Robert McCauley

From his sophomore year in 1979 at New England Conservatory of Music to his middle fifties today, the trends and techniques in art in the 20th/21st century inspire Robert McCauley's music more than the pieces created by other living composers, be they peers, professors, or professionals. Atonal, angular melodies from universities (however you label them), Minimalism from either U.S. coast, and the New Spiritualism from Eastern Europe have never centered his compositional vocabulary. Robert always wants to create music never heard before. That could mean appropriating the historical styles of other earlier composers and fusing them with wild juxtapositions, transformations, and jump cuts into one surreal sound world (as a surreal content dictates a surreal form.) That could mean stretching 38 seconds of speech into a 4-minute segment (still at the same pitch), pairing both parts as a theme and variant, and then layering the altered source with a string orchestra to enrich and harmonize the inherent music from the dark spoken word. These procedures imitate the early floor to ceiling, black and white portraits of Chuck Close. That could mean taking a Mozart a cappella chorus, doubling the melody at the half step, stripping all other original voices away, supplying contemporary day-glo triads, clusters,accompaniment patterns, and scoring it for chamber orchestra, duplicating the processes of Andy Warhol or Keith Haring. That could even mean composing be a highly personal and intense expose of the child abuse suffered at the hands his distant unfeeling father for full orchestra, narrator, and MP3s with the confessional voice of a singer/songwriter. Yet, in all his works previously created and yet to come, melody is key! Robert writes for the traditional classical musician who wants to surprise and delight the audience, not impress them with the composer's audio gyrations. There is no greater joy than writing a good tune with great harmony, and in his world that can range from the popular (he has a country song published by Lighthouse Music Company in Austin, TX) to the much longer, lyrical symphonic theme for the modern canon of serious music. He has the meticulous eye and ear of a connoisseur, the skills of a craftsman, and he is looking for the next great trends in art or literature to inspire and lead him to even better music.