John S. Hilliard

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John Stanley Hilliard, American Composer, was born in 1947 in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

Hilliard's music has had performances in Austria, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, the Netherlands, South America, the United Kingdom and the United States including performances at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Merkin Concert Hall and at numerous new music festivals. His orchestral works have been performed by the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra and the Richmond Symphony Orchestra. His piano concerto "Okeanos" was premiered in 2000 by Eric Ruple.

Hilliard has composed four symphonies, two piano concerti, a trumpet concerto and various chamber works, including two song cycles.

In 1981 Hilliard was awarded a summer residency position and commission from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He has won annual ASCAP Awards, a commission from the International Horn Society and the first-place award in the Virginia Music Teachers Association's commissioned composer contest for 1992.

President Bill Clinton requested Hilliard to compose a fanfare for his first inauguration in 1993.

Asian music has had a profound influence on his music. Hilliard studied and played in Cornell University's Javanese Gamelan under the leadership of Jennifer Lindsay. In 1995, Hilliard was given a six-month Artistic Fellow residency grant by Japan Foundation in Tokyo, studying shakuhachi and studying gagaku in Nara at the Kasuga Shrine. And in addition in 1996, he studied Indian and Balinese music in California.

Hilliard has served on the music faculty at the Interlochen Arts Academy-National Music Camp, Cornell University and Washington State University. Among Hilliard's teachers include Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Karel Husa, Donald Erb, W. Francis McBeth, George B. Wilson, William Grant Still and Ned Rorem. In addition, he has attended masterclasses with Erza Laderman, Alan Hovhaness, Włodzimierz Kotoński, George Crumb, Milton Babbitt, Ben Johnston, and Olivier Messiaen. He earned a doctorate in Music Composition from Cornell University at Ithaca, New York in 1983. Hilliard was granted a Senior Fulbright Award to teach and compose in Hong Kong in 1998-99. Numbered among his students is Joel McNeely, a noted film composer for Disney studios and George Lucas.

The Augsburg Mozartfest commissioned Hilliard to complete one of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's unfinished manuscripts, one for violoncello and cembalo that had been started in 1782, the year Mozart married.[1] Hilliard completed the manuscript fragment in the style of Mozart and added his own set of variations from the fragments. This set premiered May, 2004, in Augsburg, Germany.

On January 31, 2007 a concert of Hilliard's music was presented at the Kennedy Center, which included the Washington D.C. premiere of his second piano concerto performed by guest pianist Carsten Schmidt of Sarah Lawrence College.

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