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"In his string music, Carl aligns himself with Beethoven and Ives as a composer who asks musical questions, who frankly frames his own spiritual journey in sounds with all its doubts, hungers, epiphanies, and acquiescences."

---Kyle Gann
Liner notes Music for Strings

Robert Carl's music doesn't fit into any neat category.

In writing about his own music it is clear that he doesn't subscribe to any one particular tradition, pointing out that "...the barriers between what's been called 'tonal' and 'non-tonal' (and I hate the word 'atonal') are artificial, and one of the projects of the new century is to understand the nature of the harmonic continuum within which we work. Thus all these works tend to move from a highly chromatic, dissonant, or purely 'sonic' worlds into more overtly tonal ones, whether diatonic or not..."

New World Records' most recent offering, Robert Carl: Music for Strings (80645-2), is a collection featuring three string works composed within a three-year period: Open for string trio (1998), Violin Sonata No. 2 "Angel-Skating" (1999), and String Quartet No. 2 "Fear of Death/Love of Life" (2000-01). These works reflect Carl's philosophy that music can integrate the tonal and the non-tonal into a "harmonic continuum." Structurally the pieces share the underlying feature of being built from pairs of interlocking intervals; they develop by Fortspinnung of a single idea or gesture. In the hands of a less skilled composer such simplicity of approach might seem contrived; but Carl is a master of extending his ideas without their seeming artificial. His string music is full of slow glissandos, trills, clusters, and tremolo effects, devices that much of late twentieth-century music abandoned to "enter," as Kyle Gann explains, "the world of timbre and noise."

Open for string trio, "a spiritual journey in three stages," was written at the MacDowell Colony expressly for the Adaskin Trio. This one-movement work begins with a glissando leading to an assertive statement of the main idea---a dotted-rhythm, four-note motive in the viola. This motive, the central idea of the work, passes to the cello and is juxtaposed over tonalities "implied by the accompanying drones which slowly glissando upward and downward." A series of short variations follows, which expands on a gesture, rather than a melody or set of pitches. The work ends with the return of the opening motive, this time stated lyrically in the violin and leading to a glissando that ascends to a major third. It is apparent by the end of the work that its title, "Open," is more than just descriptive: it refers to how Carl manipulates his material, expanding or "opening" his musical landscape.

Click here for Angel Skating exerpt
Click here for String Quartet #2 excerpt

The Second Violin Sonata ("Angel-Skating") was written for violinist Katie Lansdale. Cast in three movements, it ranges from a clearly dissonant vocabulary to "simple" tonality. The movements are traditional in shape: a rondo, a set of variations, and a chaconne. The chaconne, subtitled "State of Grace," is a deeply felt movement consisting of an eight-measure melody in the piano that is later accompanied by the violin in whole notes. These eight measures become, in essence, the unifying feature of the movement.

The final offering on the disc, the Second String Quartet "Fear of Death/Love of Life," was written during the summer from 2001, which Carl spent at Yaddo. He originally conceived the piece in two-movements but found it didn't work until he added an additional section---"Hymn: "In Growing Awareness of Beauty's Presence," which forms the bridge between "Fear of Death" (the quartet's first movement), and "Love of Life" (the work's culmination). The first movement of Quartet No. 2 is dense, full of double-stops, glissandos, and moves from dissonance to consonance. The second movement, "Hymn," is largely Romantic in theme and sound. While minute strains of Bruckner might be perceived, the lyrical themes seem more reminiscent of Vaughan Williams and are in keeping with both its title and the ascending gestures that seem to suffuse Carl's music. The final movement, "Love of Life" begins with rapid scale passages, which are followed by an almost triumphant dotted motive that, by the movement's end, has been reduced to chords stated by the entire quartet.

In an interview with radio announcer/producer Bruce Duffie, Carl talked about his teachers' contributions to his oeuvre. He credits Shapey with "teaching [him] how to write a phrase and to write counterpoint." George Rochberg's contribution was broader: "It was a moral education in aesthetics that I received from him [Rochberg]. He would say things like, "If we composers and artists stopped making art, the world would fall apart, I promise you." In either case, Carl's music is melding of many traditions which is perhaps why he once referred to himself as a "midtown" composer. In his liner notes for this release, Kyle Gann describes Robert Carl's aesthetic as follows: "Carl's [music] is, at times, a Romantic music fighting its way out of modernist chaos." To my way of thinking, Carl's music is a perfect marriage of dissonance and consonance; in which neither prevails over the other.

Robert Carl received his musical training at Yale, Penn, and the University of Chicago. He also studied in Paris during 1980-1 as a Lurcy Fellow at the Conservatoire Nationale Supérieure and the Sorbonne. His teachers included Iannis Xenakis, Betsy Jolas, Ralph Shapey, George Rochberg, Jonathan Kramer, George Crumb, Richard Wernick, and Robert Morris. Mr. Carl has received prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Chamber Music America, American Chamber Symphony, NACUSA, and Tanglewood. He is the recipient of a 2005 Chamber Music America commission for a string quintet to be premiered by the Miami String Quartet and Robert Black, contrabass. In 1998 he received the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as a Copland Award, which resulted in an artistic residency in the Copland home in fall 1999. Other composer residencies have included the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France in 1984 and 1993; the Bogliasco Foundation near Genoa, Italy, in Spring 2000; the Rockefeller International Study Center in Bellagio, Italy, in 1987; as well as stays at Yaddo, the Djerassi Foundation, and at the MacDowell and Millay colonies.

Mr. Carl has received extensive performances throughout the US and Europe, at venues including Carnegie Recital Hall, Alice Tully Hall, IRCAM, Orchestra Hall Chicago, Musical Spring in St. Petersburg (Russia), the Royal Academy of Music, (London), and New Music America 1982 and 1985. A CD of Mr. Carl's complete piano music has been released on Centaur Records, and a selection of electronic, experimental, and theatrical works on Innova; other CD recordings include Time/Memory/Shadow for sextet on Neuma, Towards the Crest for solo bass clarinet on Koch International, A Wide Open Field for electronic cello and orchestra on Vienna Modern Masters, Duke Meets Mort on Lotus Records, and Magic Act for violin and marimba on The Aerial. In 1988 his Roundabout for contrabass and computer-generated tape was released on an Opus One recording celebrating the 50th anniversary of the American Composers' Alliance. Mr. Carl has written works for soloists Evelyn Glennie, percussion; Robert Black, contrabass; Kathleen Supové, piano; and John Bruce Yeh, clarinet, among others.

Currently he is chair of the composition department and director of the computer music studio at the Hartt School of Music, University of Hartford. He has been a director of the Extension Works new music ensemble in Boston, and writes extensively on new music for Fanfare magazine.