Robin Holcomb

Robin Holcomb is a composer, pianist, and singer. She has performed throughout North America, Europe, Australia, and Hong Kong as a solo artist and leader of various ensembles. She is the co-founder and director of The New York Composers Orchestra. Her most recent Nonesuch recordings are The Big Time (2002) and Little Three (1996). She has composed music for major works by the Bebe Miller Dance Company (NYC), Joe Goode Performance Group (San Francisco), and Paul Taylor Dance Company (NYC) and for PBS documentaries, dramatic films, and theatrical productions including Angels at the Four Corners, an original work for musical theatre.

Robin and theatre artist/director Nikki Appino collaborated on O, Say a Sunset, a staged song cycle inspired by the writing of Rachel Carson, which premiered at the Walker Arts Center (Minneapolis) in September 2003 and showed at On the Boards (Seattle) in October, 2003. Her awards include grants from the Allen Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts as well as a Seattle Arts Commission Fellowship and an Artist Trust GAP Award in 2000.

Robin received 2010 GAP Award funding to pay for research, development, and travel expenses for a residency period at The Blue Mountain Center, New York, to create the libretto for a new piece titled Smokestack Arias, a song cycle for soprano vocalist, piano, and pre-recorded electronic score. Based on historical research, the text will be a work of the imagination, giving voice to the stories of women whose lives intersected with the events of the “Everett Massacre,” an armed confrontation between local authorities, striking shingle workers, vigilantes, and the IWW on November 5, 1916 in Everett, Washington.