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Nathan Stumpff

Biography

Professor Gerald Shapiro of Brown University calls Nathan Stumpff "the single most promising composition student that I have worked with in my 37 years of university teaching." Having finished his degree in music at Brown, Nathan had another kind of creativity on his mind, though. He returned to his native Maine and built a cabin in the woods. "Working as a carpenter," he says, "has shown me the transformational power of apprenticeship." Now he is exhilarated at the prospect of being an apprentice to master musicians.

While at Brown, Nathan participated in the Young Composers Program at Tanglewood and studied music as a Fulbright Scholar in Iceland. His encounters with music have often been dramatic and profound. At 17, he wrote a requiem mass for his brother, who had died nine years earlier. During a performance of Alban Berg's Violin Concerto in Cologne, Germany, Nathan "yelled out in joy at the seemingly impossible finger acrobatics of the soloist."

Nathan wants to create music that "intimately connects performers to the community, especially to young people." When he produced his own one-act chamber opera of Dr. Seuss' The Lorax, a group of small children rolled around on the floor in laughter at the front of the hall. Nathan remembers, "All of the traditional barriers between audience and performers that plague classical music concerts were torn down." Such experiences led Nathan to his dream of a new concert music experience, nurtured in a musical community he wants to build on a farm in his native New England - "a meeting ground of musicians, poets, and fools of all persuasions.a place where creativity and collaboration can flourish."

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