David Hahn composes diverse styles of music ranging from the experimental sounds of a quartet of electronically-processed guitars played by himself to chamber music featuring traditional instruments and voices. He was educated as a practicing musician and a music scholar at Brown University, The New England Conservatory of Music, The Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and Stanford University. A former faculty member of the Early Music Department at The New England Conservatory, he received the doctorate in historical musicology from Stanford University in 1993.
As a professional guitarist, mandolinist and lutenist, David Hahn has performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony and Opera Orchestras, Boston Musica Viva, the Seattle Symphony, Musica Nel Chiostro in Florence, and the City of London Festival. He is a co-founder of the Boston Renaissance Ensemble which performed widely in the US and Europe and received the Noah Greenberg Award for "excellence in the performance of Early Music" from the American Musicological Society.
Mr. Hahn’s music has been commissioned and performed by a number of established professional ensembles and soloists. He won grants from Meet the Composer, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Soros Foundation, Seattle’s Artist Trust and the Jack Straw Foundation. His 3-movement suite for mandolin and guitar, Passionate Isolation, won the 2004 composition prize awarded by the Classical Mandolin Society of America. His music has been performed throughout the United States—including the 2004 Carnegie Hall debut of guitarist Cem Duruöz—and in Canada, Chile, Turkey, Croatia, France, Germany and Cyprus.
His Concerto alla Barocco for 4 guitars and strings, commissioned by the Minneapolis Guitar Quartet, was premiered in November 2003 by the Owensboro Symphony Orchestra conducted by Nicholas Palmer. The piece was later performed in March 2004 with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra conducted by Harry Bicket.