Michael F. Hunt

Michael F. Hunt (b. 1945) spent decades as a pillar of musical academia, holding prestigious posts at Washington University, Saint Louis University, and Fontbonne, as well as acting as Senior Visiting Fulbright Scholar at Trinity College, Dublin. His works have been performed in Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, China, Ireland, Serbia, and the USA, but, remarkably, his compositional catalogue has long remained a hidden treasure, largely unrecorded and, remarkably, never before released.

Hunt studied music composition with Manus Sasonkin and Graham Hollobon at the St. Louis Institute of Music, from which he graduated in 1968, only to be drafted into the US infantry to fight in Vietnam. Contracting pneumonia and from his hospital bed pleading the Army Band to accept him as a trombonist, he was eventually transferred away from the front line and back into musicianship. He remained at Fort Leonard Wood until the war ended. Returning to civilian life, he earned his PhD from Washington University in St. Louis in 1974, where he tested the limits of the era’s technology, experimenting with algae-prompted tone generation and programming Paul Hindemith’s extensive “rules of composition” into a 3,000-card IBM 360 deck. This pursuit of abstract timbre eventually led to the aforementioned “Music for Multiple Keyboards” and its many-layered ensemble of synthesisers.

Phantom Limb's compilation, Passage of Time: The Music of Michael Hunt, collects three key longform pieces from Hunt’s sizable collection, and finally introduces to the world a composer who threads together contrasting schools of music with unparalleled curiosity.