Asger Hamerik was a composer, conductor, and music teacher born in Denmark in 1843. As a teenager he received private lessons in composition from Niels Wilhelm Gade and J.P.E. Hartmann. He made his public debut as a composer at the age of sixteen, and the following year he wrote his first work for orchestra. In about 1860 he wrote his first symphony, which he left unnumbered.

In 1862 his father gave him permission to pursue a career in music. He started in London but soon moved to Berlin, where he studied with Hans von Bülow. In 1864 the second Schleswig-Holstein war erupted and Hamerik left Germany. He went to Paris and, with the help of a reference from von Bülow, became a pupil of Hector Berlioz. Hamerik was based in France until Berlioz's death in 1869. On the loss of his mentor he went to Italy, where his new opera, La Vendetta, was performed in 1870. He then proceeded to Vienna, where the U.S. consul pursued him for the post of director of the Peabody Institute in 1871.

The Music Academy of the Peabody Institute made rapid progress and grew significantly under Hamerik's direction. The name of the Academy was changed to the Peabody Conservatory of Music in 1874, and within a few years it grew beyond being merely a local institution. Hamerik championed the performance of American music and regularly included works of American composers on concert programs. His Requiem, op. 34, was premiered at the Institute in 1895 to mark the centennial of George Peabody's birth.

At Peabody, Hamerik had a full symphony orchestra and choir and his own concert hall at his disposal, and he immediately began to exploit their potential. He often programmed works by Danish and other Nordic composers, and wrote five orchestra suites based on Nordic folk tunes. Following his popular Nordic suites, Hamerik wrote seven symphonies beginning in 1879. The seventh, his Korsymfoni (Choral Symphony), Op. 40, was written in 1898, after which he terminated his appointment at the Peabody Institute and left the United States.

In 1894 Hamerik married Margaret E. Williams, a pianist and composer who had studied with Hamerik and earned a diploma from the Peabody Conservatory in 1892. After leaving Peabody in 1898, Hamerik conducted his own works on tours of Europe before residing in Copenhagen beginning in 1900. He composed little from 1900 until his death in 1923. His son Ebbe Hamerik also became a composer.