Robert Marshall

Robert is from Glasgow, and currently works as a lecturer at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and as a tutor at Douglas Academy music school. He is primarily a composer, but has research interests in a number of related areas: improvisation, theory, analysis, aesthetics, and historical musicology. He was educated at Glasgow and Edinburgh Universities, studying with Graham Hair, Bill Sweeney and Nigel Osborne respectively.

Although much of his time has been taken up by teaching, composing still remains his main area of musical activity. Most of his thinking on the subject has been concerned with the integration of discursive musical structures (e.g. sonata-forms) with the more "uncompromising" modernist tendencies of composers such as Xenakis, Varese, Carter and Birtwistle. Other influences on his music include much of the thinking behind the so-called "new-complexity" school, in particular with the notion of presenting virtuosity as an essential "expressive" component of his work. Robert is also also active as a performer, both on the piano and the violin.