Robinson McClellan (b.1976) is a composer, scholar, and concert presenter 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 is currently a doctoral candidate 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 Symphony and the Pharos Music Project 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. Several of his sacred choral pieces appear in Music by Heart, a new Episcopal hymnal.
Robin’s musical interests range from sacred music and liturgical drama (he has written a number of sacred choral pieces, and created music for a reconstructed 12th-century Latin miracle play) to music traditions from around the world. He has written music incorporating everything from Pakistani qawwali and medieval French polyphony to Greek Byzantine tuning systems. 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 has spent the past several years studying pibroch, the rarely heard baroque-era musical form from Gaelic Scotland. His approach has ranged from ‘mishearing’ to ‘inspired pilfering’ to ‘intense engagement’: his compositions often incorporate musical ideas borrowed from pibroch, and his in-depth research into its 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 this work he organizes recitals pairing pibroch with classical works inspired by it as a way to promote this music as a creative resource for contemporary composers. He has played the Highland bagpipe since 2004.
Robin’s other main enterprise is his work as founder and director of El Salto, a unique forum for contemporary music heard in a context of broad-minded religious/humanist inquiry. His article on the project appeared in Liturgy magazine in 2008.
He previously studied music at Vassar College, and his teachers have been Ingram Marshall, Annea Lockwood, Richard Wilson, Ezra Laderman, Martin Bresnick, and Aaron Jay Kernis.
He lives in New York City, where 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 has sung in a variety of professional choral ensembles.
