Alan Hacker

Alan Ray Hacker OBE FRAM (30 September 1938 – 16 April 2012) was an English clarinetist, conductor, and music professor.

He was born in 1938, the son of Kenneth and Sybil Hacker. After attending Dulwich College (from 1950 to 1955), he went on to study at the Royal Academy of Music where he won the Dove Prize and the Boise Travelling Scholarship which he used to study in Paris, Bayreuth and Vienna.

In 1958 he joined the London Philharmonic Orchestra. He became a professor of the Royal Academy of Music in 1960 and went on to found the Pierrot Players in 1965 along with Stephen Pruslin and Harrison Birtwistle. In 1966, a thrombosis on his spinal column caused permanent paraplegia. For the rest of his life he used a wheelchair and drove adapted cars. In 1972, the Pierrot Players renamed themselves the Fires of London, and Hacker continued to perform with them until 1976. In 1971, he founded his own group, Matrix. He was also appointed chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Arts Music section and of the British section of the International Society for Contemporary Music. He was one of those credited with reviving the basset clarinet, and in 1967, he restored the original text of Mozart's Concerto and Quintet. He played them on an instrument modelled on that for which Mozart originally wrote them, the Stadler's extended basset clarinet.

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