Also see: Robinson McClellan’s music explores fundamental and primal impulses that draw people to music — legend, history, the sacred, memory, melody, and the performance process itself. These interests express themselves in a widely-ranging output: from substantial sacred and secular choral works to hymns and congregational songs designed to be taught by ear; from orchestral and chamber works to music for bagpipes and banjo. Musical and textual inspirations have ranged from Schubert and Janacek to Arabic and Persian mystic poets, Medieval miracle plays, shape-note songs, Gaelic traditional music, Sufi Qawwali, Greek Byzantine chant, Islamic geometry, and more.
FULL BIO Robinson McClellan (b.1976) is a composer, teacher, scholar, and concert presenter. Audiences have heard his music via commissioners, performers and venues including the Albany, Ft. Worth, and Knox-Galesburg Symphonies, the Museum of Biblical Art (NYC), Amsterdam’s Gaudeamus Competition, the Monteverdi Kamerkoor Utrecht, Nektarios Antoniou's Greek Byzantine Choir, Yale Schola Cantorum, the Hudson Opera House, Moira Smiley and VOCO, Trio Eos, and many others. He has received residencies and awards from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, ASCAP, and Vassar College. His choral music is published in NCCO's choral music series, Music by Heart, an Episcopal hymnal, and Feniarco's Choraliter, an Italian choral anthology. As a composer and scholar Robin has spent the past several years immersed in piobaireachd ('peeb-rock'), a rarely heard bagpiping tradition rooted in 17th-century Gaelic Scotland. His compositions often borrow musical ideas from piobaireachd, and his research into its unique rhythmic idiom was published in a 2009 scholarly anthology in Ashgate's Popular and Folk Music Series, and has also been cited in the scholarly journal Ethnomusicology. He has written on pipe music as a reviewer for The Voice, and has played the Highland bagpipe since 2004. Robin is founder and director of El Salto, a unique forum for contemporary music heard in a context of broad-minded religious/humanist inquiry. The project is now hosted by the New York Society for Ethical Culture. His article about El Salto appeared in the journal Liturgy in 2008. He is also Composer in Residence for ActorCor, a NYC-based choir dedicated to bridging religious divides. Robin teaches composition at Hunter College and is also on the music faculty at Rutgers University, Manhattan College, St. Francis College, Wagner College, and the Lucy Moses School; between them he teaches composition, music theory, music history, and world music to fifth graders, teenagers, college students, and adults. He is spearheading ComposerCraft, a new composition intensive for young composers at the Special Music School. He earned his doctorate in composition (DMA) at the Yale School of Music and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. He previously studied music at Vassar College, and his teachers have been Ingram Marshall, Ezra Laderman, Annea Lockwood, Richard Wilson, Martin Bresnick, and Aaron Jay Kernis. In his spare time Robin is the Music Librarian at the Kaufman Center, and he worked on the team that created the Morgan Library's Music Manuscripts Online. He has worked for the S.E.M. Ensemble, G. Schirmer/AMP, and has sung in a variety of professional choral ensembles, currently including C4. He has done music copying work for several major publishers and created the music examples for two scholarly books. He is also a compulsive amateur photographer. |
December 2009 in the MacDowell woods. |
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