UNL's von Kampen selected as MTNA Distinguished Composer of the Year

David von Kampen
David von Kampen

David von Kampen (B.M. 2009, M.M. 2011), a lecturer in composition in the Glenn Korff School of Music, has been selected as the 2015 Music Teachers National Association (MTNA) Distinguished Composer of the Year.

The recipient of this award is chosen from the entrants in the annual MTNA Commissioned Composer program. Any MTNA state affiliate may commission a composer with financial assistance from MTNA, and von Kampen was Nebraska’s commissioned composer last year.

Three judges selected one composer, from more than 30 entries, to be honored, and von Kampen’s composition, titled “Under the Silver and Home Again,” will be performed at the MTNA National Conference in San Antonio in April. All compositions are also placed in the MTNA Commissioned Works Library.

“I was very surprised,” von Kampen said of the honor. “It’s always weird with competitions, because any composer who enters them, even composers who are really successful, will tell you that you lose a lot more than you win. When it turns out well, it’s nice to have that external validation for work you’ve done.”

“Under the Silver and Home Again” is a song cycle for baritone and piano based on a set of five Walter de la Mare poems. The tracks are titled “The Old Stone House,” “The Buckle,” “The Ride-by-Nights,” “Bunches of Grapes” and “Mistletoe.”

He wrote them in late 2014 with his friend Nathaniel Sullivan (B.M. 2014) in mind. While von Kampen was pursuing his master of music at UNL in 2009, Sullivan was a freshman in the Glenn Korff School of Music and von Kampen directed him in the Vocal Jazz Ensemble. Though Sullivan had graduated in May 2014, he was still in Lincoln taking lessons and working.

“I thought right away it would be a good opportunity to work with Nathaniel, that’s really what drove the idea,” he said. “I had accompanied him before, but I had never written anything specifically for him. He’s such a great singer, and we get along well. I wanted to come up with something that would be a good fit for us, that we could record together.”

Von Kampen started looking at poetry to find a poem or group of poems that could be the basis for a set and began looking at a handful of de la Mare poems.

“I was looking for one that had a word or theme that could be the focus of the set, then I would go find poems by other poets with that same idea,” he said. “But I liked so many of the different de la Mare poems I had been looking at, the common thread ended up being that they were all his poems.”

Sullivan made the recording with von Kampen, which was produced by Lucas Kellison locally, but then Sullivan moved to New York for graduate school. So when von Kampen premiered the composition at the Nebraska MTNA Conference in Kearney last October, Jeremy Brown, a senior B.M. vocal performance major in the Glenn Korff School of Music, stepped in to perform it.

“Jeremy premiered the set, and he did an outstanding job,” von Kampen said. “He and Nathaniel have somewhat different voice types, so it was a really interesting process to work with Jeremy and see how he interpreted them differently.”

That created a dilemma when it came time to plan the performance at the National Conference in April to decide who should perform with von Kampen.

“I ended up feeling like I should give Nathaniel a shot to do them live, since they were originally written with him in mind,” he said. “But Jeremy did such a good job, I wish we could have performed it twice.”

Von Kampen and Sullivan performed the piece on Sunday, April 3 during the national conference.

Von Kampen is a six-time Downbeat Award winner in graduate-level jazz writing categories, winner of the 2014 San Francisco Choral Artists New Voices Project, winner of the National Band Association’s Young Jazz Composers Competition and received Honorable Mention in the 2014 New York Youth Symphony First Music Commissions.

He has more than 40 choral and instrumental compositions and arrangements published with G. Schirmer, Concordia Publishing House, UNC Jazz Press, MusicSpoke and others. He recently co-wrote with Becky Boesen the musical “Puddin’ and the Grumble,” which shines a light on the issue of childhood hunger and premiered at the Lied Center for Performing Arts in March.

“I’ve been really lucky,” he said. “I’ve been fortunate to be working with people who help me get great recordings. I can’t stress enough how important that is. We all make value judgments about music based on the quality of performances. So being connected with great musicians is a huge blessing.”

To listen to “Under the Silver and Home Again,” visit von Kampen’s Soundcloud page at http://go.unl.edu/dvkmtna.