Collection: Biggs, Hayes
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 include 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 the MacDowell Colony. Among his honors are a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and an Aaron Copland Award, the latter of which afforded him the opportunity to live and compose at Copland House in upstate New York for several weeks. Since 1992 he has been on the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music, teaching courses in the theory and composition departments.
Recent works include Symphonia brevis (2010), composed for Riverside Symphony; Psalms, Hymns & Spiritual Songs (2011), for soprano Susan Narucki and pianist Christopher Oldfather; Three Hymn Tune Preludes (2010), commissioned by organist Gail Archer; The Caged Skylark (2011), Goe lovely Rose (2014), Fortunes Pantoum (2016, on a poem by Jane Shore), who are you? (2017, on a poem by Zsuzsanna Ardó), and O Oriens/Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern (2021), all composed for C4: the Choral Composer/Conductor Collective, an ensemble in which Biggs has often participated as a member of the bass section; Chorale Prelude on Nun komm der Heiden Heiland (2016), for organ; Prelude & Freund's Fuguing Tune in E (Noch einmal nach Bach) (2012), for solo piano; The Trill Is Gone (2013), for solo tenor saxophone; Inquieto (attraverso il rumore) (2015), composed for violinist Rolf Schulte; and four piano preludes, The secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal (2015), The presence of still water (2017), „du aber bist der Baum” ("but you are tree") (2018), commissioned by Thomas Stumpf, and Quicksilver (2022). Through to (and Out of) the Other Side (2018) a work for the eleven-piece saxophone orchestra Megalopolis was premiered by them under the direction of Andrew Steinberg in 2018. In 2020 Steinberg and pianist Shaoai Ashley Zhang premiered Be Gentle And Kind With Your Wandering Mind, for alto saxophone and piano. Reveries. Passions, (Fantasy-Quartet for Piano and Strings) (2020) was premiered in May of 2023 on a Merkin Concert Hall recital of Biggs’s chamber music; Currently he is at work on a new piano prelude and a work for singers and chamber orchestra based on Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes. In 2006 Biggs’s String Quartet: O Sapientia/Steal Away (2004) was given its premiere at New York City’s Merkin Concert Hall by the Avalon String Quartet on a Washington Square Contemporary Music Society concert; it was recorded by the Avalon String Quartet in 2008 and released on Albany Records. In 2018 a CD comprised entirely of his music was released by PARMA Recordings, LLC on its Navona Records label. Biggs’s music is published by C. F. Peters Corporation, APNM (Association for the Promotion of New Music) and Margun Music, Inc. (Shawnee Press).
