Emily Hall was born in Moncton, New Brunswick where she started piano lessons at the age of six. Moving later in childhood to southern Ontario, she studied through the Royal Conservatory of Music, followed by a Bachelor’s degree in piano performance and composition at Mount Allison University (Sackville, N.B.), where, in 1999, she directed 24 musicians performing her chamber and vocal music. Subsequently, she obtained a Master’s degree in composition from McGill University (Montreal, QC), studying with Jean Lesage and Denys Bouliane.
She has received national acclaim for her vocal music; her master thesis, Inside is the Sky, for chamber orchestra and mezzo-soprano, includes text by renowned Canadian poet Lorna Crozier and garnered a Godfrey Ridout Award of the SOCAN Foundation, 2005. The following year, she won in the same category for Curious Rêve, a work for a cappella choir with multilingual text written by herself.
Her works have been performed by, among others, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Quatuor Bozzini, ARRAYMUSIC, Ensemble Synapse, Viva Voce, the Vancouver Miniaturist Ensemble, the McGill Percussion Ensemble, the Group of the Electronic Music Studio of McGill (GEMS), the McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble, Julieanne Klein, Kristie Ibrahim, Marie-Hélène Breault, Catherine Meunier, Kinza Tyrrell, Peter Unternährer, and Nadia Francavilla.
She is an administrator for the Canadian New Music Network, a freelance writer (Musicworks magazine), and is part of the artistic committee of the concert society Codes d’accès. She is an associate composer of the Canadian Music Centre (CMC), and has been funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Société et la Culture, and the Albert Koechlin Stiftung (artist residency, Stadtmühle Willisau, Switzerland.)
Last update: March 12, 2008