Hilary Hahn, an American classically trained violinist with three Grammy Awards, has been hailed as one of our time’s greatest soloists. Her emphatic playing style has inspired works written explicitly for her, such as Lera Aurbach’s Sonata No. 4: Fractured Dreams, and she was named “America’s Best Young Classical Musician” by Time Magazine in 2001. She was awarded Glashutte Original Music Festival Prise in 2014 and donated her winnings to Project 440, a Philadelphia-based music education nonprofit. I was introduced to her Instagram through a friend and fell in love with her playing style and welcoming personality.
Beyond her global critical acclaim, Hahn is well-loved by budding string players for her inclusive rhetoric and efforts to broaden the scope of classical music’s outreach. Some of her trailblazing efforts include her “Bring Your Own Baby” program that offered free concerts for parents of young children for the purpose of increasing the accessibility of classical music. Hahn counteracts the distance classical music has from ordinary people by offering concerts in non-traditional venues like yoga studios and knitting circles to lengthen its reach and decrease the elitist attitude that the classical music realm sometimes purveys. By moving her efforts online, she broadened her scope even further with #100DaysOfPractice, an Instagram- and Twitter-based initiative for accountability and progress, while also demystifying the extreme amount of time that goes into professional musicianship that seems impossible to a novice player.
https://twitter.com/violincase/status/1154492795136036864?lang=en
A pro-C creative, Hahn’s creativity in her field stems from improvisation, both solo and with other musicians and composers. Her experimentation with style within improvisation began with her 2012 album Sifra, but Hahn has grown much bolder in recent years, exploring the boundaries of her instrument. Below I have included a beautiful improv session between Hahn and Hauschka, careening from intense and discordant to soft and serene, yet somehow never feeling untethered. Improvisation relies on prior knowledge in technical skill areas such as key, tone, and muscle memory (preinventive structures) to build up an entirely new piece of music in the moment. The incubation of years of practice gives Hahn and other improv musicians the insight to create music, as we see in the geneplore model.
Bibliography:
https://www.classicalarchives.com/feature/hilary_hahn_exclusive_interview.html
https://cso.org/about/performers/affiliated-artists/hilary-hahn/
https://www.alfred.com/authors/hilary-hahn/
Hilary Hahn is a fantastic example of someone using their immense talent for the betterment of a larger whole. Not only does Hahn have critical acclaim within her field, but as you mentioned, the outreach programs she has created/is a part of help to normalize the field of classical music. In terms of her musical process, her improvisational talent highlights her level of both control and creativity—her piece with Hauschka is quite impressive.
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