Richard (R.I.P.) Hayman (born 1951 in New Mexico) is an American composer and performer. He studied at Columbia University and with John Cage, Ravi Shankar, Chou Wen-chung, Petr Kotik, and Philip Corner. He has wandered the ways of newspaper boy, gardener, minstrel, medical aide, social worker, political campaigner, construction worker, pipe organ renovator, census enumerator, audio engineer, law researcher, sleep researcher, peddler (ear plugs in the subways), cook, bartender and publican, (Ear Inn), editor (Ear Magazine), and sailor (Eark). Hayman composes and performs music with voice, instruments, electronics and effects for concert, theater, dance, media events, film and video. As a composer, he has worked with voice, flute, piano, organ, ensembles, orchestra, ocarinas, tape, electronics, bells, percussion, telephones, toys, words, dance, theater, kites, horses, sleep, the blind, dry ice, film, video, fire, and visual phenomena. He was a founding editor of the NY edition of Ear magazine, 1975-1991, and he's Director of the Board of Trustees of the Sari Dienes Foundation — the painter Sari Dienes performs with Rip Hayman, Charlie Morrow and Barbara Pollitt on recording of Hayman’s ‘Sleep Song’ on Dreamsound. RIP, she [Sari Dienes] and now-famous sociologist of retail Paco Underhill—then Chairman of the New Wilderness Foundation—bought the 18th-century building, with a longshoreman’s bar, at 326 Spring Street NYC. The bar has featured music and poetry events with performers like Mike Bloomfield, Laurie Anderson, Allen Ginsberg and John Ashbery. RIP Hayman met the music composer Charlie Morrow, in Philip Corner’s project, “Sounds Out of Silent Spaces.” Hayman and Morrow worked together organizing public events, the Ocarina Orchestra (ocarina players including RIP Hayman, Mary Nell Hawk and Charlie Doria, etc.), the Great Wind Band and, most importantly, EAR Magazine, which Hayman took over from Beth Anderson. Hayman, who is a licensed merchant marine captain, has also been pursuing other projects, including organizing cruises on the Yangtze River in China, trying to start a Hudson-to-Albany riverboat line and composing projects Dreamsounds: Music for Sleeping People., and On the Way..., Music for the Near-Death Experience, cd released by Deep Listening in 1995. A noted sinologist, he curated Tellus #19 New Music China, 1988. In the mid-1980s, Hayman was exploring the musical dimension of sleep and dream. He organised Dreamsound events for sleeping audiences, what he calls ‘social-musical slumber parties’.

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