Graham Hair divides his time between Scotland, the United States and Australia......
- In Scotland, he is Professor of Music at Glasgow University
- In the United States, he conducts composer-residencies and concerts: most recently at Radford University in Virginia, where he was Visiting Professor in March and April, 2007
- In Australia, he is Adjunct Professor at the Australian National University in Canberra, and Australia Council Composition Fellow.
He is principally a composer, but also involved in performance and research. Recent compositions include:
- 'Into the Shores of Light' for the BBC SSO
- 'Wild Cherries and Honeycomb' commissioned by the Scottish International Piano Competition
- 'Lament for Santa Sophia' (10 part-choir and electrwhicho-acoustic sound) commissioned by Scotland’s professional choir, Cappella Nova
- 'Dances and Devilment and Sunlit Airs', a Millennium Commission from ABC FM Radio
- 'Five Senses' (2005, SSAA/String Quartet), commissioned by the Edinburgh Quartet with funding from the Scottish Arts Council.
His Australia Council Composition Fellowship, concluding this year, has funded him to write several works for Australian soloists, ensembles and choirs:
- 'A Wind Symphony' for 24 Wind Instruments
- 'Harmonice Mundi' for clarinettist (playing B flat and E flat clarinets, bass clarinet and contra-alto clarinet) and piano
- 'Shouts and Dances' for voices, piano and percussion
'A Creation Narrative' (soprano, piano & 5 percussionists).
Other recent (2001–2007) funding has included 8 grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Board (UK), 3 from the British Academy, 2 from the Scottish Arts Council, and grants from the Australian Research Council Discovery Projects Scheme and the Carnegie (UK) and Potter (Australia) Trusts.
Many of his compositions are for solo women's voices (SSA or SSAA), either unaccompanied or (more often) accompanied by solo instrumentalist (piano, harp, percussion, cor anglais), ensemble or orchestra. Recent projects included
- 'American Waltzes' (1997-2002, SSAA/piano), paraphrases of classic American popular songs by Kern, Berlin, Gershwin and Rodgers
- 'Seven Words' (1999, SSAA/cor anglais) for Voiceworks (Sydney), with funding from the Australia Council
- 'O Venezia' (2004-2005, SSAA/harp), one of several works on Venetian themes, for the women’s voices of the Halcyon Ensemble (Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne), Pandora’s Vox (Boston) and the composer’s own ensemble, Scottish Voices (Glasgow), which will also be given by the New York Treble Singers in 2008.
- 'The Rainbow Serpent' (2006, SSAA/orchestra) for Scottish Voices and the Orchestra of Scottish Opera in June 2006
- 'Symphonic Songs' (2006, SSAA/string quartplayet) for Mockingbirds and the Ives Quartet (San Francisco), which will also be performed by 'Pandora's Vox' and the Hawthorne Quartet (Boston) in October 2007
- 'Sibylline Voices' (2007, SAA/ensemble) for Scottish Voices and the Symposia Ensemble for performance in June 2007.
Graham also writes words about music, with a particular interest in regional, transplanted and post-colonial musics. This includes various aspects of Australian, New Zealand, Scottish and American music, and the music of ‘Hitler’s émigrés’. Three symposia which he edited or co-edited, and to which he contributed, were published in 2004:
- 'Loose Canons', on Australian women composers
- 'Modernism in Australian Music, 1950 – 2000: Eight Case Studies'
- 'The Music of Thomas Wilson', on the leading Scottish modernist (1927–2002)
- .....and a fourth 'Notis Musycall: Essays on Music and Scottish Culture in Honour of Kenneth Elliott' in 2005.
A monograph 'The Music of Matyas Seiber' (Hitler émigré, 1905-1960, long resident in London) is in preparation and work on the Carnegie-funded collaborative project 'A Companion to Recent Scottish Music' is in progress.
One recent research project with members of the Glasgow University Centre for Music Technology was ‘Rehearsing microtonal music: grappling with performance and intonational problems’. Co-investigators were Dr Nick Bailey and Douglas McGilvray (GU, Electronics), clarinettist Ingrid Pearson (Royal College of Music, London), soprano Amanda Morrison (BBC Singers, Exaudi, Synergyvocals, Steve Reich and Musicians, Scottish Voices) and Dr Richard Parncutt (Institüt für Musikwissenschaft, Graz, Austria). The capacity of singers to perform music using the microtonal scale with 19 steps in the octave was investigated.BR
An account of this project ('The Rosegarden Codicil') will appear in the inaugural issue of the journal 'Scottish Music Review' in July, 2007.BR
- A sequel to 'The Rosegarden Codicil' is being conducted in Australia during 2007-2009, in conjunction with Professor Greg Schiemer and Mr Warren Burt (University of Wollongong) and Dr Emery Schubert (University of New South Wales).
Graham also co-convened the 'Musica Scotica' conferences on ‘800 years of Scottish Music’ in 2005, 2006 and 2007 in Glasgow and Edinburgh.