Peter Van Zandt Lane


Peter Van Zandt Lane is an American composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music.

Biography

Peter Van Zandt Lane is a recipient of a 2018 Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2017 Aaron Copland House Award, and a 2015 Composers Now residency at the Pocantico Center. Other composer residencies include MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. He has been commissioned twice by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, the Atlanta Chamber Players, American Chamber Winds for a concerto for trombonist Joseph Alessi, the Composers Conference and Chamber Music Center at Wellesley College, the Sydney Conservatorium Wind Ensemble, Juventas New Music Ensemble, Emory Wind Ensemble, and Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble. His music has been played by International Contemporary Ensemble, New York Virtuoso Singers, the Cleveland Orchestra, Ensemble Signal, Talea Ensemble, Freon Ensemble, and Triton Brass. His compositions for winds –namely Hivemind and Astrarium– have become programmed widely by college and university wind ensembles in the United States.
Lane holds degrees from Brandeis University and the University of Miami Frost School of Music. His composition teachers include Melinda Wagner, David Rakowski, Eric Chasalow, and Lansing McLoskey. He has held positions at Wellesley College, Harvard University, MIT, the University of Florida, and is currently composition faculty at the University of Georgia.

Works

Lane's 2017 concerto for trombone and wind ensemble, Radix Tyrannis, was commissioned by American Chamber Winds for trombonist Joseph Alessi, and was premiered at the 2017 World Association for Symphonic Bands and Ensembles conference in Utrecht, Netherlands.
Peter Van Zandt Lane's 2013 ballet, "HackPolitik" was composed for and premiered by Boston-based Juventas New Music Ensemble and Brooklyn-based contemporary dance company The People Movers. Based on a series of cyber-attacks between 2010 and 2012 linked to the hacker groups Anonymous and LulzSec, the ballet depicts the rise and fall of Topiary and Sabu through a combination of “electroacoustic music, modern dance, and video projection" and "examine how the Internet... blurs the lines between activism and anarchy.” The music and choreography aims to "translat cyberspace into music and motion." In an interview with the Clyde Fitch Report, Lane cited the wider cultural implications of social networking as a motivation for composing the piece, stating that “whether or not we are engaged in cyber-activism… we are constantly thinking about ‘what do I write here? How do I portray myself to the rest of the world?’… We spend an enormous amount of effort into shaping our online personalities.” Described as "angular, jarring, and sophisticated... very compelling," the piece received positive critical reviews; the Boston Musical Intelligencer stated "Lane’s score was friendly to listeners, emotionally and texturally varied... Ballet needs live music and this one offered it on the highest level." Noting the poignancy of the premiere, Forbes writer Parmy Olson noted that "the same day that hacker Jeremy Hammond was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his role in the vigilante attacks of Anonymous, an altogether more artistic outcome for the online network took place. The hour-long premier of HackPolitik... reflect the story of the Anonymous... and the rise and fall of its hacker splinter group LulzSec." The ballet was premiered in Boston, and subsequently at Here Space in Manhattan, where it was dubbed a New York Times Critic's Pick.

Selected works

Orchestral and Wind Symphony
Solo/Chamber Ensemble
Solo/Chamber Ensemble
Vocal