Micah Hayes
Director of Music Production; Assistant Professor of Music Technology
Email: micahhayes@spu.edu
Office: Nickerson Studios 113
Education: BA, California State University, Chico, 2000; MM, University of Oregon, 2005. At SPU since 2020.
Micah Hayes is a recording engineer and composer who began his musical career as a guitarist in his native Southern California. He began recording and composing music as a student at California State University, Chico where he completed a BA in Music with an emphasis in Recording Arts. After college he continued his audio career with the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, Florida where he was the Recording Engineer Fellow from 2000–2002. After receiving a Masters degree in music composition from the University of Oregon, Micah moved to New York where he worked as the live sound engineer for Redeemer Presbyterian Church’s Upper West Side services, and also freelancing as a composer, recording engineer, and educator for a couple of years before moving to Texas.
He also engineered music at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 2001 and the Aspen Music Festival where he was a Senior Recording Engineer from 2003–05. As a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington he helped create the Music Industry Studies area, overseeing the area’s growth from 8 to 70 majors. He is very excited to begin teaching at Seattle Pacific University as an Assistant Professor of Music Technology and Director of Music Production in Fall 2020.
He began working as a film composer after being the sole recipient of the ASCAP Foundation Fellowship for Film Scoring and Composition at the Aspen Music Festival in 2006 where he studied with such composers as John Corigliano and Jeff Rona. As a film composer he has scored multiple projects including Wolf, a film by Ya'Ke Smith that premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival and the short film Dawn, which aired on HBO several times. His concert music has received performances in such venues as Orchestra Hall in Chicago and Powell Symphony Hall in St. Louis. His piece I’m Not Connected to Anything won the National Flute Association (USA) 1st place award for newly published solo flute music in 2019, and his choral music — featuring religious texts by John Donne — was published by Periferia Publishing in Barcelona in 2020.
Personal links
Micah Hayes’ personal website