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Robinson McClellan (b.1976) is a composer, scholar, and concert presenter living in New York City. His choral, orchestral, band, and chamber music is performed regularly in the U.S. and Europe, and has been heard in concert and liturgical settings such as the Oregon Bach Festival, Windsor Castle (UK), the Monteverdi Choir Festival (Hungary), the Vatican, and others. Commissions have come from the Albany Symphony, the Museum of Biblical Art NYC, Yale Schola Cantorum, and others. He has received composition awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, ASCAP, and Vassar College. Several of his sacred choral pieces appear in Music by Heart, a new Episcopal hymnal. He is currently a doctoral candidate in composition at the Yale School of Music and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

Robin's musical interests range from sacred music and liturgical drama to music traditions from around the world. He has written music incorporating everything from Pakistani qawwali and medieval French polyphony to Greek Byzantine tuning systems. Mainly, though, he has spent the past several years immersed in pibroch, the rarely heard baroque-era musical form from Gaelic Scotland. His approach has ranged from 'inspired pilfering' to 'intense engagement' (in the words of Michael Tenzer): his compositions often incorporate musical ideas borrowed from pibroch (and Gaelic song) in various obvious and less obvious ways, and his research into its unique rhythmic idiom will be published in 2009 by Ashgate in an anthology of Highland bagpipe-related scholarship.

Robin's other main enterprise is his work as founder and director of El Salto, a unique forum for contemporary music heard in a context of broad-minded religious/humanist inquiry (visit www.el-salto.org).

For audio samples and other information, please visit www.robinsonmcclellan.com.