About John Donald Robb

John Donald Robb (1892-1989) led a rich and varied life as an attorney, composer, arts educator, and folk song collector and preservationist. He composed an impressive body of work including symphonies, concertos, sonatas, chamber and other instrumental music, choral works, songs, and arrangements of folk songs, two operas, including Little Jo, a musical comedy, Joy Comes to Deadhorse, and more than sixty-five electronic works. Robb’s orchestral works have been played by many major orchestras in the United States and abroad under noted conductors, such as Hans Lange, Maurice Bonney, Maurice Abravanel, Leonard Slatkin, Gilberto Orellano, Yoshimi Takeda, and Guillermo Figueroa.

During his two decades as an international lawyer in New York, Robb studied composition with Horatio Parker, Darius Milhaud, Roy Harris, Paul Hindemith and Nadia Boulanger. In 1941, at the age of 49, Robb left his law career to become head of the Music Department at the University of New Mexico and served as Dean of the College of Fine Arts from 1942-57.

During his tenure at UNM, Robb’s fascination with Hispanic folk music led to his recording of over 3,000 traditional Hispanic folk songs and dances from the American Southwest, and South America which formed the nucleus of the John Donald Robb Archive of Southwestern Music at the University of New Mexico. He wrote two books on the subject, including Hispanic Folk Songs of New Mexico (1954; revised edition by UNM Press, 2008) and his authoritative book Hispanic Folk Music of New Mexico and the Southwest: A Self Portrait of a People (1980). Robb received numerous honors and grants including the honorary Doctor of Music from the University of New Mexico.

Robb’s music has had performances by 16 symphony orchestras in the U.S., Central America and South America, including ten by the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra and its predecessors. A number of his works and of a large number of Hispanic folk songs have been performed in many other venues such as six recitals in Carnegie Recital Hall in New York (some of which were reviewed by the New York Times).

The St. Louis Symphony premiered his Third Symphony in 1962, and his music receives continuing performances at the renowned UNM John Donald Robb Composers’ Symposium each spring. His folk opera, Little Jo, was conducted by Guillermo Figueroa at the National Hispanic Cultural Center in 2005, and the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra under Figueroa performed his Dances from Taxco in their 2007 season.

In June, 2008, KNME-TV-5, New Mexico's PBS station, premiered a documentary about Dean Robb entitled "The Musical Adventures of John Donald Robb in New Mexico." The documentary can be continuously viewed at the unique interactive web-site developed by KNME where visitors can experience other folk songs and photographs from the Robb archives in UNM Libraries' Center for Southwest Research. In October of 2008, the University of Missouri-St. Louis presented a "John Donald Robb Tribute Concert" in the stunning new Blanche M. Touhill Performing Arts Center in St. Louis to a standing room only audience.

OPUS ONE Recordings has released for national and international distribution a recording of seven Hispanic folk songs and six art songs arranged by Roger Jannotta and performed by the world-renowned National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Oberg of Albuquerque with Leslie Umphrey of the UNM Music Department Faculty as soprano soloist. This is the fourth of the outstanding CD’s of Dean Robb’s major works on the OPUS ONE label by Oberg and the NPRSO. All have been widely distributed and are available through Amazon.com. Reviews of this and other CDs and articles in leading national recording magazines have focused further national and international attention on Dean Robb and his work. Visit the CD page here.