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 Dr. Biggs is a faculty member in the College for the following department(s) and division(s):
| Telephone | (212) 749-2802 x7622 | | Homepage | www.hayesbiggs.com
| | E-mail | hayesbiggs@earthlink.net |
| | | Hayes Biggs was born in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1957 and raised in Helena, Arkansas. He holds a doctor of musical arts degree in composition from Columbia University, a master of music degree from Southern Methodist University, and a bachelor of music degree in piano performance from Rhodes College. His teachers have included Mario Davidovsky, Jack Beeson, Fred Lerdahl, Donald Erb, and Don Freund. Biggs has been a fellow in composition at the Composers Conference and Chamber Music Center at Wellesley, at the Tanglewood Music Center, at Yaddo, and at the MacDowell Colony. In 1995 he was the recipient of a Fromm Foundation Commission to compose a work for Parnassus, When you are reminded by the instruments, which was premiered by that ensemble in March 1997. He was named a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for the academic year 1998–99. Recently he was honored by an entry in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd Edition, and he was named as one of five composers to receive a 2001 Aaron Copland Award. This award carries with it the opportunity for a residency at the Aaron Copland House in upstate New York for several weeks next year, where he will be free to devote himself entirely to composition. From 1991-2001 he was associate editor at C. F. Peters Corporation, and since 1992 he has been on the faculty of Manhattan School of Music. Most recently he has been awarded a commission by the American Composers Forum and the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust to compose a group of haiku settings for the vocal quartet Kiitos.
In 1993 his Mass for All Saints won a second prize in the 5e Concours International de Musique Sacrée (Festival de Musique Sacrée) in Fribourg, Switzerland. On July 3, 1994, this work received its first complete performance in Fribourg by the Choir of the North German Radio (Hamburg) under the direction of Horst Neumann. Biggs’s choral works have been performed by such distinguished ensembles as the Gregg Smith Singers, the New Calliope Singers, the New Amsterdam Singers, the New York Virtuoso Singers, Kiitos, and the Florilegium Chamber Choir. His solo vocal, instrumental, orchestral, and chamber music has been heard throughout the United States, in Europe, and in Latin America in performances by, among others, the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, the Riverside Symphony, the Memphis Symphony, Voices of Change, Musicians’ Accord, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Empyrean Ensemble, Parnassus, the Washington Square Contemporary Music Society, and the League of Composers/ISCM. Biggs is currently at work on his first string quartet. His music is published by C. F. Peters Corporation and Margun Music, Inc. He is a member of BMI.
Manhattan School of Music faculty since 1992.
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