About
ROBERT RANKIN (b. 1994) is a composer, teacher, and writer who grew up in North Carolina and now lives in Salt Lake City, UT. His music, which has been described as “powerful and effective” (Classical Voice Carolina), draws on a wide range of influences to create intense, intricate, and expressive works. READ MORE >
News
Saxophone Concerto consortium:
Band directors and saxophonists! I'm currently at work on a big concerto for the phenomenal saxophonist Derek Granger and we want you folks to be a part of it. So, we are launching a consortium!
The piece, "The Angel of History" will be a roughly 20 minute concerto for alto saxophone and wind ensemble. The title of the concerto comes from the German philosopher Walter Benjamin who, while fleeing Nazi Germany, wrote about his thoughts on history as being not “a chain of events” but as “one single catastrophe…piling wreckage upon wreckage.” The figure he refers to as the Angel of History, “would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them.” I found these compelling set of images and metaphors about the cyclical nature of history—at least that is one reading…it is philosophical writing after all—profoundly inspiring.
The soloist will act as a kind of lyrical, meditative figure who will be in dialogue with, or at times pitted up against, the ever shifting moods of the wind ensemble. More broadly, the piece will also commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust.
The concerto will be premiered by the Utah Valley University Wind Symphony in early 2025, and will be designed to be playable by most advanced high school wind ensembles, as well as college and university groups.
If you are interested or want more information, please visit the consortium page or feel free to send me an email. I’m extremely excited to begin work on this piece, and believe it will be a unique, fulfilling project!
Featured Works
(2023) — Inspired by the rise of disinformation on the internet and how it creeps into the “real world.” Short, seemingly insignificant musical ideas grow, spread, and eventually consume the ensemble.
(2024) — Three short arrangements for saxophone quartet of motets from Orlando de Lassus’s Prophetiae Sibyllarum composed around 1550.
(2024) — Thought of as a musical analog to Richard Powers’s brilliant novel about great trees, The Overstory,Sequoia is made up of a series of breathy, intertwined, seemingly endless melodic lines that ever so gradually morph over time.
Writings
The Rankin File (at least I thought it was a clever name) is a Substack consisting of monthly essays concerning my thoughts about music, as well as politics and culture. And, during the season, the occasional piece about baseball.
I have fun writing these essays and I hope you enjoy reading them.