Jack Van Zandt (b. 1954, Honolulu) is a Grammy Award-winning Los Angeles and Ireland-based composer of music for concerts, public spaces, gallery installations, television, film, and advertising. He studied composition at Cambridge University with Alexander Goehr; the Dartington Summer School of Music with Peter Maxwell Davies; and at University of California Santa Barbara with Thea Musgrave, Peter Racine Fricker, and Emma Lou Diemer. He was Alexander Goehr’s teaching, personal and musical assistant in Cambridge from 1978-1984.

 

He has composed more than 300 works. His concert music has been performed in the USA, Canada, Asia and Europe, and his commercial music is regularly heard on broadcast, internet, and cable TV. He has scored documentary and silent films, and his electronic music has been used for installations, multimedia presentations, TV, and meditation videos and workshops. He is a co-Grammy winner in the Best Classical Compendium category for his piece Sí an Bhrú for solo piano and electronics on pianist Nadia Shpachenko’s CD, “The Poetry of Places.” 

 

Van Zandt is also a writer, publisher, teacher, music education program designer, concert producer, and frequent university guest lecturer on various musical subjects.  He was recently a faculty member of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and the California Institute for the Arts (CalArts). He was a member of the board of directors of the Los Angeles chapter of the American Composers Forum, of which he was president 2014-17, and was Visiting Artist at Cal Arts in 2017. He was a member of the Thea Musgrave International 90th Birthday Celebration Committee (2018-19), and travelled to various universities and other venues presenting live conversations with Thea Musgrave about her life and work and their friendship.

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His concert music has recently been performed in New York at Symphony Space, Barge Music, Columbia University and Queen’s College; The Opera Center, Seattle; the San Francisco Center for Contemporary Music; Orgelpark, Amsterdam; new music festivals in Krakow, Philadelphia, Seattle and Montreal; Birmingham University, Nottingham Chamber Music Festival, Bishopsgate Institute and St. John's Smith Square, London, and the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, UK; The Florida Toy Piano Festival; Wende Museum Music Series Los Angeles; Hear Now Festivals in Los Angeles and Paris; Unsung Festival Los Angeles; Pianospheres LA; Boston Court Pasadena; Tuesdays @ Monk Space Series LA; People Inside Electronics LA; Ussachevsky Festival at Pomona College; Cal Arts; Universities of California at San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Riverside; California State Universities at Los Angeles, Fullerton, San Bernardino, East Bay and Cal Poly Pomona; Bridges Hall and Drinkwater Hall, Claremont, California;  Salmon Hall, Chapman University, Orange, California; and many other North American theaters, colleges and universities. 

 

Van Zandt’s orchestral score for a segment of the 1922 silent film Nosferatu was premiered live in 2018 with film projection at the Forest Lawn Crucifixion-Resurrection Hall in Glendale, California. His music composed for TV has appeared on broadcast, cable and internet networks all over the world, including Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, HBO, AMC, the BBC, E Channel, Discovery, USA Network, Oxygen, Bravo, and Viceland; and dozens of internationally popular programs including Bosch (Amazon), Desperate Housewives (ABC), Modern Family (NBC), and Weird Loners (Fox). He co-composed the score for a 2018 Canadian documentary on homeopathic medicines, Magic Pills.

 

Recent premieres include the National Endowment for the Arts funded The New Frontier: An Atomic Age Jazz Opera, libretto by Jill Freeman, for soprano Stacey Fraser at California State University San Bernardino; Strange Loops for the Villiers String Quartet (UK) at the Royal Northern College of Music (Manchester, UK); La Nuit Étoilée: A Nocturne After Van Gogh for the Seattle Chamber Orchestra; and From th’Etereal Skie performed by the UCLA Philharmonia in in Schoenberg Hall in the 2024 Hear Now Festival. His Sí an Bhrú for solo piano and electronics, recorded at Skywalker Ranch, appears on Nadia Shpachenko’s 2020 Grammy-winning CD “The Poetry of Places.” His song cycle with librettist Jill Freeman, Apples and Time Crack in October, appears on the recently released CD “Luminous” from soprano Kirsten Ashley Wiest and pianist Siu Hei Lee.

 

His current projects in progress include a multimedia dramatic madrigal with dance, On the Shores of Eternity, with texts by R. Tagore for vocal ensemble and soloists, dancers, video, electronics, flute, harp, cello, electric guitar and electric bass; American Exodus, a new dramatic work for the Partch Ensemble in Los Angeles; a set of Irish traditional music–inspired pieces with flutist/co-composer Jane Rigler and Irish traditional singers, artists, and filmmakers; a piano sextet with electronics, Lessness, for the Villiers Quartet and pianist Nadia Shpachenko; and a CD project with soprano Stacey Fraser that includes his song cycle with texts by Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Chaos of Light and Motion, to be released in late 2024.

 

Van Zandt has been a journalist, publisher and editor, and is a frequently published writer on music and the arts. His book with British composer Alexander Goehr, Composing a Life: Teachers, Mentors and Models was published by Carcanet Press in October 2023.

 

Jack Van Zandt divides his time between his homes in Los Angeles and West Cork, Ireland. The composer and his publishing company, Roaring Water Music, are BMI affiliates. His concert music is published by Composers Edition in Oxford, UK.

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