About

Thanks for stopping by. A bit about me:

I’m a Chicago-based music writer, editor, researcher, and radio producer. I write music criticism for The Chicago Tribune and The Chicago Reader, and regularly contribute to ARTnews, The University of Chicago Magazine, and Tone Glow.  Previously, I served as assistant digital editor at Chicago magazine and was a contributing writer and editor at The Classical Review, an online publication covering classical music in seven states and metro areas. In radio, I was an intern for Sound Opinions, WBEZ’s weekly music criticism show hosted by Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis, and for 98.7 WFMT, for whom I still write as a freelancer. I was also a temp producer for the culture/talk podcast Nerdette.

While a student at the University of Chicago, I was deputy editor-in-chief and arts editor of The Chicago Maroon. I’m also the writer behind the majority of “The History in This Program” features in the New York Philharmonic’s subscription program books for the orchestra’s 2017–2018 season. I was a 2018 Rubin Institute Fellow, working alongside professional and rising critics in a four-day intensive music criticism program, and a 2019 Bang on a Can Media Fellow, where I covered Loud Weekend for WNYC’s New Sounds. Back in college, I cofounded and ran the classical music blog dia[loge]s alongside the rapier-witted MJ Chen.

I graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign’s iSchool with honors, taking courses in multimedia archives, music librarianship, and special collections. I’m always soliciting freelance humanities research projects, especially those intersecting with Chicago newspaper history and/or music. My bachelor’s thesis—on the work and legacy of Chicago-based arts critic Claudia Cassidy—was the recipient of the Leonard B. Meyer Prize and accepted for publication in the 2018 edition of the Chicago Studies Annual. My essay “Discriminating Ears: Critical Receptions of ‘Blackness’ in the Music of George Gershwin and William Grant Still” appears in Nota Bene‘s 2018 issue.

You can e-mail me at the very redundant hedgar@hannah-edgar.com or slide into my DMs on Twitter (@2ndFiddle).