Christopher Vaneman

Christopher Vaneman is the Director of Converse College’s Petrie School of Music. The winner of the College’s 2013 Kathryne Amelia Brown Award for Teaching Excellence, he is a busy performer and a former President of the South Carolina Flute Society.

Chris completed his studies at Yale University, where he studied with Ransom Wilson and from which he received the Doctor of Musical Arts degree. Chris holds MM and MMA degrees from Yale as well as an Honors BM from the Eastman School; he has also attended the Salzburg Mozarteum and Belgium’s Conservatoire Royal de Bruxelles, where he studied under a grant from the Belgian American Educational Foundation. He studied at Eastman with Bonita Boyd, in Brussels with Jean-Michel Tanguy, and in Salzburg with Andras Adorjan. He has also studied contemporary flute techniques with Robert Dick in New York and Baroque performance practice and ornamentation with Barthold Kuijken in Belgium.

He is flutist of the flute-oboe-piano trio Ensemble Radieuse (whose first CD, Inbox, features three newly-commissioned works, and who were prizewinners in the National Flute Association’s Chamber Music Competition) and the New York-based Echo, and for many years taught during the summer at Pennsylvania’s Performing Arts Institute. Chris has performed as a soloist with orchestras in Germany and Denmark as well as in the United States and served as principal flutist of the Reigate Festival Orchestra in England, among other ensembles. Recent performances have taken him to Europe, Central America, and the Middle East, among other interesting places.

Chris is also an engaging speaker and writer on musical subjects. He has spoken at national conferences and symposia of the College Music Society and has supplied program notes for a number of compact discs and innumerable concerts; the Tokyo Quartet used his notes for its cycle of Beethoven performances at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center.

His wife, Kelly, is Professor of Oboe and Musicology at Converse; their daughter Tally is not a professor of anything at Converse.