A musician inspired by silence. American compositions shaped by Daoism. Orchestral ensembles of keyboards and synthesisers. A body of works performed the world over but rarely recorded and never before released.

Such are the improbabilities that tell the story of the American composer Michael F. Hunt (b. 1945, New Castle, Indiana). Highly decorated in music academia, Professor Hunt has taught composition, jazz history, orchestration, music theory, and several more demanding disciplines over a career that started in his preteens.

His life as a composer, however, began on a school trip to a performance of Tchaikovsky's Pathétique. The young musician found himself awestruck by a moment of absolute stillness held by the orchestra as the piece closed. Even now, almost seventy years on, Hunt speaks of the sheer, crushing power of that pause. He remembers being moved to tears, awash in silence and placidity amidst great emotive arousal. The experience stayed with him for days, he recalls, igniting in him a new desire to create music that could achieve such gravity. As we view his work now, we find throughout a depth of dynamic shading, silence allowed to hang in negative space in contrast to the richness and vibrancy that emerge as harmonic structures develop, perhaps all inspired by that single moment.

Greatly influenced by Daoist philosophies (and, interestingly enough, holding belts in the accompanying martial art aikido), a yin-yang of quietude and potency shines through Hunt’s compositions. Fluid and mellifluous melodies conjure an Edenic natural world of birdsong, trickling streams, dawnlight, and sky blue, echoing the New Age movement of the 1980s and their crystalline cassette serenity. But the cellular repetition of (for one example) this compilation’s opener “Music for Multiple Keyboards” unfolds with a Rileyian shimmer (Hunt and Riley have been peers and contemporaries for much of their careers) and the gliding, aquiline viola of “Butterfly Dreams” graces the piano’s dark arpeggiation and resonant bass chords with all the austerity and conscientiousness of a conservatoire performance (belying the work’s decidedly outré oversized graphic scores). Indeed, we point to Hunt’s work as a missing link between New Age, large-ensemble composition, and mid-century American minimalism: it is spiritual, wide-eyed, meticulously crafted, and astral in sensitive balance.