The New York Times:

To this taste the most striking effort of the evening was Robert Carl's Always Rising, which was inspired by an experience Mr. Carl had of ascending in an airplane through clouds into sunlight. The music was dense, passionate, and knotty.... (John Rockwell) 

Some of this weekend’s offerings [for the New York City Opera’s VOX Showcase] look enticing. “Harmony”, by the dynamic Hartford-based composer Robert Carl, with a libretto by Russell Banks, imagines romantic intrigue between Charles Ives and his wife, Harmony, with her disapproving godfather, Mark Twain, causing no end of trouble. (Anthony Tommasini) 

Time Out New York:

New World Records has been on a measured but steady winning streak lately, and once again, expectations are met and even raised by this new collection of works by Robert Carl. It’s curious that this composer has not garnered more popular attention. Although he has been ensconced in academia most his life, his writing is free of the predictable trappings and dogma, conveying an intelligence that doesn’t need to bury itself in theory in order to express something serious and compelling.
    Music for Strings collects three of Carl’s chamber works, each performed by the players for whom it was written. The composer acknowledges that with these pieces, he sought to create an open space for rumination, and an existential climate pervades the disc. By mining established string techniques—notably glissandi—rather than more experimental sounds, Carl couches these musics in the familiar, organic, and lovely, even when the music scratches and bites.
    …the real standout on the disc is Open for string trio. Carl fashions this piece as something of musical mandala. Following his line around and around as it develops. We don’t reach a grand, sweeping philosophical conclusion; but rather sense a common bond formed by our need to ask the big questions. (Molly Sheridan)

The Boston Globe:

Carl's own From Him to Me often felt like a weighty, confidently ordered passacaglia, making its way, without a seam, from the tonally angular to the lushly chromatic. Another solo piano piece, The Big Room, trafficked in spikiness and split-screen simultaneities. And finally, how would you set to music the utterances of Blaise Pascal? Carl's approach in Pensées Nocturnes could be songful, yet still bear the cadences of orderly prose, and---in atmosphere cool and deep and calm--occasionally bring to mind Erik Satie's Socrate. Robert Carl would seem to have a hard time writing dull music. There wasn't any in this concert. (Richard Buell)

Robert Carl ...provided a description of his compositional procedure for his short wind quintet A Fork in the Road, method of exponentially expanding intervals...that--guess what?--just happened to produce tonal harmonies. Carl may have maneuvered himself into this stringent quasi tonal language, but it suits this quintet, a captivating world-weary elegy. (Anthony Tommasini)

The most ambitious of the pieces was Robert Carl's Trancendance, a theater piece which has the singer---with authentic period texts---enacting an American Shaker's crisis of conflicting pulls of the flesh and spirit, and the music darts between the rapt, homely manner of Shaker music and the virtuosic free-for-all that seems to come bubbling up from the steaming tureen of the unconscious. It wasn't always clear what was going on, so quick were the changes in dramatic perspective, but that there was something its intensity left no doubt of, and Karol Bennett threw herself into the split-second twists and turns of the solo part with admirable brio and precision.
(Richard Buell)

In Robert Carl's polished, epigrammatic Magic Act, Marimolin...reminded you of the kind of lively couple that can silently anticipate or finish each other's thoughts. Although it abounded in fine, specific effects of phrasing with color, the piece didn't sound arbitrary or scattered. Particularly fine was the the evanescent, ghostly, morendo conclusion--like a wisp of smoke rendered in sound. (Richard Buell)

The unarguably choice stuff was...Robert Carl's Roundabout for doublebass and tape...say that here were combined the best features of modern gallery art and the "new music"--quick, rhythmic, technologically self-aware, pop-culturish, and delighting in sharp, bright colors. (Richard Buell)

As a musical environment, Carl's Open (1998) seemed to take in several climates and terrains, some of them like electronic glisses from the lab of Dr. Frankenstein, some of them deliberately tentative sallies into straight-arrow variations writing. Surely it takes a practiced hand to write music thatís unashamedly about music? Thatís what Carl is, and the Adaskin String Trio evidently felt so too. (Richard Buell)

"Welcome to our wake", said composer Robert Carl. Addressing the audience assembled last night for the "going out of business" concert by Extension Works....tellingly, only one of the pieces, Carlís Excavating the Perfect Farewell, was written for this concert....
Carlís valedictory piece  explores potential elements of a work before arranging them in place as a melody endlessly unfolding over a primal harmony; the melody is at once a fulfillment and an embalming---one assumes at the end the cycle of life will resume. (Richard Dyer)
 

The New York Daily News:

The Distant Shore, written in Paris, illustrates the composer's homesickness for Vermont, and while its generalized moods really could depict countless other emotions as well, its sonority has a pleasingly individual flavor---especially when Carl shows his ability to get maximum power from a relatively small group of instruments.
  

