William Robin is an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Maryland's School of Music. He has published work on contemporary music, orchestral culture, and early American hymns in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Musical Quarterly, and the Journal of Musicology, and he contributes regularly to The New York Times.
Sparks vital conversation about what music based on solidarity might one day look like. -- The Wire In the past decade, William Robin has established himself not only as one of America's most formidable younger musicologists but also as an incisive, eloquent writer in the public sphere. His study of Bang on a Can gives lavish evidence of his multisided brilliance: it is at once an absorbing historical narrative and an exacting work of critical analysis. No scholar or fan of contemporary American music can do without it. -- Alex Ross William Robin breaks important new ground with this thick historical and ethnographic description of how networks of ensembles, institutions, listeners, and new technologies come together to forge new experimental music communities and marketplaces. Much more than a history of a new music ensemble, this book incisively chronicles a larger movement aimed at revitalizing expression, reception, and diversity in contemporary American classical music. -- George E. Lewis, author of A Power Stronger Than Itself:A The AACM and American Experimental Music