapientia/Steal Away (2004) was given its premiere at New York City’s Merkin Concert Hall by the Avalon String Quartet as part of the 2006-2007 season of the Washington Square Contemporary Music Society; it was recorded by the Avalon String Quartet in 2008, and was recently released on Albany Records. Biggs’s music is published by C. F. Peters Corporation, APNM (Association for the Promotion of New Music) and Margun Music, Inc. www.hayesbiggs.com