Robinson McClellan (b.1976) is a composer, scholar, and teacher living in New York City. His choral, orchestral, band, and chamber 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 (UK), the Monteverdi Choir Festival (Hungary), the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall (NY), and the Vatican. He earned his doctorate in composition at the Yale School of Music and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.
Commissions have come from the Albany Symphony, baritone Nektarios Antoniou, baroque trio Flying Forms, the Museum of Biblical Art (NYC), mezzo-soprano Sylvia Aiko Rider, 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 and Knox-Galesburg Symphonies, Moira Smiley and VOCO, and the Lirico Chamber singers have also played his music. He has received composition awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, ASCAP, and Vassar College. He has been interviewed as a composer for Chronogram and Chamber Music magazines, and recordings of his music have appeared in Palimpsest, an arts magazine.
Robin’s musical interests range widely. Drawing on his lifelong fascination with religion, he has written varied kinds of sacred music, including choral church anthems, concert works on sacred subjects, congregational worship songs (some of which are published in Music by Heart, a new Episcopal hymnal), and liturgical drama (including a full-length Passion setting for Palm Sunday and music for a reconstructed 12th-century Latin miracle play).
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). In May 2008 he was appointed composer in residence for ActorCor, a new NYC-based choir dedicated to bridging religious divides; as part of this project he will oversee a new composing competition for choral works inspired by Islam.
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 (visit www.el-salto.org). His article on the project appeared in Liturgy magazine in 2008.
In his compositions Robin draws freely from music traditions from around the world. He has studied, arranged and borrowed from Pakistani qawwali, medieval French polyphony, Greek Byzantine tuning systems, Irish traditional music, and many others. In general, his work follows a musical ethos nicely summed up by Michael Tenzer:
"It is music’s nature to fuse, recombine, and proliferate like genes…[the activities of composers today] may range from inspired pilfering based on brief acquaintance to careful planning supported by years of immersion and reflection. Neither way guarantees better music: mishearing can be as creatively productive as intensive engagement, and it is unwise to argue for one or the other approach…The key realization is that the proliferation proceeds apace with tremendous energy and it requires sympathetic consideration not just to try to understand it, but to participate” (from Analytical Studies in World Music, 2006).
Robin’s musical approach assumes that there are no meaningful barriers or artistic hierarchies between different traditions; he views all music as being equally nuanced and richly expressive (whether or not in immediately evident ways). He not only transfers ideas from folk traditions into classical music, but enjoys the reverse, and the many shades in between. He has written music for Greek choir in the Byzantine notation they themselves use, and pibroch for the Highland bagpipe in its unique rhythmic notation—in each case borrowing ideas from the classical tradition to inform music that belongs primarily to another tradition.
He has spent the past several years studying, and composing in response to, pibroch—a rarely heard baroque-era type of bagpipe music from Gaelic Scotland. His approach to this rich but rarely-heard tradition ranges from ‘pilfering’ to ‘intense engagement’ (as Tenzer says): his compositions often incorporate musical ideas borrowed from pibroch in ways that incorporate surface detail or deeper structures, or both. His in-depth research into pibroch’s unique rhythmic idiom has gained acceptance within the piping community and will be published in 2009 by Ashgate in an anthology of Highland bagpipe-related scholarship.
As an extension of his work with pibroch, Robin organizes recitals that pair pibroch with classical pieces that have been inspired by it. He hopes in this way to promote pibroch as a creative resource for contemporary composers. He has played the Highland bagpipe since 2004.
Robin previously studied music at Vassar College. His composition teachers have been Ingram Marshall, Annea Lockwood, Richard Wilson, Ezra Laderman, Martin Bresnick, and Aaron Jay Kernis.
He has worked for the S.E.M. Ensemble, G. Schirmer/AMP, the Kaufman Center, and the Morgan Library, and as a freelance choral singer and music copyist. He currently teaches at Rutgers University, St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights, and the Lucy Moses School at NYC's Kaufman Center. He has sung in a variety of professional choral ensembles.
For audio samples and other information, please visit www.robinsonmcclellan.com.