Beginning with the 2019-20 season, Steve Hackman serves as Creative Director of the Indianapolis Symphony’s Stella Artois Happy Hours Series.

Hackman is a daring voice leading the charge among a new generation of classical musicians intent on redefining the genre. Equally adept in classical and popular forms, his breadth of musical fluency and technique is uncanny—he is at once a composer, conductor, producer, DJ, arranger, songwriter, singer, pianist, and rapper. He uses those wide-ranging abilities to create hybrid compositions that blur the lines between high and pop art. The result is evocative works that are both derivative yet wholly original. He synthesizes Brahms and Radiohead, Bartók and Björk, and Beethoven and Coldplay into epic orchestral tone poems; re-imagines Stravinsky and Shostakovich into original orchestral-electronic concept albums; and samples Verdi and Debussy and interpolates them into hip-hop tracks. His performances of these pieces have surprised and thrilled diverse sellout audiences across the country.

Hackman is active on social media under the handle @stevehackmanmusic, and many of the pieces referred to here can be watched in their entirety on YouTube via the @stereohideout channel.

“Spectacular precision…profoundly enjoyable.”

– St. Louis Post-Dispatch

THOMAS FLIPPIN is established as an original and versatile voice in the world of contemporary music. Whether premiering new works with his pioneering classical guitar ensemble, Duo Noire; performing avant-garde art songs on the theorbo as part of Alicia Hall Moran’s Black Wall Street; or plucking the banjo in the American Repertory Theater’s critically-acclaimed premiere of The Black Clown, Flippin’s playing has been hailed as “lovely” (New York Times), and “spectacularly precise” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch).

Recent concert highlights include performances at Carnegie Hall, National Sawdust, The Metropolitan Museum, Beijing’s Peking University, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Charleston’s Colour of Music Festival. Flippin has performed in concerts featuring MacArthur Fellow Jason Moran, Renee Fleming, Imani Winds, and members of Eighth Blackbird and the Emerson String Quartet, as well as a solo performance honoring the president of Juilliard.

Flippin’s recent album on New Focus Recordings, Night Triptych, is the culmination of the 2015 project he launched with the Diller Quaile School of Music to address the lack of female representation in classical music. Featuring new works exclusively by leading women composers, Night Triptych received universal praise from critics for being a “truly pathbreaking recording” (AllMusic), that is “astounding” for its “sheer musicality” and “goldmine of ideas and feelings” (Stereophile).

Flippin graduated with honors from the University of Chicago before attending the Yale School of Music (M.M., A.D.). He is currently on faculty at Concordia College Conservatory and the Diller Quaile School of Music. His primary teachers were Benjamin Verdery, Denis Azabagic, and Dr. Julie Goldberg. When he’s not practicing, he enjoys mountaineering.