Steve Hackman - Guest Composer

A multi-hyphenate music powerhouse and visionary producer, Steve Hackman is a daring voice leading the charge among a new generation of classical musicians intent on redefining the genre. Equally adept in classical and popular styles, his breadth of musical fluency and technique is uncanny—he is at once a composer, conductor, producer, DJ, arranger, songwriter, singer, and pianist. He uses those wide-ranging abilities to create innovative fusions that blur the lines between high and pop art. The result is evocative works that are both derivative yet wholly original. He synthesizes Brahms and Radiohead, Bartók and Björk, and Beethoven and Coldplay into epic orchestral tone poems; re-imagines Stravinsky and Shostakovich into original orchestral-electronic concept albums; and samples Verdi and Debussy and interpolates them into hip-hop tracks. His performances of these pieces have surprised and thrilled diverse sellout audiences across the country, including with the orchestras of Philadelphia, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Colorado, Phoenix, Nashville, Oregon, Indianapolis, Grand Rapids, Columbus, Charlotte, Southwest Florida, Alabama, Colorado Music Festival, and the Boston Pops.

In Fall of 2021 Hackman composed the 60-minute ballet AT WORK in partnership with Jacob Jonas the Company, premiering the piece in consecutive weekends at Century City Park and the Water Gardens in Los Angeles. It was the culmination of a busy two years of composing: he wrote five original scores for the global film initiative films.dance, teaming up with Hilary Hahn, Dave Koz, Voces 8, and musicians from the Philadelphia Orchestra in the process; his music was featured on the American Express campaign Stand For Small, alongside the voice of Lin-Manuel Miranda; and during the summer of 2021 he completed recording of a solo piano album.

Hackman has teamed up with some of the biggest pop superstars of today to add a signature virtuosic and classical dimension to their work. He has collaborated frequently with Doja Cat, performing with her at the 2021 VMA’s in Brooklyn, following orchestrating and arranging strings for her performances at the Billboard Music Awards and iHeart Radio Music Awards. In December 2019, Hackman collaborated with Kanye West, the Sunday Service Choir and Access Opera in their production of the opera Mary. Hackman contributed as composer, conductor, and orchestrator. The opera had public performances at Art Basel in Miami, Laskey Mesa in Calabasas and Lincoln Center in New York City.

Hackman serves as the conductor and curator of the BSO Fusion with the Baltimore Symphony, presenting multiple concerts per year of his fusion productions. He is Creative Director and Conductor of the Indianapolis Symphony’s Uncharted Series, one of the most successful millennial-focused concert experiences in the country. Hackman has been instrumental in the development of this concert series since 2010. A recent highlight featured the blockbuster premiere of his newest fusion work The Resurrection Mixtape, a combination of Mahler’s 2nd Symphony and the music of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G.

In September 2019 Hackman recorded a seventy-piece orchestra of LA’s finest studio musicians at Eastwood Soundstage on the Warner Brothers lot for his original music project STEREO HIDEOUT. The results will be heard on the upcoming Stereo Hideout album The Revival.

In early 2019, Hackman debuted IGOR DAMN STRAVINSKY, an orchestral/hip-hop synthesis of Stravinsky's Petrushka and Kendrick Lamar's Pulitzer Prize-winning album DAMN. Earlier that year, Hackman premiered his choral re-imagination of Bob Dylan, a fifteen-song anthology entitled The Times They Are A-Changin’ with the Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh. The piece was commissioned by six American choirs, and will see with its orchestral premiere with the Nashville Symphony in January 2020.

Hackman has conducted for and collaborated with Andrew Bird, performing on piano at the live taping of the PBS show Articulate. Other soloists and ensembles Hackman has composed/arranged for and collaborated with include the Beach Boys, Michael Bolton, Aoife O’Donovan, Storm Large, and Carly Rae Jepsen; violinist Joshua Bell; and choral ensembles Chanticleer, The Tallis Scholars and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. In addition, he has collaborated closely with the group Time for Three for nearly a decade, serving as their music director for a time, producing two of their albums, and penning over fifty arrangements, orchestrations, and compositions. Hackman is also a frequent contributor to From the Top. 

In 2001 Hackman was the only outside student to be accepted to Otto-Werner Mueller’s conducting studio at the Juilliard School and the Curtis Institute of Music. He received an advanced diploma in conducting at Curtis, where he also studied counterpoint, composition and improvisation under his mentor Dr. Ford Lallerstedt. He subsequently studied conducting with David Zinman at the American Academy of Conducting at Aspen. He received further training in orchestration from the Broadway orchestrator and composer William Brohn. His undergraduate degree is in piano performance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he studied with Gustavo Romero. 

Hackman is active on social media under the handle @stevehackmanmusic.