Composer and music curator Peter Hatch has composed works in a large number of genres, from orchestral and chamber music to instrumental theatre, electroacoustics and installations. Known for his interest in revitalizing the listening experience, Hatch’s compositions are both heady and playful, profound and humorous. His works are performed and broadcast internationally and has been featured at festivals such as the ISCM World Music Days, the Darmstadt Ferienkurse fur Neue Musik, Montreal’s Espaces Improbable, the Vancouver New Music Festival, the Vancouver Early Music Festival, and by organizations such as Aventa, Soundstreams, Arraymusic, the Winnipeg, Vancouver, Edmonton, Windsor, Victoria and Kitchener-Waterloo Symphonies and by members of the Berlin Philharmonic. Hatch’s music been recorded on numerous compact discs under the CBC Musica Viva, CMC Centrediscs, Conaccord, CBC and Artifact labels.
Theatrical and multi-media elements have been incorporated into many of his works, an interest that has grown from extending traditional concert music performance practices and from collaborations with director David McMurray Smith, architect Dereck Revington, choreographers David Earle and Bill James and writers John Sobol and Adam Cowart. The writings of Gertrude Stein have played an important role in his compositions and this influence has resulted in compositions ranging from the full evening instrumental theatre piece ‘Mounting Picasso’ to his very short opera ‘Asks Alice’.
As well as his compositional work, Peter has been very active as the artistic director of new music ensembles and festivals. He founded NUMUS Concerts in 1985, and the Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound in 1998, two organizations that have continued to thrive years after their beginnings. Peter was Composer-in-Residence with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony from 1999-2003 and Arts and Culture Consultant with the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics from 2011 to 2013. From 1985 to 2017 Peter was a Professor at the Faculty of Music, Wilfrid Laurier University, where he was University Research Professor for the 2006-07 academic year and is now Professor Emeritus. Peter now makes his home in the Gulf Islands on the west coast of Canada.
