Robert Een

Last updated

Robert Een (born 1952) is an American composer, cellist, and vocalist.

Contents

Career

Known for his use of extended vocal and cello techniques, Een has recorded eight albums of his compositions and scored several films. He received Bessie Awards for music composition in 1998 and for sustained achievement in 2000. He won an Obie Award in 2004 for his score to Dan Hurlin's puppet theatre work Hiroshima Maiden. His music for dance and theater can be heard in the repertories of Liz Lerman, David Dorfman, Jennifer Muller, Brian Selznick, and Yin Mei, among others. He teaches voice and composition in UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance.

Performance

Robert Een [was] a longtime member of my Vocal Ensemble and [is] an extraordinary singer and musician in his own right. I had had the pleasure of singing with him for many years but never in the context of a duet [until Facing North]. From the time I first met him in 1977, I was moved by the bell-like clarity of his musical understanding and the beauty and honesty of his singing and playing.

Meredith Monk [1]

Een's band, Big Joe, includes the film composer Carter Burwell, and his long association with Meredith Monk, including his performance in the 1991 premier of Monk's Atlas , [2] culminated in the creation of their hour-long music/theater duet, Facing North (1992). He also performed with Julius Eastman in Monk's ensemble and studied composition with him. He has performed his music throughout the world, including Buddhist caves in India, a theater above the arctic circle in Norway, a Shinto shrine in Japan, as well as Lincoln Center and the Knitting Factory in New York City. He performed his opera The Escape Artist at the 2008 World Festival of Sacred Music in Los Angeles with the International Mystical All-Star Band.

Discography

With Meredith Monk

Soundtracks

Sources

  1. Jowitt, Deborah; ed. (1997). Meredith Monk , p.167. JHU Press. ISBN   9780801855405.
  2. Pendle, Karin; ed. (1997). American Women Composers , p.62. Psychology Press. ISBN   9789057021459.
  3. 1 2 3 Lieberman, Julie Lyonn (2004). Alternative Strings: The New Curriculum , p.109. Hal Leonard. ISBN   9781574670899.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louis Andriessen</span> Dutch composer and pianist (1939–2021)

Louis Joseph Andriessen was a Dutch composer, pianist and academic teacher. Considered the most influential Dutch composer of his generation, he was a central proponent of The Hague school of composition. Although his music was initially dominated by neoclassicism and serialism, his style gradually shifted to a synthesis of American minimalism, big band jazz and the expressionism of Igor Stravinsky.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philip Glass</span> American composer (born 1937)

Philip Glass is an American composer and pianist. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century. Glass's work has been associated with minimalism, being built up from repetitive phrases and shifting layers. Glass describes himself as a composer of "music with repetitive structures", which he has helped to evolve stylistically.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Meredith Monk</span> American composer, director, filmmaker, and choreographer

Meredith Jane Monk is an American composer, performer, director, vocalist, filmmaker, and choreographer. From the 1960s onwards, Monk has created multi-disciplinary works which combine music, theatre, and dance, recording extensively for ECM Records. In 1991, Monk composed Atlas, an opera, commissioned and produced by the Houston Opera and the American Music Theater Festival. Her music has been used in films by the Coen Brothers and Jean-Luc Godard. Trip hop musician DJ Shadow sampled Monk's "Dolmen Music" on the song "Midnight in a Perfect World". In 2015, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts by Barack Obama.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roscoe Mitchell</span> American composer, jazz musician, and educator

Roscoe Mitchell is an American composer, jazz instrumentalist, and educator, known for being "a technically superb – if idiosyncratic – saxophonist". The Penguin Guide to Jazz described him as "one of the key figures" in avant-garde jazz; All About Jazz stated in 2004 that he had been "at the forefront of modern music" for more than 35 years. Critic Jon Pareles in The New York Times has mentioned that Mitchell "qualifies as an iconoclast". In addition to his own work as a bandleader, Mitchell is known for cofounding the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ECM Records</span> German independent record label

ECM is an independent record label founded by Karl Egger, Manfred Eicher and Manfred Scheffner in Munich in 1969. While ECM is best known for jazz music, the label has released a variety of recordings, and ECM's artists often refuse to acknowledge boundaries between genres. ECM's motto is "the most beautiful sound next to silence", taken from a 1971 review of ECM releases in Coda, a Canadian jazz magazine.

Vanessa Lann is an American-Dutch composer living in the Netherlands.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Mantler</span> Austrian jazz trumpeter and composer

Michael Mantler is an Austrian avant-garde jazz trumpeter and composer of contemporary music.

