Burr Van Nostrand

Last updated
Burr Van Nostrand
Born
Bruce Burr Van Nostrand

1945 (age 78–79)
Los Angeles, California
Occupations
  • composer
  • cellist
Years active1960s – 2000

Burr Van Nostrand (born 1945) is an American classical composer and cellist. He is known for his avant-garde works which use aleatory and graphic notation and were composed from the 1960s through the 1980s. [1] Van Nostrand was born in Los Angeles and began composing while still in high school in San Diego. He studied cello at Yale with Aldo Parisot and composition at the New England Conservatory under Robert Cogan. After his graduation from the NEC with a Masters in Music in 1971, he spent four years in the Netherlands at the Gaudeamus Foundation where several of his works were premiered. He stopped composing in the late 1980s but remained active as a cellist until 2000. There was renewed interest in his music following a concert of his early works at the New England Conservatory in 2012 and the release of a CD the following year containing his 1969 Voyage in a White Building I and two other works from that period. [2]

Contents

Life and career

Van Nostrand was born in Los Angeles, California. Both his parents were visual artists. He grew up in San Diego where he studied painting, piano, and cello and later composition with John Glasier and Howard Brubeck. He also became acquainted with the music and instruments of Harry Partch who was a friend of Glasier's. He entered the New England Conservatory (NEC) in 1964, but while still a student at Hoover High School he had already had his compositions played by the San Diego Symphony and the La Jolla Chamber Orchestra. [3] [4] [5] At the NEC, Van Nostrand studied composition under Robert Cogan but during that time he also studied cello at Yale with Aldo Parisot. Van Nostrand was part of a close circle of composers studying at Yale in the late 1960s and early 1970s which also included Stephen Mosko and Humphrey M. Evans III. [lower-alpha 1] Known as the "bad boys" of the Yale Composition Department, they formed the ensemble Not Morton, Baby and took part in numerous concerts of avant-garde music, collaborative compositions, and multimedia performances. [9] [4]

Jordan Hall at the New England Conservatory where Van Nostrand's Fantasy Manual for Urban Survival premiered in 1972 Jordanhallbalcony.jpg
Jordan Hall at the New England Conservatory where Van Nostrand's Fantasy Manual for Urban Survival premiered in 1972

After graduating from the NEC with a Masters in Music in 1971, Van Nostrand settled for a while in New Haven, Connecticut, actively composing, giving guest lectures at the NEC and Wheaton College, and playing cello with the New Haven Symphony. In 1974 he received a four-year residency at the Gaudeamus Foundation in the Netherlands. There he continued working on his "Manuals" series which had begun with Fantasy Manual for Urban Survival premiered at the NEC's Jordan Hall in October 1972. His Ventilation Manual: A Dusk Ceremonial was premiered by harpist Susan Allen and flautist Richard Stallman at the 1976 Gaudeamus Festival where it received the AVRO Young Composer's Prize. Allen and Stallman gave the work's New York premiere the following year in their joint recital at Carnegie Hall. [10] [11]

Van Nostrand returned to the United States in 1978 and settled in Florida. His composing became more sporadic and he worked primarily as a cellist for several Florida orchestras including the Fort Lauderdale Symphony and Palm Beach Opera. His last composition was Nighlines. It was a commission from the California E.A.R. Unit, a Los Angeles-based new-music collective, and had its world premiere in 1988. Van Nostrand retired from composing after 1988 and returned to live in New Haven where he remained active as a cellist until 2000. [5] [4] [12]

There was renewed interest in Van Nostrand's music in 2012 after Jason Belcher, a graduate student at NEC, heard a tape of Van Nostrand's Voyage in a White Building I which led to him retrieving other scores by Van Nostrand from the American Composers Alliance archives. Struck not only by the music which seemed very ahead of its time but also by the visual beauty and complexity of Van Nostrand's graphic notation, he began a project to re-introduce the composer and his works. This began with a concert of his early works at the NEC in 22 April 2012, followed by a recording on New World Records released in 2013, and a further concert of his works at the University of Pittsburgh in 2014. His Fantasy Manual for Urban Survival was performed in New York City in 2015 in a concert by the ensemble Music on the Edge who had also performed the work in Pittsburgh. [3] [1] [13]

