Discipline: Music Composition

George Burt

Discipline: Music Composition
MacDowell Fellowships: 1965
George Burt (1929–2015) was a composer, author, and educator. He attended the San Francisco Conservatory and then earned degrees at the University of California, Berkeley and Mills College, followed by an M.F.A. in music from Princeton in 1963. He wrote more than 40 works (orchestral, chamber, and electronic) plus scores for six feature-length films, including Robert Altman’s Fool for Love and Secret Honor. His music has been performed by the Houston and Detroit symphony orchestras, the Paris Opera Orchestra, the Cleveland Chamber Symphony Orchestra, and by chamber ensembles in many colleges and universities. Burt was a professor of music at Smith College, the University of Michigan, and Rice University, from which he retired as professor emeritus. His book, The Art of Film Music, became a standard text in university film departments throughout the U.S.

Studios

Wood

George Burt worked in the Wood studio.

Wood Studio, given to the residency program by Mrs. Frederick Trevor Hill, was completed in 1913 in memory of Mrs. Hill’s mother, Helen Ogden Wood. Like Schelling Studio, the building is sided with large, overlapping pieces of hemlock bark. When the studio was renovated in 1995, MacDowell staff researched the origins of this unusual building material and…

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