Benjamin Robison » Bio
Benjamin Robison has a diverse career as a violinist, multimedia artist, composer, producer and director. He founded and is the artistic director of the multimedia-for-stage nonprofit Ardesco, Inc. and is also the co-founder of the Musicians' Alliance for Peace, a global organization that has produced over three hundred and fifty concerts for peace in over 26 countries. As director of Ardesco, Robison creates narrative multimedia stage performances that feature a counterpoint between image, live music and sound design. He has spent the past five years creating multimedia experiments and productions.
Robison's most recent efforts combine multimedia work with a social and political framework and were developed based on the idea of contextualizing and highlighting local environments. Called Tracings, these works represent Robison's attempt to interact more directly with the environment in which he creates. His initial tracing was entitled Casting and is a work for painting, violin, recorded sound and written text. He plans to continue this line of work, utilizing field recordings, digital film and photographs to facilitate composing immediate intuitive responses to an environment’Äôs natural line. His next tracing will be presented in May 2007.
Other multimedia work in the past two years includes a fugue for video taped dancer, violin and recorded violin; a piece for quartet and light ring, a improvised trio for sound design, live electronically manipulated violin and single channel live mixed video painting; and a quartet for two instruments and two color fields. As writer-producer-director, Robison created Brush Voice in 2005 and Astralis in 2004.
Also active as a classical violinist, Robison has performed as soloist, concertmaster and chamber musician in France, Italy, Greece, Canada and the United States. He began studying the violin at age three. After a two-year sojourn studying physics, he returned full time to music in 1992 and won the grand prize at the Canadian National Music Festival. Since that time, he has won numerous competitions and collaborated with musicians such as Anton Kuerti, Laurence Lesser and David Finckel. Most recently he was awarded the Prix de Fontainebleau for chamber music by Philipe Entremont, the Thomas Jefferson Award at Stony Brook University and two New York State Council for the Arts Grants for Ardesco. He holds degrees in performance from the Cleveland Institute of Music, the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University and a doctorate from Stony Brook University. He has studied with Ani Kavafian, Pamela Frank, Philip Setzer, Ray Anderson, Loran Fenyves, David Cerone, Claude Richard and Steven Majeski.
Robison is currently active as a director for Ardesco, the Musicians' Alliance for Peace, fractor.org, plays with the Okamoto-Robison-Snow Piano Trio and creates public art pieces. In his spare time he rides his fixed-gear bike, practices yoga, reads, hikes and volunteers with a NYC Ambulance Corp.
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