Vanessa Lann

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Vanessa Lann (Born in Brooklyn, USA in 1968) has been a composer and pianist since the age of five. She studied at

• the Tanglewood Institute
• with Ruth Schonthal at the Westchester Conservatory of Music
• at Harvard University, where her main teachers were Earl Kim, Peter Lieberson, and Leon Kirchner. There she won numerous prizes, organized new-music concerts, produced radio feature programs, and was music director for theatrical productions at the American Repertory Theatre.

Upon graduation in 1990, she was awarded the John Knowles Paine Traveling Fellowship, which took her to The Netherlands, where she completed her Post Graduate Diploma in The Royal Conservatory of The Hague with Theo Loevendie as her main teacher.

She continues to live in Europe, working as a composer and university professor. Her music has received many awards: Inner Piece won a prestigious Amsterdam Arts Foundation Composition Prize (The Netherlands, 1995), the Boswil International Composition Competition (Switzerland, 1997), and the Collegium Novum Competition (USA, 1998).

Her music has been recorded on six compact discs and has been performed at major festivals, including Warsaw Autumn (Poland), Gaudeamus Music Week (The Netherlands), ULTIMA (Norway), the Kiev Music Fest (Ukraine) and Summergarden (NY, USA).

In recent years she has written on commission for such groups as The Netherlands' Radio Chamber Orchestra, Orkest De Volharding, Cappella Amsterdam, Maarten Altena Ensemble, ELECTRA and Nieuw Ensemble, as well as for such performers as Tomoko Mukaiyama, Guy Livingston, Jannie Pranger, Ivo Janssen, Harry Sparnaay, Annelie de Man and Eleonore Pameijer.

She is now composing a piece for the Residentie Orchestra of The Hague for their 2006/2007/2008 season. Lann's music is published by DONEMUS in Amsterdam.

[edit] Compositions

The majority of Vanessa Lann's compositions include aspects of ritual, ceremony or contemplation. She is interested in breaking with the conventional concert-hall approach to the performance and programming of music, and she frequently experiments with alternative ways of sharing sound, other media and time with audiences, often hoping to blur the boundary between art and daily experience. In her music, Lann uses the repetition of recognizable figures, as well as layers of structures based on number ratios, to create a world in which each subtle element has a distinct meaning. In many works she explores the listener's perception of continuity, infinity and silence, as well as the shifting psychological relationship between foreground and background material, or between performer and audience. Lann is intrigued by the boundaries of what is audible: how long or how quietly a note can be appreciated, how a performer's changing physical experience of a musical gesture changes its nature, why an altered context of a recognizable element can render it absurd or divine. She embraces the sensuality of the rawest of sounds, as well as the riskiness and "impolite" quality inherent in the seemingly endless recurrence of the most basic, even childlike, patterns. She searches for extremes within limited means and asks the listener to enter the time and sound world of the music in as simple a manner as possible: as the essence of the music gradually becomes apparent, she hopes that the listener continuously reevaluates his relationship to the music and to the meaning of listening, itself.

[edit] External links

• Official website