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Early in her career, Nancy Van de Vate, a celebrated modernist composer, would tell people about her work and sometimes be met with dismissive questions like \u201cDo you write songs for children?\u201d And though she often won competitions that she had entered anonymously, her daughter Katherine Van de Vate said, she rarely won when she entered them under her own name, a dynamic she attributed to gender discrimination.<\/p>\n
Ms. Van de Vate refused to let such barriers slow her down. In 1968, she became only the second woman to receive a doctorate in music composition in the United States, according to \u201cJourneys Through the Life and Music of Nancy Van de Vate\u201d (2005), by Laurdella Foulkes-Levy and Burt J. Levy.<\/p>\n
Ms. Van de Vate would go on to compose more than a hundred compositions in a seven-decade career, including seven operas, many orchestral works and a large body of chamber music.<\/p>\n
She died on July 29 at 92 at her home in Vienna, where she spent the final 38 years of her life, her daughter said. Her death was not widely reported at the time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Ms. Van de Vate created a distinct musical voice, tinged with dissonance, that drew from a variety of genres and global influences, including traditional Indonesian music, and from a wide array of composers, including Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Penderecki and Var\u00e8se.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you\u2019re at a smorgasbord,\u201d Ms. Van de Vate said in an interview<\/a> with the music writer Bruce Duffie in the 1990s, \u201cdo you head for the dishes you like, or do you make a conscious choice that you should sample everything there? I go to enjoy the variety.\u201d<\/p>\n Even working at the conceptual frontiers, Ms. Van de Vate composed music to be listened to, not to be dissected by theorists.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWhile no stranger to modernism, she had a deep desire to connect with her audience,\u201d the composer David Victor Feldman, a friend, said in an email. \u201cShe didn\u2019t see the tropes of modernism as a deal breaker, so they\u2019re definitely in her mix. But so is infectious rhythm, color and the sounds of music coming from beyond the West.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Among her best-known pieces was her orchestral work \u201cChernobyl,\u201d<\/a> a haunting rumination on the 1986 Soviet nuclear disaster, which had its world premiere in Vienna in 1995 and its U.S. premiere in Portland, Maine, in 1997.<\/p>\n She also earned critical acclaim for \u201cAll Quiet on the Western Front,\u201d<\/a> a searing antiwar opera based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque about trench warfare during World War I, which premiered in Osnabr\u00fcck, Germany, in 2003.<\/p>\n A prominent feminist in a male-dominated field, Ms. Van de Cate led by example. In 1975, she founded an advocacy organization called the League of Women Composers, later renamed the International League of Women Composers and now part of the International Alliance for Women in Music<\/a>.<\/p>\n In 1990, she and her husband, Clyde Smith, founded Vienna Modern Masters, a small label dedicated largely to recording new orchestral music, including many works by female composers.<\/p>\n Though progress was made, she believed far more was needed. \u201cThere have always been one or two women<\/a> in the American musical establishment,\u201d she told Mr. Duffie. \u201cI don\u2019t see that as progress,\u201d she added. \u201cIt\u2019s like saying we have Sandra Day O\u2019Connor on the Supreme Court now, so therefore all women have equal rights.\u201d<\/p>\n Nancy Jean Hayes was born on Dec. 30, 1930, in Plainfield, N.J., the second of three children of John Hayes, who ran an insurance company, and Anna (Tschudi) Hayes, a secretary.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n A gifted pianist since childhood, she studied piano at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., for a year after graduating from North Plainfield High School in 1948. She transferred to Wellesley College, where she majored in music and received a bachelor\u2019s degree in 1952. She earned her pioneering doctorate from Florida State University in 1968.<\/p>\n In addition to her daughter Katherine, Ms. Van de Vate\u2019s survivors include another daughter, Barbara Levy; a son, Dwight; and six grandchildren. Her marriage to Dwight Van de Vate Jr., a philosophy professor, ended in divorce in 1976. She married Mr. Smith, a career naval officer, in 1979. He died in 1999.<\/p>\n Ms. Van de Vate was also a committed music educator; she taught at Memphis State University, the University of Tennessee and other institutions through the 1960s and \u201970s. While teaching in Hawaii in the mid-\u201970s, she organized music appreciation courses for sailors stationed at the Pearl Harbor naval base.<\/p>\n \u201cMy mission as a teacher was to do as much as I possibly could to bring people to an understanding and, if possible, a liking for contemporary music,\u201d she said in a 1986 interview<\/a> with Ev Grimes, a radio producer. \u201cAnd I found that if they understood it, they almost always liked it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI want my music to communicate,\u201d she added. \u201cI don\u2019t care to write for the shelf.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n