Robinson McClellan 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, a hymnal, and Feniarco's Choraliter, an Italian choral anthology.
He earned his doctorate in composition (DMA) at the Yale School of Music and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, and studied music at Vassar College. His teachers have been Ingram Marshall, Ezra Laderman, Annea Lockwood, Richard Wilson, Martin Bresnick, and Aaron Jay Kernis.
As a composer and scholar Robin has spent the past nine years immersed in piobaireachd ('peeb-rock';), a rarely heard bagpiping tradition rooted in 17th-century Gaelic Scotland. His compositions sometimes 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 is a beginner Highland bagpipe player.
Robin is founder and director of El Salto, a unique forum for contemporary music heard in a context of broad-minded religious/humanist inquiry, 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 is directing the composition program at the new SMS High School, and spearheading ComposerCraft, a composition intensive for young composers at the Kaufman Music Center. He has taught composition at Hunter College and is on the music faculty at Rutgers University, Wagner College, Manhattan College, and the Lucy Moses and Special Music Schools; between them he teaches composition, music theory, and music history to K-12 students, college students, and adults. More about teaching...
Robin has sung in a variety of professional choral ensembles. He does consulting work for Noteflight, an online music notation program, and he helped create the Morgan Library's Music Manuscripts Online. He has been Music Librarian at the Kaufman Music Center, Managing Director for the S.E.M. Ensemble, and on the production team at G. Schirmer/AMP. He is also a compulsive amateur photographer and has had photos published twice in magazines.
More about him: www.
http://robinsonmcclellan.com
