Robinson McClellan (b.1976) is a composer, scholar, teacher, and concert presenter. His choral and instrumental music is performed regularly in the U.S. and Europe, and has been heard in concert and liturgical settings such as the Oregon Bach Festival, Windsor Castle, the Monteverdi Choir Festival (Hungary), the Vatican, and others. Commissions have come from the Albany Symphony (NY), baroque trio Flying Forms, the Museum of Biblical Art (NYC), Nektarios Antoniou and Schola Cantorum, Yale Schola Cantorum, organist Carson Cooman, Christ Church New Haven, Marquand Chapel at Yale, the Fireworks Ensemble, and Trio Eos. Ensembles such as the Fort Worth Symphony, the Pharos Music Project, and the Lirico Chamber Singers have also presented his music. He has received composition awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, ASCAP, and Vassar College. He was awarded a MacDowell Colony residency for December 2009 and a Yaddo residency for March 2010. His choral music is published in Music by Heart, an Episcopal hymnal, and Feniarco's Choraliter, an Italian choral anthology. Robin's musical interests range from sacred music, liturgical drama and early music, to traditions from around the world. He has spent the past several years immersed in pibroch (piobaireachd), a rarely heard bagpiping tradition rooted in 17th-century Gaelic Scotland. His approach to it ranges from surface-level ‘pilfering’ to ‘intense engagement’ (in the words of Michael Tenzer): his compositions often incorporate musical ideas borrowed from pibroch in overt and hidden ways. His research into its unique rhythmic idiom appears in a recent anthology of Highland bagpipe-related scholarship from Ashgate's Popular and Folk Music Series. As an extension of this work Robin organizes recitals that pair pibroch with classical works inspired by it; he hopes in this way to promote pibroch as a creative resource for contemporary composers. He has written on pipe music for CelticLife magazine and The Voice, and has played the Highland bagpipe since 2004. Drawing together his interests in music and religion, 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 Liturgy in 2008. In May 2008 he was appointed composer in residence of ActorCor, a NYC-based choir dedicated to bridging religious divides; as part of this he co-judges a composing competition for interfaith choral music. He has also developed a keen (if not expert) interest in Islam, and has written choral settings of the Qur’an (in English) and medieval Islamic poetry (in Arabic). Many of these endeavors revolve around basic questions about the nature of music. Robin’s scholarly and creative work challenges common Western assumptions about the nature of rhythm and the role of notation in the sounding result of music. His interest in ‘fundamentals’ has also led him to rework standard classical performance format in the El Salto project, and to experiment with alternate tunings in a new work for Greek Byzantine chorus and strings. Robin is on the music faculty at St. Francis College, Rutgers University, and the Lucy Moses School; between them he teaches the history of Western music, world music, composition, and theory. He is also the Music Librarian at the Kaufman Center, home of the Lucy Moses School. He is a doctoral candidate in composition 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. He has worked for the S.E.M. Ensemble, G. Schirmer/AMP, the Morgan Library, and has sung in a variety of professional choral ensembles. He has done music copying work for several major publishers and created the music examples for two scholarly books. |
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