Michael Hedges

b. 31 December 1958, California, USA, d. 30 November 1997, Mendocino County, USA. This American guitarist, singer and composer moved from a highly individual instrumental style to a growing acclaim as a singer and composer, cut short by his death in a car accident. Hedges grew up in Enid, Oklahoma and began playing the piano at the age of four. At high school he played cello and clarinet, then flute and guitar. He underwent a formal musical education, studying flute and composition at Philips University in Oklahoma then classical guitar and electronic music at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. Hedges cited as his early influences, the Beatles, guitarist Leo Kottke and the twentieth century composers Morton Feldman, Bela Bartok and Anton Webern. In 1980, he moved to California to study computer music at Stanford University and was signed by Windham Hill Records. The company’s image, as purveyors of ethereal ‘new age’ music was, in part, forged by Hedges’ early recordings with them, in particular Breakfast In The Field and the excellent Aerial Boundaries, featuring a sensitive cover of Neil Young’s ‘After The Goldrush’. While mysticism was a force behind his songwriting and he admitted being deeply influenced by the ideas of the anthropologist Joseph Campell, Hedges built a solid and grittier reputation as a musical innovator. Freewheeling experiments with tuning, two handed-fretwork tapping and harmonics pre-figured in later work in both recordings and concerts, which also saw the use of the harp guitar (an obscure instrument augmenting the standard six-strings with a tangential set of five bass strings) and synthesizers. The experiments are not merely embellishments to the music, but structural - Hedges’ route to a distinctive musical voice. He was not, he said, an instrumentalist, but a composer. That was clearly disputed by his standing with the specialist music press who saw him as one of the great guitarists of the past two decades.