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Alum Robert Aldridge appointed director of music department at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers

Grammy Award-winning composer to direct Music Department at Mason Gross School of the Arts

Composer and YSM alum Robert Livingston Aldridge ’00DMA has been named the director of the music department of the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.

Aldridge recently won a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for the opera Elmer Gantry, based on the novel by Sinclair Lewis with a libretto by Herschel Garfein. Both Aldridge and Garfein are currently professors at Montclair State University.

“We are delighted with the appointment of Robert Livingston Aldridge as Director of the Music Department,” says George B. Stauffer, Dean of the Mason Gross School. “We are fortunate to have this elegant artist and leader join the Mason Gross team.”

Aldridge has written more than 80 works for orchestra, opera, musical theater, voice, dance, string quartet, solo and chamber ensembles, including the critically praised opera Elmer Gantry. Other important words include Leda and the Swan (2003) and the Clarinet Concerto (commissioned by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, premiered by David Singer in 2005 and recorded for Naxos in 2010).

His music has been performed at Lincoln Center and has recently been conducted by Keith Lockhart and performed by Gidon Kremer and Martha Argerich. He was a founder of the Boston-based international consortium called Composers in Red Sneakers.

Aldridge, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin with a bachelor’s degree in literature, also holds degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music (MM, Composition) and the Yale University School of Music (MMA and DMA, Composition). He was the founding director of the John J. Cali School of Music at Montclair State University from 2006 to 2009 and served as chair of the Music Department at Montclair State University from 2005 to 2011.

Click here to read the original announcement from Rutgers.