BURRILL PHILLIPS 1907 - 1988

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." Wikipedia Bio
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