Burrill Phillips (November 9, 1907, Omaha, Nebraska – June 22, 1988) was an American composer, teacher, and pianist.
Phillips studied at the Denver College of Music with Edwin Stringham and at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, with Howard Hanson and Bernard Rogers.
In 1929 he married Alberta Phillips (who wrote many of his librettos); they had a daughter, Ann Phillips Basart (b. 1931) and a son (Stephen Phillips, 1938-86). Because of privations due to the Great Depression, Ann was adopted and raised by her maternal grandparents; she was not reunited with her parents until 1959.
Phillips’s first important work was Selections from McGuffey’s Reader, for orchestra, based on poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (Basart 2001). He wrote of this work in his 1933 diary, “I don’t think anybody had written such ‘American-sounding’ music before. On the first night, the students said it was corny. And it was. But I didn’t care, because it was a huge success.” The early style of this work, stressing melody, self-consciously American references, and jazzy rhythms, has tended to overshadow his later compositions. In his 1943 diaries, he looks back at his "Courthouse Square" (1935) and is struck by “the poor scoring and the clichés and triviality of the material. There is almost self-conscious simplicity, not to say idiocy, about it. Too sweet, although the vitality of rhythm is there. But it wasn’t a bad way to begin a career.”
By the 1940s he had turned to a more astringent and expressive idiom (Basart 2001). In 1942, he wrote in his diary, “I have decided that my slow movements from now on are going to be different; they are going to play for keeps and not just be soft, sensuous, tender, delicious, delicate, dramatic, or dark. No more warm middle-western summer-night scenes, but the cool, stormy, volcanic, passionate stretches of the soul.” He commented in his 1944 diary, “I want something with more bite to it, with an ache and some force. I want the structure of this work to be evident. I want to use some of the elements of the mind in working it out, such as fugue, passacaglia, etc. I want to write with humor or wit in some parts — another function of mind. The underlying emotional warmth, however, must always be there.”
In 1960 his String Quartet Number Two was premiered at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. by the Paganini Quartet, with the composer present, and broadcast on live FM radio. In the early 1960s he turned to free serial techniques, less sharply accented rhythms, and increasing fantasy (Basart 2001). “Yesterday,” he wrote in his 1987 diaries, “I read about [Elliott] Carter’s Double Concerto for piano and harpsichord. I find I am developing a type of chordal structure similar to his, but I never knew anything about this phase of his before reading about it. I certainly don’t feel attracted to his rhythmic style, but the widespread open distribution of intervals in the chords & the cluster forms & inversions are very much what I have been doing. I hadn’t, until lately, done anything to arrive at a new chordal style because of my predominant drive for linear motion, thematic or contrapuntal.”
He wrote, in 1983, of his musical influences: “The first music of a serious nature I was introduced to as a child was the 2- and 3-part inventions of Bach. Then Haydn and Chopin. All of these are simple and clear, and their harmonic content is not obscured by an elaborate overlay of either contrapuntal virtuosity or chromatic sugaring. After college I emerged with a fairly self-recognized set of preferences: Scarlatti, Soler, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz, Debussy, Stravinsky — all those whose attitude toward the sonic portion of music is one of making things clear and strong-flavored.”
Phillips taught composition and theory at Eastman (1933-49), the University of Illinois (1949-64), the Juilliard School of Music (1968-69), and Cornell University (1972-73). His students include Ben Johnston. He was a Fulbright Lecturer in Barcelona, Spain, in 1960-61, and received Guggenheim fellowships in 1942-43 and 1961-62, when the entire Phillips family reunited in Paris. He died in Berkeley, California, on June 21, 1988, of a heart attack. His scores and sketches are housed in the Burrill Phillips archive, Special Collections, Sibley Library, Eastman School of Music, in Rochester, NY.
His major works include: