Robert Livingstone Aldridge (September 7, 1954 in Richmond, VA) is an American

composer A composer is a person who writes music. The term is especially used to indicate composers of Western classical music, or those who are composers by occupation. Many composers are, or were, also skilled performers of music. Etymology and Defi ...

, 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 Dance is a performing art form consisting of sequences of movement, either improvised or purposefully selected. This movement has aesthetic and often symbolic value. Dance can be categorized and described by its choreography, by its repertoir ...

, and various chamber ensembles that have been performed in the United States, Europe, and Japan. He is widely known for his opera ''

Elmer Gantry ''Elmer Gantry'' is a satirical novel written by Sinclair Lewis in 1926 that presents aspects of the religious activity of America in fundamentalist and evangelistic circles and the attitudes of the 1920s public toward it. The novel's protagonis ...

'', 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 The 54th Annual Grammy Awards were held on February 12, 2012, at the Staples Center in Los Angeles being broadcast on CBS honoring the best in music for the recording year beginning October 1, 2010 through September 30, 2011. LL Cool J hosted t ...

Biography

Aldridge holds degrees in both composition and English literature. Aldridge received a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a master's degree in composition from the New England Conservatory of Music, and a doctorate in composition from the Yale School of Music in 2000. In November 2007, an opera titled ''

'' by Robert Aldridge and with a

libretto A libretto (Italian for "booklet") is the text used in, or intended for, an extended musical work such as an opera, operetta, masque, oratorio, cantata or Musical theatre, musical. The term ''libretto'' is also sometimes used to refer to the t ...

by Herschel Garfein premiered in the James K. Polk Theater in

Nashville Nashville is the capital city of the U.S. state of Tennessee and the seat of Davidson County. With a population of 689,447 at the 2020 U.S. census, Nashville is the most populous city in the state, 21st most-populous city in the U.S., and the ...

. ''Parables'' also with a libretto by Herschel Garfein was a work commissioned by the Topeka Symphony. It premiered in May 2010. He was professor of composition at Montclair State University in New Jersey. He was appointed director of the music department of the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 2012. Robert Aldridge currently lives in Montclair, New Jersey with his wife Paula Stark, a landscape artist. They have one daughter, Micaela Aldridge (b.1994).

Honors and awards

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.

Works

References

External links

Official website

Rutgers University profile

'Ep. 88: Robert Aldridge, composer'
Interview by Tigran Arakelyan {{DEFAULTSORT:Aldridge, Robert 1954 births American male classical composers American classical composers American opera composers Male opera composers Living people Rutgers University faculty 20th-century American composers 20th-century classical composers 21st-century American composers 21st-century classical composers University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Letters and Science alumni New England Conservatory alumni Yale School of Music alumni Montclair State University faculty Musicians from Richmond, Virginia Classical musicians from Virginia 20th-century American male musicians 21st-century American male musicians