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After completing degrees in Arts and Music at the University of Sydney, David Hush was the first Australian applicant to be awarded a Graduate Fellowship in Music at Princeton University (USA). While at Princeton he studied with Milton Babbitt, earning a Master of Fine Arts and a PhD. On completing his PhD, Hush remained in Princeton until 1993, when he returned to Australia and took up a composer residency at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Hush has written works spanning solo instrumental, chamber ensemble, choral and orchestral idioms. They have been performed, recorded and broadcast in North and South America, the UK, Europe, Israel, Australia and South Korea.

Hush has received fellowships and awards from, inter alia, Princeton University, the Hinrichsen Foundation, and the New Jersey State Council On the Arts. In addition, he has received the Ignaz Friedman Prize, was named the first recipient of the Schoenberg Award in 1984, and has received numerous awards from ASCAP.

Hush's ouput falls into five categories.

The first is music written in the European tradition, represented by such works as the Cello Sonata, influenced by Beethoven, and the Prelude and Fugue in D minor for solo violin, written in the harmonic idiom of JS Bach.

Jewish vocal music, cantorial and secular, comprises the inspiration for the second group. Incantation and Elegy, each for solo violin, offer examples.

The third group is influenced by rāgas of North India and is represented by such works as Meditation and Rāga in B♭.

The fourth group consists of short pieces conceived and played in the jazz and blues tradition of African-American music.

The last group comprises experimental pieces such as Free Improvisation 18-09-22 for piano and Deconstructing Microtones for alto recorder and electronics.

Hush writes:

'Far from viewing the role of performers as solely technical, I see collaboration between composer and performer as a collaboration of artists. If the performer is an artist, he or she will confer on a piece an interpretation that is unique. I learn a great deal from such interpretation. I learn not only about the piece at issue but also about more general possibilities of creating with sounds.'

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David Hush — current to September 2026