Bryan Beaumont Hays, was born in 1920 on a farm near Clarksville, Tennessee. His Southern roots remain strong even after 42 years as a monk in Saint John's Abbey, Collegeville, Minnesota.
After serving in the Pacific during World War II, he returned to school and obtained a Master's Degree in music composition in the late 1940s at the Chicago Music College (now the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University in Chicago). Hays won the Gershwin Memorial Award for a short orchestral composition, Pastorale and Allegro in 1949. This piece was performed at Carnegie Hall during the annual Gershwin Memorial Concert.
He was awarded a summer scholarship to Tanglewood where he was a student of Aaron Copland in 1950. That fall two of his pieces were performed at a concert of contemporary music at McMillan Hall, Columbia University in New York City. In 1951, Hays received the first of two Guggenheim Fellowships in Music Composition and spent two years in Italy composing and listening to opera.
In 1957 he entered Saint John's Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Collegeville, Minnesota. He composed five operas, numerous art songs, choral music and music for chamber ensembles. In 1995, some of his choral and organ music was performed at St. Mark's Cathedral in Minneapolis. At 79, Hays continues to compose for available local performers. The selections presented on his CD, Uncommon Daisies (Granite City Records, 2000), represent a small portion of the vast collection of beautiful songs Bryan Beaumont Hays has composed for voice, piano and a variety of instruments.
I am a frustrated opera composer in as much as I have not had my opera performed. But perhaps this has been a blessing. Maturing musically late in life, I realize now that I am a lyric poet. I generally prefer short poems that make their points quickly.
Although I occasionally write instrumental pieces, my true love is for the art song. To me there is nothing so lovely and expressive as the human voice. I shall devote the rest of my creative life to this vocal genre. I am the poet of the short line, not the long. Not for me is the spinning of endless melody. As my device, I adopt the lines of Alfred de Musset: "Mon verre n'est pas grand, mais je bois de mon verre" (My glass is not a big one, but I drink from it.)
-Bryan Beaumont Hays
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CD: Uncommon Daisies
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