Robert Carl  (b.1954) received his musical training at Yale, Penn, and the University of Chicago. He also studied in Paris during 1980-1 as a Lurcy Fellow at the Conservatoire Nationale Supérieure and the Sorbonne. His teachers include Iannis Xenakis, Betsy Jolas, Ralph Shapey, George Rochberg, Jonathan Kramer, George Crumb, Richard Wernick, and Robert Morris. Mr. Carl has received prizes and fellowships from such organizations as the National Endowment for the Arts, Chamber Music America, American Chamber Symphony, NACUSA, and Tanglewood. He is the recipient of a 2005 Chamber Music America commission for a string quintet premiered by the Miami String Quartet and Robert Black, contrabass. An excerpt from his opera-in-progress Harmony (libretto by Russell Banks) was premiered in May 2006 at the New York City Opera’s VOX showcase series. A CD on New World Records of his string chamber works was released the same spring to critical acclaim. In 1998 he received the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as a Copland Award, which resulted in an artistic residency in the Copland home in fall 1999. He has held other composer residencies abroad at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France in 1984 and 1993, at the Bogliasco Foundation near Genoa, Italy, in Spring 2000 and 2007, and at the Rockefeller International Study Center in Bellagio, Italy, in 1987.  US residencies include stays at Yaddo (3), the Djerassi and Ucross Foundations, and at the MacDowell (3) and Millay (2) Colonies. Mr. Carl has received extensive performances throughout the US and Europe, at such venues as Carnegie Recital Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Joe's Pub, IRCAM, Orchestra Hall Chicago, Musical Spring in St. Petersburg [Russia], the Royal Academy of Music, London, and New Music America 1982 and 1985. His works are published by American Composers' Edition (648 Broadway, Suite 803; NY, NY 10012), Boosey and Hawkes, Roncorp, and Apoll-Edition (Vienna). A CD of Mr. Carl's complete piano music has been released on Centaur Records, and a selection of electronic, experimental and theatrical works on Innova; other CD recordings include on Time/Memory/Shadow for sextet on Neuma, Towards the Crest for solo bass clarinet on Koch International, A Wide Open Field for electronic cello and orchestra on Vienna Modern Masters, Duke Meets Mort on Lotus Records and Magic Act for violin and marimba on The Aerial. In 1988 his Roundabout for contrabass and computer-generated tape was released on an Opus One recording celebrating the 50th anniversary of the American Composers' Alliance. Mr. Carl has written works for soloists Evelyn Glennie, percussion; Robert Black, contrabass; Kathleen Supové, piano; and John Bruce Yeh, clarinet, among others. Currently he is chair of the composition department at the Hartt School, University of Hartford. He has been a director of the Extension Works new music ensemble in Boston, and writes extensively on new music for Fanfare magazine. 

    As a writer on new music, he has been commissioned to write a book on Terry Riley's In C by Oxford University Press. In Spring/Summer 2007, he will travel to Japan to interview mid-career composers there for a book on the "post-Takemitsu generation", supported by a grant from the Asian Cultural Council.

Artistic Statement:

My work has always been concerned with time. At first this meant inventing musical techniques and forms which allowed for a peculiar flow of musical events, dynamic yet not always straightforward. More recently, my "pre-musical" background as a historian has reasserted itself, bringing more and more artifacts of my earlier life, earlier music, and other eras into my music, in a play of memory and shadow.
Time is in turn a substance both malleable and “crystallizable”. By shaping form in a manner similar to making a sculpture, I have found that I am able to create an ever-broader sense of space in my pieces, even when they are information-rich. As a result I hope that by creating a sense of amplitude into which the listener can enter, and trying to synthesize diverse historical elements, I can create something of a model for how s/he can cope with our increasingly fragmented, intense, and vertiginous experience of life today, and find a sense of energizing  peace. ----RC

For an interview with Robert Carl, link to:
http://www.bruceduffie.com/carl.html