New Music Box, American Music Center:

You can take a listener anywhere, you just have to be sure you’ve given him something to hold onto…Robert Carl’s Open does it for me… At the outset I have no idea where the path is leading, but throughout the three sections (played more or less straight through with only the briefest pauses) there seems to be a sonic banister under my left hand that assures I won’t get lost or left behind along the way. His writing fits my ear, even when it surprises me. And in spite of the work’s title and expansive glissandi that are especially pronounced in the opening section, there’s something big and emotional that wraps itself around and creates a shelter in which to listen. (Molly Sheridan)
 

The Chicago Tribune:

[Carl's] economy of gesture, his delicate coloristic sense, and his skill as a neo-Romantic mood painter have been impressive. Carl has interesting musical ideas to express, and a fresh, stimulating way of expressing them. He is a local composer of whom the downtown musical establishment should take notice. (John von Rhein)
 
 

The Boston Herald:

Robert Carl's From Him to Me, a six-minute homage to his teacher George Rochberg, is a big, brilliant, mercurial piano solo performed here with panache by Kathleen Supove. It proceeds from a short theme derived from Rochberg's Second Symphony that is varied with remarkable contrast and ingenuity for so short a piece. It ends touchingly with a lyrical and poignant coda.
 
 

Kyle Gann of the Village Voice:

There are many, many younger composers still working within basically classcial idioms...A few of the best will be mentioned here.

Robert Carl (b. 1954) was a student of Rochberg, among others, and inherited something of his lyrical and quotation-oriented sensibility. Yet Carl also did his dissertation on Carl Ruggles's Sun-Treader, and the great angular leaps of Ruggles's music pervade Carl's as well, if in less strident tones. Carl's music often plays with ghostlike anticipations and reminiscences: for example, one of his most characteristic essays, Time/Memory/Shadow (1988), is written for two trios, one of which comments ethereally on materials played by the other, all leading to a nostalgic quotation of a neoclassical march Carl wrote in his youth. Perhaps his germinal work, Spiral Dances (1984), likewise brings a waltz in F minor from the crashing jaws of atonality. In recent chamber works such as Pensées Nocturnes (1994), Carl has settled into a more serene, meditative medium, but still with a dissonant edge.
 
 

Fanfare:

Robert Carl’s uniquely effective music often seems to take on a visceral physicality. This seems to be part of his working method, or more broadly, his ethos….In this music, Carl lays bare his soul in an open and even brave way that is rarely hear these days. In doing so, he achieves a level of bold intensity that may not be for everybody, but those who share any degree of the composer’s emotional and spiritual mettle will be well rewarded. (Peter Burwasser)

In the programmatically titled Ritratto dei Giorni e delle Notti su Lago di Como... birdcall is employed, not in the stylized way of Couperin or Respighi, but with the unadorned power of the natural patterns of Messiaen so indelibly evoked in his own music. This delicate, involving piece also includes the use of taped church bells. This adroit combination of an essentially tonal harmonic framework, peppered with abstract gestures and contemporary technology, seems to be a hallmark of Carl...
Robert Carl is an intelligent and passionate composer who does not shy away from employing sophisticated language, but still manages to be highly communicative and accessible. (Peter Burwasser)

[On Roundabout CD]:  While the media employed in these pieces is more far-ranging than in other of Carl's works I've heard, the approach is similar---certainly referential, ...theatrical, conceptually multilayered. One of Carl's touchstones is the music of Charles Ives, in Ives's way of bringing experiences of the real world into the concert hall to create amalgams of musical and cultural meaning. While Carl uses different media, the idea obtains throughout his output, and that's what makes it interesting. One doesn't consider at first the idea of musical craft as traditional compositional technique, but when examined these pieces hold up well by those standards as well--this is probably most evident here in the transforming melodic line of Roundabout (but also in more traditionally scored pieces in some of  Carl's other recordings)...This is a compelling collection from a composer who clearly has a lot to say. (Robert Kirzinger)

The beautifully paced tensions of of Robert Carl's Time/Memory/Shadow are in large part from the music's inspiration, a dream the composer experienced as a film in which "conceptual subtitles", that is, instantaneous revelations of actions and dialog, appeared with what they reflected. Carl transposed the dream's strange weight to music by structuring the music as a trio (violin, cello, piano) and "ghost" trio (violin, viola, harp) engaging in what develops into turbulent, sturm und drang tensions, along with the injection of an eighteenth-century motive, perhaps the composes, earlier hinted at. It would be wrong to leave the impression of a clever exercise in polystylistics or worse, pastiche. The impressively made Time/Memory/Shadow simply works too evocatively well, particularly when the listener knows its curious story. (Mike Silverton)

