Burrill Phillips

Burrill Phillips (November 9, 1907 – June 22, 1988) was an American composer, teacher, and pianist.

Phillips was born in Omaha, Nebraska. He studied at the Denver College of Music with Edwin Stringham and at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, with Howard Hanson and Bernard Rogers. On September 17, 1928, he married Alberta Phillips (who wrote many of his librettos; died 1979). The couple had a daughter, Ann (b. 1931; actress Ann E. Todd, later Ann Basart) and a son, Stephen (1937–1986), who predeceased his father. Due to privations caused by the Great Depression, the children, Ann and Stephen, were raised by their maternal grandparents.

Phillips's first important work was Selections from McGuffey's Reader, for orchestra, based on poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (Basart 2001). He wrote of this work in his 1933 diary, "I don't think anybody had written such 'American-sounding' music before. On the first night, the students said it was corny. And it was. But I didn't care, because it was a huge success."

In his 1943 diaries, he looked back at his "Courthouse Square" (1935) and is struck by "the poor scoring and the clichés and triviality of the material. There is almost self-conscious simplicity, not to say idiocy, about it. Too sweet, although the vitality of rhythm is there. But it wasn't a bad way to begin a career."

By the 1940s he had turned to a more astringent and expressive idiom (Basart 2001). In 1942, he wrote in his diary, "I have decided that my slow movements from now on are going to be different; they are going to play for keeps and not just be soft, sensuous, tender, delicious, delicate, dramatic, or dark. No more warm middle-western summer-night scenes, but the cool, stormy, volcanic, passionate stretches of the soul." He commented in his 1944 diary, "I want something with more bite to it, with an ache and some force. I want the structure of this work to be evident. I want to use some of the elements of the mind in working it out, such as fugue, passacaglia, etc. I want to write with humor or wit in some parts—another function of mind. The underlying emotional warmth, however, must always be there."

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