Dr. Hannah Chan-Hartley is a musicologist, active as a writer, program book editor, content producer, instructor, speaker, and researcher with various organizations, including Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra, Detroit Opera, and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. In 2023, she returns to the Verbier Festival as Musicologist-in-Residence at the invitation of the Verbier Festival Academy and UNLTD, a role she also took on in 2018 and 2022. She was previously Managing Editor and Musicologist at the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.
Chan-Hartley is the creator of the award-winning, internationally acclaimed Visual Listening Guides (symphonygraphique.com)—a new kind of graphic listening guide for symphonic music. Since its initial development in 2015, hundreds of thousands in 22 countries worldwide have used and enjoyed the Guides—in print with concert program books (including in Canada, Australia, Finland, the UK, and the USA), through talks and workshops including at the Verbier Festival, and as available individual publications online. Hannah wrote a chapter about the Visual Listening Guide for The Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory (2022), edited by J. Danny Jenkins.
Hannah holds a Bachelor of Music Honours in violin performance from McGill University, a Master of Philosophy in musicology and performance from the University of Oxford, and a PhD in musicology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has performed professionally as an orchestral violinist and loves to play chamber music. Hannah’s research interests include the social and cultural history of music and music institutions, focusing on the Europe–North America transatlantic context from the 19th century to the present day, as well as the performance and reception history of opera and orchestral music, about which she has written and presented at major conferences.