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Steve Hackman, who grew up in northwest suburban Cary, says, “I just see music as music. I see it in its kind of absolute form. It’s made of the same building blocks."
Tom Russo/CAMI
Conductor, composer and producer Steve Hackman moves easily among music worlds, from rock/pop, hip-hop and R&B to classical.
“I don’t see these big barriers or dividers between classical music and pop music,” Hackman said in an interview with the arts and culture site Stir. “I just see music as music. I see it in its kind of absolute form. It’s made of the same building blocks. It manifests in different ways, we experience it in different ways, and people categorize it in different ways. But to me, they’re not that different.”
That’s the idea behind his production Brahms X Radiohead, which fuses passages from Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 with the British rock group Radiohead’s album “OK, Computer” (1997). Hackman, a native of northwest suburban Cary, will conduct the program Aug. 14 at Ravinia, featuring the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and vocalists Kéren Tayar, Will Post and Andrew Lipke.
Through his company SYMPHONYFUSE, Hackman has developed a concept that he calls FUSE, which synthesizes classical and popular works. His catalog consists of productions such as Taylor Swift: The Symphonies Era, Beethoven X Coldplay, Stravinsky X Kendrick Lamar, Tchaikovsky X Drake and The Resurrection Mixtape (Mahler/Notorious B.I.G./Tupac Shakur). He has conducted his fusions worldwide, including with the orchestras of Philadelphia, Richmond, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, Colorado, Phoenix, Grand Rapids, Pittsburgh, Nashville, Colorado Music Festival and the Boston Pops.
Hackman describes his Brahms X Radiohead as “a reimagined experience of each work by seeing it through the lens of the other, exploring their shared explosive tension and pathos.” Brahms’ 19th-century orchestral sound palette is used throughout, with the melodies and music of Radiohead woven in, superimposed over and inserted into the Brahms.
Hackman explores every combination of synthesis in his recomposition; the music moves from one to the other so seamlessly that the audience might wonder which is which and how the combination is even possible.
Lori Dimun, CEO of the Harris Theater, which presented Hackman’s Beethoven X Beyoncé last November with the Chicago Philharmonic, discovered Hackman’s work online. “I’m a giant Radiohead fan, and this Brahms Radiohead mash-up came across my feed, and I became completely obsessed with it,” Dimun said in an interview with Better magazine. Once she realized it was Hackman’s own creation, she began exploring his other projects and then invited him to collaborate. “We were looking for the right fit on timing and were interested in seeing how this could flourish as a future partnership.”
While a student at Cary-Grove High School, Hackman focused on music, participating in swing choir and an a cappella group. “That was sort of the beginning of making music with other people,” Hackman said in an interview with WGN-Channel 9.
At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he majored in classical piano performance, but also joined The Other Guys, a campus a cappella group. “I was listening to everything and falling in love with everything equally and then pursuing it all,” Hackman said. Later, he attended the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music on a full scholarship and has taught at Juilliard.
While at Curtis, Hackman noticed that “the further up the ranks of classical music I was rising, the more and more detached I was from the rest of the musical world,” he told Better magazine. “My classmates and colleagues just weren’t aware of popular music, and I became aware of that disconnect between the classical music world and the rest of the musical landscape. I knew there was a conversation to be had here.”
After finishing his studies, Hackman worked with some of today’s biggest music stars, such as Kanye West, Doja Cat and Andrew Bird, with the goal of adding a virtuosic and classical dimension to each artist’s work. He’s also creative director and conductor of the Indianapolis Symphony’s Uncharted series, one of the nation’s most successful millennial-focused concert programs. In addition, he is the conductor and curator of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s BSO Fusion series.
Hackman credits all of his teachers, from high school to conservatory, for making his life in music possible. “My entire journey through music is kind of a two-parallels path,“ he told Better magazine. ”It’s the classical side and the popular side. In high school, I was leading rehearsals and forming my own groups, doing arrangements in choir, a cappella, jazz choir, swing choir — anything I could do with music. My piano teacher at the U. of I. was a brilliant pianist who truly opened my world up to classical music. I fell in love with it and became obsessed.”
