Daniel Hathaway was music director at Cleveland's Trinity Cathedral from 1977 to 2008, where he founded Music and Performing Arts at Trinity, the Brownbag Concerts, Trinity Chamber Orchestra and the Medieval Feasts. He launched a second career as a musical journalist with the creation of ClevelandClassical.com in September, 2008. Most recently, he team-taught Introduction to Music Criticism at the Oberlin Conservatory in the fall of 2011, along with ClevelandClassical cofounder Mike Telin and Plain Dealer music critic Donald Rosenberg, preparing ten young writers to participate in the Rubin Institute for Musical Criticism in January 2012.

Hathaway began his musical training as a boy chorister at Grace Cathedral, Topeka, Kansas, and at the age of 14, was appointed organist and choirmaster at St. David's Episcopal Church in Topeka. He went on to study musicology at Harvard College and Princeton University and took his master's degree in at the Episcopal Divinity School. His later posts have included organist and choirmaster at Christ Church, Cambridge, MA, Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral in Kansas City and St. John's Chapel at Groton School. He was the first undergraduate to be appointed assistant conductor of the Harvard Glee Club and Radcliffe Choral Society, with whom he toured around the world in 1967. Hathaway was conductor of the Bach Society Orchestra at Harvard, and studied orchestral conducting with Leon Barzin at Tanglewood. He made his South American conducting debut at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires in Purcell's Dido & Aeneas in 2004 as part of the International Opera Project involving the Oberlin Opera Theater, Trinity Cathedral, the Instituto of the Teatro Colón and the Ohio Arts Council.