Works

Recordings

Notes

  1. ↑ Humphrey Marshall Evans III (1948-1983) had been a child prodigy who was given a retrospective of his compositions at the Smithsonian in Washington at age fifteen and while still an undergraduate at Yale was the subject of a WGBH documentary which noted that he had been "accused of creating 'freaked out' sound instead of music." He later worked in New York for Maurice Girodias's short-lived Venus-Freeway Press and then as a literary agent. [6] [7] In 1969 he was one of the subjects portrayed in Alison Knowles's avant-garde performance art The Identical Lunch. [8]
  2. ↑ Paul Severtson has been a friend of Van Nostrand's since their high school days in San Diego when they formed their own string trio. He studied at the Yale School of Music during Van Nostrand's time there and was the concertmaster of the Yale Symphony Orchestra. As of 2017, he teaches violin and viola at California Polytechnic State University and is co-concertmaster of the San Luis Obispo Symphony. [18] [4]
  3. ↑ For a reproduction of the complete one-page graphic score of Tuba-Tuba, see New Music Connoisseur (Spring 2016), p. 29.

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References

  1. 1 2 3 Guerrieri, Matthew (26 April 2012). "New England’s Prospect: Echolocation". NewMusicBox . Retrieved 21 January 2017.
  2. ↑ Ross, Alex (23 April 2013). "Burr Van Nostrand". The Rest is Noise. Retrieved 21 January 2017.
  3. 1 2 3 Bloom, Elizabeth (20 February 2014). "Avant-garde composer back on the map". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette . Retrieved 21 January 2017.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Rosenblum, Mathew (2013). Liner notes: Burr Van Nostrand: Voyage in a White Building I. New World Records. Retrieved 21 January 2017.
  5. 1 2 American Composers Alliance. "Burr Van Nostrand". Retrieved 25 January 2017.
  6. ↑ WGBH (24 May 1968). Humphrey Evans: Vedic Pronouncements. Retrieved 27 January 2017.
  7. ↑ De St. Jorre, John (1996). Venus Bound: The Erotic Voyage of the Olympia Press and its Writers, p. 292. Random House
  8. ↑ Museum of Modern Art. Alison Knowles, Humphrey M. Evans Performs The Identical Lunch. Retrieved 27 January 2017.
  9. ↑ Numus-West (1974). "1974–75 Season", Vols 1-8, p. 106.
  10. 1 2 Kasander, J. (7 September 1976). "Gaudeamus 1976 leert dat jongste musiek meer aansluiting zoekt bij tonale tradities". Leidse Courant, p. 7. Retrieved 10 January 2017 (in Dutch).
  11. 1 2 Davis, Peter G. (3 October 1977). "Music: A Duo; Stallman and Allen Triumph In Flute-and-Harp Concert". The New York Times . Retrieved 10 January 2017.
  12. 1 2 Wager, Gregg (27 May 1988). "Music Review: E.A.R. Unit Ends Season at Museum". Los Angeles Times . Retrieved 25 January 2017.
  13. ↑ Allen, David (29 November 2015). "Review: Music on the Edge Makes Its New York Debut". The New York Times
  14. ↑ Pasadena Independent Star-News (26 April 1964). "Music Matters", p. 57.
  15. ↑ Harvard University Libraries. Potpourri : Evans, Van Nostrand, a Bach. Retrieved 25 January 2017.
  16. ↑ American Composers Alliance. Evocation of Quetzacoatal. Retrieved 25 January 2017.
  17. ↑ OCLC   609884765
  18. ↑ California Polytechnic State University. Music Department: Paul Severtson.
  19. 1 2 Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library. The Stephen "Lucky" Mosko collection: 1963-2000 Archived 2017-01-03 at the Wayback Machine . Harvard University. Retrieved 25 January 2017.
  20. 1 2 Sheridan, Molly (21 May 2013). "Sounds Heard: Burr Van Nostrand—Voyage in a White Building 1. NewMusicBox . Retrieved 25 January 2017.
  21. ↑ American Composers Alliance. Fragments from Symphony Nosferatu. Retrieved 28 January 2017.
  22. ↑ OCLC   897919448
  23. ↑ Mens en Melodie (1975). "Gaudeamus/ISCM", Vol. 30, p. 10. Uitgeverij Het Spectrum
  24. ↑ Boston Symphony Orchestra (1974). Program: Ninety-Fourth Season 1974–1975, p. 30. Retrieved 25 January 2017.
  25. ↑ OCLC   525285941
  26. ↑ OCLC   6007007
  27. ↑ American Composers Alliance. Earth Manual. Retrieved 25 January 2017.
  28. ↑ Crystal Records (1983). Directory of New Music, p. 153

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