Burr Van Nostrand

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

At the NEC, Van Nostrand studied composition under Robert Cogan but during that time he also studied cello at Yale with Aldo Parisot.

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.

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.

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.

In 1974 he received a four-year residency at the Gaudeamus Foundation in the Netherlands.

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.

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.

He stopped composing in the late 1980s but remained active as a cellist until 2000.

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.

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.

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.

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.