After learning classical guitar and discovering contemporary music and art in his teens, Marc Hyland studied composition at the Montréal Conservatory of Music, with Gilles Tremblay, Clermont Pépin and Yves Daoust. His works have since been performed by soloists and ensembles such as pianist Louise Bessette, the Trio Fibonacci, the Ensemble de la SMCQ and heard in Canada, Europe, the United States and South Korea. He has also been pursuing a practice of visual arts since his adolescence, deeply influenced by surrealism and poetry. In 1995, he organized with the late Silvio Palmieri a “Dada” exhibition at the Chapelle historique du Bon-Pasteur (Montréal). In June 2017, he presented a solo exhibition of his pictorial works created since the 90s at the Carte blanche Gallery (Montréal).

His electroacoustic catalogue includes Pi Music, for alto flute and fixed media, performed online by English flutist Carla Rees during the fall of 2020; Souffles ASF, premiered online at the 2021 Montréal / Nouvelles Musiques Festival; and Vivre ainsi? (2022), on climate crisis, available on Bandcamp.

Having resumed playing the guitar, he occasionally shares music with videos on digital platforms, in a deliberately minimalist language, such as Now and Then (on YouTube). His trio Chants du signe, commissioned and performed by the Trio Fibonacci in Montréal, Berlin and Venice, as well as his Promenade, for solo clarinet and dancer, commissioned by Yannick Nézet-Séguin and presented by the Saint-Sauveur Arts Festival in the summer of 2020, are notably available on YouTube. His Sonnets to Orpheus, on poems by Rilke, can be heard on the Bandcamp website, along with several other works. A live film version of Orlando Music / The Great Thaw, for baritone and electric guitar, on excerpts from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, will be released in 2025.

He lives in Montréal.

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