Geoffrey Burr is an amateur clarinet player who has made his home in the Bay Area for 30 years. He has served as Principal Clarinet of the Palo Alto Philharmonic since 2002, and performs regularly with Peninsula Symphony, Cambrian Symphony and other Bay Area community orchestras. In additional to orchestral performance, Geoff enjoys playing chamber music at workshops and local concerts, performing pieces ranging from Brahms' Clarinet Quintet to the original (13-instrument) version of Copland's Appalachian Spring to Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat.
Geoff studied clarinet in high school with Sam Cifonelli and Vincent Smith, and in college with Diana Haskell (then Principal with the Buffalo Philharmonic, currently Associate Principal with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra). He performed the Mozart Clarinet Concerto with the University at Buffalo Orchestra in 1991, and the Spohr Clarinet Concerto with the Caltech/Occidental Symphony Orchestra in 1995.
Geoff is an active orchestra volunteer with the Palo Alto Philharmonic — he serves on the Music Committee, handles online and in-person ticket sales and various marketing tasks, maintains the orchestra's online presence as Webmaster, and designs the orchestra concert programs. Outside of playing music, Geoff has been coaching AYSO soccer for autistic and other special-needs children on Sunday afternoons for nearly 20 years.
In his "day job," Geoff is a Distinguished Research Scientist at IBM Research — Almaden in south San Jose, where he has worked for 30 years. Geoff holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Caltech, and has worked in a wide variety of technical fields, ranging from holographic storage to classical nucleation theory. He was named a Fellow of the IEEE Society in 2020. Currently, Geoff serves as a technical leader and strategist for a worldwide team, driving chip-architecture, -design and -test for novel "Analog AI" (Artificial Intelligence) hardware systems based on performing computation with non-volatile memory devices.
Geoff and his wife Annette Grot — violinist, Board Member, and Concert Coordinator for the orchestra — live in Cupertino, where they raised their two daughters, Emily and Allison Burr.
