Biography
Robert Livingston Aldridge (born: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, Japan
and Australia. He has received numerous fellowships and awards for his music from
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 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
unanimous praise from 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. 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 released on compact
disc by Naxos International in 2010. His tone poem, LEDA AND THE SWAN, a commission
from the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, The Nashville Symphony Orchestra, and the
Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, was premiered in January, 2003 at the New Jersey
Performing Center for the Arts.
His forty-five minute symphonic oratorio, PARABLES (written with librettist Herschel Garfein) was commissioned and premiered by the Topeka Symphony for their 20010 season finale. Other 2010 season highlights include both professional and university performances of ELMER GANTRY in Milwaukee, Houston and Minnesota. A CD recording of ELMER GANTRY (Florentine Opera/Milwaukee Symphony) will be released by Naxos International in 2011. The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra has commissioned him to write an ELMER GANTRY SUITE for orchestra, to be given its world premiere September 14, at the opening gala for their 2010-2011 season. His music has recently been conducted by Keith Lockhart and performed by Gidon Kremer and Martha Argerich.
Robert Livingston Aldridge has been Composer-in-Residence at the Brevard Music Festival since 2006. He has been a Meet the Composer/Music Alive Composer in Residence, and was 2010 Composer in Residence at CU NOW in Boulder, Colorado. 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.
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. Currently, he is Chair of the Department of Music at Montclair State University, where he is also a Professor of Music Composition and Theory. He was Founding Director of the John J. Cali School of Music at Montclair State, 2006-2009.
