Biography
GRAMMY®-winning composer Robert Livingston Aldridge (1954,
Richmond,VA) has written over sixty works for orchestra, opera, music-theater,
voice, dance, string quartet, solo and chamber ensembles. His music has been
performed throughout the United States, Europe and Japan and Australia. He has
received numerous fellowships and awards for his music from the National Academy of
Recording Arts and Sciences, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts
and Letters, National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts,
the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Massachusetts Artist's Foundation, the
Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund, Meet the Composer, The American Symphony
Orchestra League, the New Jersey Council on the Arts and the Geraldine R. Dodge
Foundation. His opera, Elmer Gantry, based on the novel by Sinclair Lewis, with a
libretto by Herschel Garfein, was given its fully-staged world premiere by Nashville
Opera in November, 2007, and received very positive reviews in The New York Times
("Behold! An Operatic Miracle"), The Wall St. Journal and Opera News. Excerpts from
Elmer Gantry were performed by New York City Opera on their 2007 VOX Festival. An
Orchestral Suite from Elmer Gantry was commissioned by the New Jersey Symphony
Orchestra and premiered on their opening season gala in September, 2011, an event
which received international coverage. The Naxos CD of Elmer Gantry was released in
July, 2011, and received two GRAMMY® Awards in 2012: for Best Contemporary
Classical Composition, and for Best Engineered Classical Recording. Opera News
ranked the Naxos recording of Elmer Gantry #1 in the Best Opera Recordings of the
Year, 2011. In 2014, his oratorio, PARABLES, will be released on DVD by Naxos International.
He was recently commissioned by the Beijing Music Festival to compose a work for the Shanghai String Quartet, which was premiered at that festival in the fall of 2013. He was commissioned by Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra to compose a clarinet concerto for David Singer, which was premiered in April and May, 2005 and was recently released on compact disc by Naxos Recordings in 2010 (deemed 'A brilliant new concerto' by Gramophone). The world premiere of his fifty-minute symphonic oratorio, PARABLES (also written with librettist Herschel Garfein), a work commissioned by the Topeka Symphony took place in May, 2010. Other recent highlights include continuing performances of ELMER GANTRY in both regional professional and college/conservatory productions, in Milwaukee, Houston and Minneapolis and Tulsa. His music has recently been conducted by Keith Lockhart , Jeffrey Kahane, and performed by Gidon Kremer, Martha Argerich and the Shanghai String Quartet. Orchestral and operatic performances of his commissioned work include the Nashville Symphony, The New Jersey Symphony, The Milwaukee Symphony, The Louisiana Philharmonic, Santa Rosa Symphony and the Brevard Music Center Orchestra.
He has been Composer-in-Residence at the Brevard Music Festival since 2006. He was an American Orchestral League/Music Alive Composer in Residence and has been a Composer-in-Residence at the American Dance Festival, the University of Minnesota and Colorado University. He has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony on five occasions since 1987. In 1989, he was chosen to represent the New York Foundation for the Arts in a solo concert of his music at Lincoln Center. He was a founder of the Composers in Red Sneakers, a composer consortium which achieved international recognition in 1980's. In 1991 he received a National Endowment Recording Grant for a compact-disc of his chamber music for saxophone. His compositions are exclusively published by Edition Peters (CF Peters Corporation).
Robert Livingston Aldridge received a Doctorate in Composition from the Yale School of Music, a Master's Degree in Composition from the New England Conservatory of Music, and a Bachelor's Degree in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He was Professor of Composition at Montclair State University 2000-2012, Director of the Cali School, 2006-2009 and Chair of the Music Department, 2005-2011. Currently he is Professor and Director of Music at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.