The "Duke" and the "Mort" in the title of Robert Carl's piece [Duke Meets Mort] refer to two wonderful composers whose styles could hardly be more distinct. Although Duke Ellington penned his share of languorous ballads, it is, for this fan, his bright, propulsive anthems celebrating a joyous love of life that are his greatest legacies. Morton Feldman, on the other hand, could have made an hour's worth of music from one bar of Ellington, and that is the bold conceit of this intriguing new work. Carl's audacious challenge, to meld styles that seem to oppose, stasis versus propulsion, transcends the level of clever gimmickry to become a satisfying work of music in its own right. The bluesy harmonies of Ellington ooze along at a Feldman crawl, just as sweet molasses slowly melts under a blanket of summertime haze. (Peter Burwasser)

To my mind, the most successful music is the modest, evocative, serene pastoral imagery of Robert Carl's A Wide Open Field, which makes effective (and never overbearing) use of Jeffrey Krieger's device-laden cello. (Art Lange)
 
 

American Record Guide:

...his own music is eclectic but individual in a style I guess we could call Approachable High Modernism. He engages in such postmodern staples as pop music references..and "deconstruction" of classic music..., but without a whiff of irony. The references to earlier music aren't covering up a lack of invention; Carl really has something to say.

The Piano Sonata is impressive---a wild combination of Scriabineqsue devilry and Ruggles massiveness--but my favorite piece here is the portrait of Lake Como, where Carl rather audaciously accompanies his calm piano chords with a tape of bird-song and ringing church bells (perfectly timed). It's a wonderfully conceived ten-minute mood piece, and I would love to hear it live. 

[Carl] states in a note [to his New World release] that he has embraced the idea of “engaging in an ongoing dialogue with tradition” in order to “produce a more synthetic and personal language that has something to say to the repertoire that’s both respectful and challenging.” I think he does that, and I look forward to where that leads in his future work. (Gimbel)   
 

The New Music Connoisseur:

We dare anyone to give this disc the once-over and call it a hearing. After about our third, we were convinced that Robert Carl expresses the most complex musical thoughts on the piano as well as any living composer we know. One realizes that although the seven works recorded here were written over a period of nine years, there is this overwhelming impression of a singular, massive statement for solo piano composed in one long, but intensely inspired nocturnal session....Somehow, Robert Carl and his piano nave taken us through twilight and deepest night to endure many moods, from moments of true grandeur to total terror, a variety of expression, finely chiseled, well ordered, but always with periods that allow the senses to rest and refresh themselves. That's no small feat for 66 minutes.
(Barry L. Cohen)

Robert Carl's Towards the Crest is well-named, a nine-minute long solo for bass clarinet in the form of a "wave". It begins and ends with the soloist playing something like soft white noise suggesting, perhaps, surf in the distance. The piece builds to a climax cautiously, but, once reached, the soloist struggles as if fighting to ride that crest and survive at all costs. The music then slowly recedes in a near palindromic manner. A good showpiece for this instrument which in [John Bruce] Yeh's sure hands, is amazingly supple and wide-ranging.

Robert Carl's Piano Sonata No.2, ("The Big Room") (1999) is a formidable, risk-taking composition with much to offer. This is not quite so much a sonata as it is a subversive deconstruction of the sonata ethos, melding minimalist process ideas to formats that at least on the surface appear traditional (sonata-allegro in movement one, variations in the other two), but are handled in a decidedly non-prescriptive fashion. The work, while lengthy and repetitive, does not pall. (David Cleary)

[Open's] title might be misleading to some; it is not designed primarily as music for open strings---there is plenty of vibrato called for (plus some doublestopping where the strings are open). Carl had other rationales in mind and in his program notes suggested that we keep the mind "open".
    One might see "Open" as the infinitive, i.e. to explore the spaciousness of the musical line, or to open the eyes wide, or even to open the heart, for there is a meditative, spiritual feeling throughout. Or one might get a sense of agoraphobia, of too much openness, of impending dangers in the drawn out chromatic lines with their multiple tremoli and glissandi, and from the compositional structure in which the three movements lead into one another like wide avenues. This is not music by a bookworm, yet the extended melodic language, with its allusions to the late Beethoven quartets, reveals great musical erudition. All of these dualities are summed up neatly by program annotator Heather Schmidt in her description, "simultaneously calm and intense." Once again, Carl provides us with a work that asks more questions than it answers, and that has in our opinion always been a mjaor requisite of high art. (Barry L. Cohen)
 
 
The Wire (UK):

The distinctive Americana audible in Carl’s music is given an unusual perspective through his use of glissandi, deployed to disorient our sense of time and place. (Philip Clark)

Twentieth-Century Music:

Robert Carl's Open (1998) also possesses first-class structural virtues. The composition's three movements roughly exhibit a palindromic use of material, with its phoenix-from-the-ashes final melody being a logical outgrowth from the opening snippets, triadic passages, slow-moving glissandi, and dissonant fragments complement each other surprisingly well, never sounding haphazard. This is strong, ambitious stuff, nicely leavened with a touch of quirkiness. (David Cleary)

