Hailed by the press as having "creative powers working on a higher plane" and writing "exuberant and rhythmically vital music marked by energy and a wonderful sense of color," Composer Robert Paterson's "richly colorful, wildly eclectic and intensely rhythmic" music is increasingly in demand by musicians and audiences alike. Influenced by the past and present as well as visual art, nature, and machines, Paterson's recent compositions are inspired by everything from crashing waves and Dali's melting clocks to the life of New York Mets Baseball catcher Mike Piazza and animated cartoons.
Recent performances include the Louisville Orchestra world premiere of Electric Lines, conducted by Barry Jekowsky. This work was previously selected for the Minnesota Orchestra Readings and American Composers Orchestra Whitaker New Music Readings, and which won the Louisville Orchestra Composition Contest. Other recent performances include Embracing the Wind by the Aureole Trio, New York Harp Trio and Trio St. Germain, Wind Quintet by the Philharmonia Quintet (Cracow), The Essence of Gravity, commissioned for the San Francisco-based Volti choir, The Thin Ice of Your Fragile Mind by the Society for New Music and the world premiere of Crimson Earth with the University of Connecticut Wind Ensemble conducted by Jeffrey Renshaw. Quintet of the Americas recently premiered his Wind Quintet through an American Composers Forum Jerome Composers Commissioning Program grant. Recent performances also include those by The New York New Music Ensemble, Da Capo Chamber Players, California EAR Unit, Ensemble Aleph (Paris), the Kairos String Quartet, the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra, as well as numerous festivals world-wide. Recent performances in 2007-08 also include the European premiere and seventeen performances of Dancing Games from Symphony in Three Movements by the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire, Jonathan Schiffman, conducting.
Paterson has received numerous prizes, awards and honors, including fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Aspen Music Festival and the Atlantic Center for the Arts and grants from Meet The Composer, the American Music Center and the American Composers Forum. He is a two-time winner of the ASCAP Young Composers Award, as well as winning a Copland Award and the Society for New Music's Brian M. Israel Prize. Paterson appears on recordings for Mode Records, Bridge Records, Centaur Records, Capstone, MediaLogic (Poland) and Riax.
Born in 1970, Paterson was raised in Buffalo, the son of a sculptor and a painter. Although his first love was percussion, he soon discovered a passion for composition, writing his first piece at age thirteen. Paterson is active as a professional percussionist and pioneered the development of a six-mallet marimba technique, presenting the world's first all six-mallet marimba recital at the Eastman School of Music in 1993. According to a recent dissertation, Paterson has written for and commission more works utilizing six-mallet technique than anyone in the world. Paterson has received degrees from Eastman (BM), Indiana University (MM), and Cornell University (DMA), and his composition teachers include Samuel Adler, Frederick Fox, Aaron Jay Kernis, Christopher Rouse, Joseph Schwantner, Roberto Sierra, and Steven Stucky. He resides in New York City with his wife, Victoria, a violinist with whom he formed the American Modern Ensemble, and their two-year-old son Dylan.