Starkland is an independent record label based in Boulder, Colorado that specializes in alternative classical music. It was founded in 1991 by Thomas Steenland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eric Salzman</span> American classical composer

Eric Salzman was an American composer, scholar, author, impresario, music critic, and record producer. He is best known for his contributions to 'New Music Theater,' a concept he advanced through both his compositions and writings. He established it as an independent art form, distinct from grand opera and popular musicals, both aesthetically and economically. He co-founded the American Music Theater Festival and was, at the time of his death in 2017, Composer-in-Residence at the Center for Contemporary Opera.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jay Cloidt</span>

Jay Cloidt is an American composer, performer, sound designer, and audio engineer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pamela Z</span> American singer

Pamela Z is an American composer, performer, and media artist best known for her solo works for voice with electronic processing. In performance, she combines various vocal sounds including operatic bel canto, experimental extended techniques and spoken word, with samples and sounds generated by manipulating found objects. Z's musical aesthetic is one of sonic accretion, and she typically processes her voice in real time through the software program Max on a MacBook Pro as a means of layering, looping, and altering her live vocal sound. Her performance work often includes video projections and special controllers with sensors that allow her to use physical gestures to manipulate the sound and projected media.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tim Brady</span> Canadian composer, musician and producer

Timothy Wesley John Brady is a Canadian composer, electric guitarist, improvising musician, concert producer, record producer and cultural activist. Working in the field of contemporary classical music, experimental music, and musique actuelle, his compositions utilize a variety of styles from serialism to minimalism and often incorporate modern instruments such as electric guitars and other electroacoustic instruments. His music is marked by a synthesis of musical languages, having developed an ability to use elements of many musical styles while retaining a strong sense of personal expression. Some of his early recognized works are the 1982 orchestral pieces Variants and Visions, his Chamber Concerto (1985), the chamber trio ...in the Wake..., and his song cycle Revolutionary Songs (1994).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Theo Bleckmann</span> German singer and composer

Theodor Raoul Bleckmann is a German singer and composer.

Janis Brenner is an American dancer, choreographer, singer and artistic director of Janis Brenner & Dancers in New York City.

Cristian Amigo is an American composer, improviser, guitarist, sound designer, and ethnomusicologist. His compositional and performing output includes blues and soul, music for the theater, chamber and orchestral music, opera, avant-jazz and rock music, and art/pop song. He has also recorded solo albums on the innova, Deep Ecology and BA labels. Amigo earned a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from UCLA where he focused on the music of Chile, Peru, and Argentina, as well as anthropological theory, critical studies, and intercultural aesthetics. While in graduate school, he was second guitarist to the Peruvian Afro-Criollo guitarist Carlos Hayre, with whom he played in concerts and festivals including the World Festival of Sacred Music. He is currently composer-in-residence at INTAR Theater in New York City and Music/Design/Production Faculty @ CalArts School of Theater Department of Experience Design and Production in Valencia, California.

Robert Livingstone Aldridge is an American composer, professor, and current Head of Composition professor, and former Director of Music at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. He has written over eighty works for orchestra, opera, musical theater, dance, and various chamber ensembles that have been performed in the United States, Europe, and Japan. He is widely known for his opera Elmer Gantry, based on Sinclair Lewis's 1927 novel of the same name. which was completed in 2007 and won Best Engineered Album (Classical) and Best Contemporary Classical Composition in the 54th Annual Grammy Awards.

<i>Dolmen Music</i> 1981 studio album by Meredith Monk

Dolmen Music is a 1981 studio album by American composer and vocalist Meredith Monk recorded over two sessions in March 1980 and January 1981 and released on the ECM New Series—her first of twelve releases for the label.

<i>Do You Be</i> 1987 studio album by Meredith Monk

Do You Be is the sixth album by Meredith Monk, recorded over two sessions in June 1986 and January 1987 and released on the ECM New Series later in 1987.

Atlas is an opera in three acts composed by Meredith Monk who also wrote the libretto and choreographed the dances. It is scored for 18 voices and a small chamber orchestra which includes a shawm and a glass harmonica. The story is very loosely based on the life and writings of the explorer Alexandra David-Néel, where "travel is a metaphor for spiritual quest and commitment to inner vision." The story is told primarily through wordless vocal sounds with brief interjections of spoken text in Mandarin Chinese and English.

Wayne Hankin is an American musician, conductor and composer. He is known for his performance in early music, theater, and creation of musical compositions for unusual instruments. He also developed a speech-producing method for throat cancer patients.