Music Alive Composer-in-Residence
Robert Paterson, VYO Music Alive Composer-in Residence
The Vermont Youth Orchestra Association is pleased to welcome Music Alive composer Robert Paterson as he returns for his third and final year of residency with the VYO.
The Music Alive Composer-in-Residence program was funded by a $65,000 grant awarded to the VYOA by Meet The Composer and the League of American Orchestras. This program provides young musicians with an opportunity to work with a skilled, living composer, an experience that can extend beyond the residency into our students’ future musical endeavors. The VYO was only the second youth orchestra in the country to receive this three-year award in 2009.
As the Composer-in-Residence, Mr. Paterson has spent three weeks a year in Vermont, working directly with VYO musicians, beginning in 2009 and continuing through the spring of 2012. Rob’s residency activities have been busy ! He began working with the students during the Reveille! Music Festival in 2009. Since then, he has consistently returned as a faculty member, teaching two different music appreciation classes to VYO and VYP members. He has participated in VYO rehearsals and percussion sectionals on a regular basis. Rob has taught at and lectured in numerous area schools, including the Integrated Arts Academy in Burlington, the University of Vermont, Winooski and Burlington High Schools and Harwood Union High School, to name a few. He has also collaborated on a continual basis with the Vermont MIDI Project, mentoring young composers both in person and online. In January 2010, the VYO performed his, Enlightened CityLast Spring, the VYOA Choruses debuted his Did You Hear? a work written by he and librettist David Cote.
Rob’s final year of residency culminates in in May, when the VYO and the VYO Choruses will present the World Premiere of A New Eaarth, a work written specifically for them. In writing this piece, Paterson drew his inspiration from the book Eaarth by author and environmentalist Bill McKibben. Mr. McKibben will join the orchestra and choruses as the narrator for the presentation of the work.
Tickets are available for this performance by visiting www.flynntix.org or calling 802-86-Flynn
Paterson is no stranger to Vermont. As a graduate of the Eastman School of Music, he relocated to Burlington with wife Victoria, a violinist and former Middlebury resident, in the mid-1990′s. He immersed himself in the active music scene, performing with the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, the University of Vermont Orchestra and the Vermont Composers Consortium. He also performed for Lyric Theatre productions at the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts and collaborated on various projects with local musicians. He and his wife are founding members of The American Modern Ensemble, a New York-based ensemble dedicated to premiering, performing, recording and commissioning the widest possible repertoire written by American composers. AME showcases American music, and especially works written by living composers and is dedicated to education and outreach programs that expose communities to American music.
Paterson’s work as a composer ranges from orchestral pieces and opera to choral music and music scored for dance. The l’Orchestre National de la Loire, in France, the Philharmonia Quintet of Poland, the Louisville Orchestra, baritone-bass David Neal and the Society for New Music, and the American Modern Ensemble have all presented Paterson’s compositions during recent performances
Rob’s recording of The Book of Goddesses, a new work for the MAYA trio and choreographed dancers, funded in part by NYSCA was released on the AMR label in December 2011.Paterson holds degrees from the Eastman School of Music (BM), Indiana University (MM) and Cornell University (DMA). Currently, he resides in New York with his family.
Robert Paterson’s Music Alive residency is a program of the American Symphony Orchestra League & Meet The Composer. Funding for Music Alive is provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, and the ASCAP Foundation Joseph & Rosalie Meyer Fund.
