Chris Vaneman, flutist

Flutist Christopher Vaneman is Dean of the School of the Arts at Converse University in Spartanburg, SC, where he also serves as Associate Professor of Flute; He was the 2013 winner of the Kathryne Amelia Brown Award, the College's annual prize for teaching excellence, and is a Past President of the South Carolina Flute Society. 

A dedicated champion of diversifying the flute's repertoire, Chris has premiered dozens of new works and original arrangements, both for solo flute and in a chamber setting. He is flutist of the Converse-based chamber group Ensemble Radieuse (whose first CD, Inbox, features three newly-commissioned works, and who were awarded Third Place in the National Flute Association's International Chamber Music Competition) and the New York-based Echo. He has performed as a soloist with orchestras in Germany and Denmark as well as the United States, and chamber and solo performances have taken him to the Middle East, Central America, and on many occasions to Europe. He has served as principal flutist of the Reigate Festival Orchestra in England as well of several American orchestras.

He 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, 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.


Chris is also an engaging writer and speaker on musical subjects, 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.