Robert J. Martin

Robert J. Martin is known for music projects based on images and metaphors from the world at large. Martin’s composition titles and, in the case of multi-movement works, movement titles are image-based, giving listeners a puzzle to solve or an idea to listen for. Examples of Martin’s image-centered pieces include works for soloists such as Limoncello Suite for cello; My Mind’s Attic for tenor pan; Hommage Á Tom et Jerry for soloist alternating between flute and piccolo (recorded by Ronda Ford Benson, available from rondaford.com); Ten Thousand Things Moving for flute; Two for One, for soloist alternating between alto and soprano saxophone; and a body of piano works, including the two works in this set: 100 Views of Mt. Fuji: 100 Pieces in One Hundred Minutes – Homage to Hokusai and stone & feather. Ensemble image-based pieces include Here There Be Dragons for brass choir; Palace of the Winds for flute choir; Embrace the Wind: A Celebration of Wind and Wind Energy, a seventy-five minute cycle for string quartet; and The Owl and the Pussycat for harp and flute.

Martin studied with composer Herbert Brun and cybernetician Heinz von Foerster. His interests in composition, cybernetics, and learning resulted in an interdisciplinary doctoral thesis at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign completed under Brun and Foerster. Professor Emeritus at Truman State University, Martin has been a long-term jurist for a well-known international composition competition, and both a curator and programmer for the New Horizons Music Festival at Truman State University (2013 and 2014). He is a member of the Society of Composers, the Iowa Composers Forum, and the American Society for Cybernetics.

Born in Chicago, raised in New York and New Jersey, educated at Illinois Benedictine University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Martin remembers as a child sitting in the dark listening to the Caprices for Solo Violin of Paganini, the Brahms Double Concerto for violin and cello, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, as well as more popular numbers like the The Crazy Otto Medley, a corny ragtime medley, on the family phonograph. He played the French horn and the now archaic upright mellophone in high school band, and then French horn in bands and orchestras in college and afterwards. More recently, he has been a principal in over a dozen musicals where his experience has nurtured the desire to connect with audiences through drama, image, and gesture, A new work, The Musicians of Bremen, a musical based on the fairytale by the Brothers Grimm, is in progress.