Charles Lemon Bestor (1924–2016) was an American composer of contemporary classical music, professor, and administrator. Bestor spent his childhood at the Chautauqua Institution where his father was president and in New York City, where he graduated from the Lincoln School. He met his future wife, Ann Elder, at the International House in New York City and on their first date they watched Bobby Thompson hit his legendary home run. He studied with Paul Hindemith at Yale University and later with Vincent Persichetti and Peter Menin at the Juilliard School and independently, with Vladimir Ussachevsky. He held degrees from Swarthmore College (Phi Beta Kappa), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a doctorate from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
He began his career at the Juilliard School, where in 1958, he accompanied the Juilliard Orchestra on their State Department sponsored European tour, acting as manager of the orchestra. He then accepted a faculty position at the University of Colorado at Boulder and from there went on to become the dean of the music school at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, followed by appointments as head of music at the University of Alabama and the University of Utah. In 1977 the family returned to the east coast and Ann's hometown of Amherst, where he became head of music and dance department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
While Charles spent many of his hours composing and, while in Utah received commissions from the Utah Symphony and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, it was during his tenure at UMass that he was able to fully embrace his role as composer. Through time spent at the artist colonies Yaddo, MacDowell, Ragdale, the Virginia Center for the Arts and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre (Ireland) Charles was able to write many of the compositions performed so beautifully by his colleagues at UMass and elsewhere. At the time of his death he was working on a double CD set of his music entitled The Summing Up. The CD features local artists Estela Olevsky, Nigel Coxe, Paulina Stark, Lynn Klock, Eduardo Leonardo, Astrid Schween, Jon Humphries, and Dana Lynne Varga.
Charles also collaborated on many installation pieces, the first of which, Pathways from the Dream Spell Series, with Sherry Healy, was installed at the Chicago International Art Expo at Navy Pier. He went on to a long and fruitful collaboration with the visual artist Barbara Cornett and the lighting designer John Wade on the installations Cycles and Time and River's Flow, both of which were commissioned by the Maier Museum of American Art. He subsequently collaborated with Ms. Cornett and Mr. Wade on the installation Into the Labyrinth, commissioned by the Fine Arts Center of the Virginia Museum in Lynchburg and The Unfound Door, commissioned by the College Music Society.
