| ROBERT WINTER BIO | | Print | |
Scholar/pianist/media author ROBERT WINTER began his life as a three-letterman at Coral Gables High School and a physics major at Brown University. He eventually earned his B.A. in Music from Brown, an M.F.A. in Piano from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and a Ph. D. in the History & Theory of Music from the University of Chicago. Before joining the UCLA music faculty he spent three years in Europe on Fulbright-Hayes and Martha Baird Rockefeller Foundation fellowships researching his doctoral work on the sketches for Beethoven's String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, Op. 131. In the first fifteen years of his scholarly career, Winter authored, co-authored, or edited four major books on Beethoven and published a substantial number of influential articles on compositional process, performance practice, and Franz Schubert (he contributed the Schubert article to the new 2000 edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians). The Beethoven Sketchbooks (with Douglas Johnson and Alan Tyson, published by the University of California Press) received the Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society for the best scholarly music book of 1985. Winter’s other awards and honors in that same period included a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983 and, in 1990, the Frances Densmore Prize (for the best article on musical instruments between 1986-89) from the American Musical Instrument Association. He also served a term as an elected member of the American Musicological Society’s Board of Directors, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the Cleveland Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera, the Opera League of Los Angeles, numerous summer music festivals (including the Aspen Music Festival and Music@Menlo, as well as nine seasons directing a sold-out summer concert series at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California), and a host of colleges, universities, and schools of music. Winter has also presented his work to international audiences in Japan (on a multimedia tour sponsored by Pioneer); three Intermedia conferences in Mexico City; early Mozart in Calgary, Canada; France (Milia Festival, Cannes); Austria (international Beethoven symposium); Germany (Beethoven sketches in Berlin and Bonn); and Prague, Czech Republic (New World interactive DVD). He has served as official and unofficial coach of numerous string quartets, chamber ensembles, and opera productions. Writing for the Wall Street Journal in 1993, Mark Swed described Winter as “probably the best public explicator of music since Leonard Bernstein.” In 1989 Winter’s career took a dramatic turn when he was invited by Bob Stein of the Voyager Company to produce its first original interactive software title—today widely regarded as the first commercial interactive publication. As an instinctively multimedia performer and author, Winter’s programs on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (called “masterly” by the New York Times); Mozart’s “Dissonant” Quartet, and Dvorak’s New World Symphony have been hailed in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek (where he was profiled as one of “50 to Watch” in cyberspace), U.S. News and World Report, Wired Magazine, People Magazine, and elsewhere as milestones in multimedia publishing. In addition to his interactive creating and authoring, Winter has become an articulate international spokesperson for the role of content and the arts in a digital world. He worked closely with both Apple and Microsoft in developing their early multimedia platforms and strategies. He has been a featured or keynote speaker/performer at many professional conferences, including the Microsoft CD-ROM Conference, Digital World, Stuart Alsop's Agenda '90, the UCLA Multimedia Roundtable, the Japanese National Audio-Visual Conference in Tokyo, MacWorld Expos in the United States and Mexico, Milia (Cannes, France), Intermedia (San Francisco), the Governor's Conference on the Arts & Technology (Santa Clara), the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver, B.C., the Ziff Institute, and keynote addresses for the National Association of Schools of Music. He also recorded a live video music series for RCA Victor that was launched with three titles in February 1995. From 1996-2002 he led for the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (the major presenter organization, based in Washington, D.C.) an annual five-day seminar for arts presenters in Aspen, La Jolla, and New York entitled "Classical Connections" that explored broad issues of understanding and programming classical music with a focus on audience and community education. Winter served as Chair of the Music Department in 1992-93 (overseeing the statewide approval of the uniquely structured M.M./D.M.A. program whose development he spearheaded) and Associate Dean for Technology of the School of the Arts & Architecture from 1995-2000. In 1996 Winter was named to occupy the Presidential Chair in Music and Interactive Arts—the first such chair to be awarded in the arts at UCLA. From 1996-2000 he was the Founder/Director of UCLA's Center for the Digital Arts. In the spring of 2008 Winter was honored with UCLA's Distinguished Teaching Award. He has been selected for the Faculty Research Lecture in Winter 2010, one of the highest honors UCLA can bestow on a faculty member. As President of Calliope, a multimedia publishing company devoted to originally authored programs in the arts, humanities, and entertainment, Mr. Winter authored or produced numerous titles—from “Robert Winter’s Crazy for Ragtime” (released in May 1996; “Robert Winter has done it again.” Newsweek) to “Interactive Perlman” (a program exploring Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman) that have continued to receive wide critical acclaim. In 2003 he was recruited by Carnegie Hall to help spearhead their new digital outreach programs. The first project, an interactive DVD for Winter and his collaborator Peter Bogdanoff, joined forces with the world renowned Emerson String Quartet in an interactive Performer’s Guide to the Bartók Quartets, which Carnegie Hall made available online in 2006. Under the leadership of Joseph Horowitz, Winter was the recipient of an NEH grant to vastly expand his earlier program on Dvorák and the New World into an interactive DVD (the first of its kind) that appeared in March of 2008. During the fall of 2010 Winter made his first visit to China, giving more than thirty lectures, performances, or master classes in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and more than a half dozen universities in Taiwan over a three-month period. Winter’s current and future projects include new interactive DVDs (Bach Stories–Five Fugal Tales; and How They Played Chopin; How We Play Chopin). He is also involved in upgrading and preparing for release more than 30 of his media projects and live performances for release on laptops, iPads, iPhones, and other digital platforms. |
