Biography

Hamish is a New Zealand-based composer, arranger, musical director and performer for television, film and theatre, and has a Masters degree in composition. He also lectures courses in digital audio software and music theory at Canterbury University, Christchurch Polytechnic, and the Music and Audio Institute of New Zealand.

Hamish has toured internationally with Elaine Paige, Aled Jones and Hayley Westenra and performed on piano with Serj Tankian, Bic Runga, Anika Moa, Michael Barrymore, Christchurch Symphony, and Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra among others. He features on the DVDs "Elaine Paige Live - Celebrating 40 Years on Stage", "Hayley Westenra Live in Concert", "Fiona Pears:Live at the Christchurch Cathedral", and Serj Tankian's "Elect the Dead Symphony " live concert DVD.

Along the way, Hamish has amassed experience in a huge variety of musical situations - everything from playing triangle and bass drum on a tour of the Central Band of the Royal New Zealand Airforce to performing a piano and voice version of "Amazing Grace" with Hayley Westenra on live television in Osaka; from being a policeman's helmet-wearing bass player in a Wellington ska band to being principal clarinet in orchestras; from roaming around a medieval-style corporate function (in a valley customised for the occasion complete with hay bales, jousting and mead) while playing his own arrangements for recorder and drum to supervising a postgraduate music student's seminar on the legalities of sampling; from programming a command-line DOS utility for multiplexing audio files into a surround format to arranging a BeeGees song for a concert with 100,000 audience members.