Maggie Hasspacher is a bassist, vocalist and composer based in Vancouver, BC. She is principal bass of the Vancouver Opera Orchestra and also the Kamloops Symphony Orchestra and plays as an extra musician with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. As a composer, she writes and records film music for PBS show Craft in America and releases original music, animations and stop-action films through her co-created label Purple Mollusk Music.
In the past decade, she performed at the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland as a part of the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra, the Alumni Orchestra, the Composers Seminar Chamber Group and Styx Tours, an entirely original collaborative theatrical production. In addition, Hasspacher was a member of grammy-nominated new music group Wild Up from 2010-2020 and continues to perform new music as a soloist and collaborator, premiering and commissioning over a dozen new works for the bass from composers such as Timo Andres, Paul Brantley and Sarah Gibson. She is performing the Canadian premiere of Missy Mazzoli’s concerto for bass, Dark with Excessive Bright, as a part of the Kamloops Symphony Orchestra’s 2024-2025 season.
Hasspacher has a Doctorate of Musical Arts from the University of Michigan and is faculty at the Vancouver Academy of Music, the VSO School of Music and St. James Music Academy. As an excuse to hang out with bass players, she created the annual Vancouver Bass Workshop in 2023 and has held it every year since with over 20 participants each workshop. She likes to arrange fun stuff for bass orchestra, with her arrangements performed at Twin Cities Bass Camp, the Young Bassists Orchestra at the International Society of Bassists Convention, Tucson Bass Jam and her own workshop. Hasspacher enjoys reading, baking cookies and making crafts with her three little ones.