Our Heart and Home Is With Infinitude (1998) by Robert Carl expertly sets verse by various Romantic period poets with nary a stumble, whether employing English, German, French, or Italian texts. The work is thoroughly of our time in sound and technique, yet pays homage to the music of bygone days, effectively utilizing pattern-style piano accompaniments and ecstatically repeating the word "ergeben" in best Mahlerian Das Lied von der Erde fashion. (David Cleary)
 

Ear Magazine:

The piece which stands out, and is something of a revelation, is Robert Carl's Roundabout for contrabass and tape. Carl combines the instrumental part of the work, brilliantly played by Robert Black, with computer-generated sounds modelled on the contrabass's low E and on noises obtained from knocking on the instrument's body. The piece begins slowly and mysteriously, then builds to a dance-like frenzy as the contrabass plays rapid arabesques over insistent electronic pulsations. Dramatic and sensual, Roundabout definitely deserves a listen.
 

Musicworks [Toronto]:

Robert Carl described his ensemble tone poem Windriver as searching for the effect of "moonlight on water". The piece, my favorite of the program, was atmospheric and very abstract...The energy built, then quieted down before a true climax, and there were a number of exquisite moments, such as when a chord played on the piano was hocketed out through the ensemble.
 

Kansas City Star:

...the innovative "Encounter" melded independently produced visual and musical works into a satisfying piece with its own identity. Blending composer Robert Carl's  WindRiver with  visual artist Karen McCoy's Perceptual Overture , the piece's abstract projected video images served as an effectual visual counterpoint to the music's shimmering, ever-evolving themaitc teatment of the quicksilver atmospheric conditions common in the lush landscapes of the Mediterranean region. (Robert Eisele)
 

The Hartford Courant:

New Music ...still signifies some essential things: freedom from organizational orthodoxy, a wide-open understanding of what music is and can be, and a steady belief in the cohabitation, if no longer the actual marriage, of technology and art.All these things are present in Carl's work, plus a few other things as well, such as a broader cultural frame of reference and a playful, humanizing spirit.Example: in his Haiku of Buson, Carl juxtaposed gentle, evocative texts (spoken by himself, from memory), with electronic sounds that sometimes reinforced, and sometimes aggressively contrasted with the words. He also furnished...some nice sounds on the shakuhachi, the Japanese bamboo flute. (Steve Metcalf)
 

The Hartford Advocate:

The concert featuring Carl's work spanned 25 years of the composerís careerÖhis work is more inviting than much experimental music because the compositions are rooted in narrativeÖWhere much electronic music may seem clinical and cold, Carl managed to give his pieces a warmth by infusing them with personal meaningÖAll four of Carl's pieces explored the ways in which sound and memory can serve as a stimulus for epiphanies. (John Adamian)
 

Le Monde (Paris):

Ebb and Flow du compositeur américain Robert Carl vaut davantage par la générosité de l'inspiration et une certain qualité de l'écriture instrumentale que par une originalité dont elle ne semble pas se préeoccuper... (Gerard Condé)
 

Thüringer Landeszeitung [Weimar, Germany]:

Coloring Sound's Scent  by Robert Carl [USA], a professed Romantic, draws all our attention through its mixture of modern sound combinations and stringently composed music. (Hans-Jürgen Thiers)
 

The Bridgeport [CT] Post:

At first, Carl's description of [The Star's Harmony/The Night's Pleasure for orchestra] had me expecting some wild, swirling, off-key seat banger. What a pleasant surprise, then, to hear a delicate, almost old-fashioned work, full of ticks and tocks, bells and bongs, with just enough discordance to convey the scary nighttime feelings which inspired it.
One word sure to get an artist's back up is "pretty". But in my lexicon, the word is still a compliment. When I think back on Carl's composition and the fine treatment it get from the Greater Bridgeport Symphony under Gustav Meier, "pretty" is a description that I can't shake. Certainly, it's a term that can't be applied to very many contemporary compositions.
In the end, Carl's message of time passing in the dark, silent void of the night as one gradually emerges from a state of terror, was beautifully told.
 

The Berkshire [MA] Eagle:

Robert Carl's Transcendental Cakewalk, Coughlin told the audience, comes from an opera Carl is writing about Charles Ives. As if in Ives, the ragtime cakewalk tune ran into all sorts of complications before finding its way back to naivete. Clever and catchy: people were still humming the tune during intermission. (Andrew Pincus)
 

Toledo [Ohio] Blade:

The other standout performance was John Sampen and Marilyn Shrude's reading of Robert Carl's 1995 work Die Berliner Hornisse (The Berlin Hornet). Sampen and Srude buzzed, swung, and stung through a most convincing performance.