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Neil Rolnick’s career since the late 1970s has spanned many areas of musical endeavor, often including unexpected and unusual combinations of materials and media. He has performed his music around the world, exploring forms as diverse as digital sampling, interactive multimedia, and traditional musical theater. Throughout the 1980s and ‘90s he has also been responsible for the development of the first integrated electronic arts graduate and undergraduate programs in the US, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s iEAR Studios, in Troy, NY. Rolnick’s innovation as an educator has been to bring together the commonality of artistic creation across many disciplines, and this has led to his varied work with filmmakers, writers, and video and media artists. Though much of Rolnick’s work has been in areas which connect music and technology, and therefore considered in the realm of “experimental” music, his music has always been highly melodic and accessible. Whether working with electronic sounds, improvisation, or multimedia, his music has been characterized by critics as “sophisticated,” “hummable and engaging,” and as having “good senses of showmanship and humor.”
Mr. Rolnick has received fellowships and grants from the Asian Cultural Council, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, New York State CAPS, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Alice M. Ditson Fund, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the University of California, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Rolnick has toured extensively, with performances in New York City, Tokyo, London, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Washington, Reykjavik, Zurick, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Banff (Canada) and numerous other venues. His music has been included in the Barber Festival in England, the Aspen Music Festival, the New Music America Festivals, and the Whitney Biennial Exhibition. Mr. Rolnick's music appears on ten records and CDs.
Neil Rolnick earned a BA in English literature from Harvard College in 1969. He studied musical composition with Darius Milhaud at the Aspen Music School, with John Adams and Andrew Imbrie at the San Francisco Conservatory, and with Richard Felciano and Olly Wilson at UC Berkeley, where he earned a PhD in musical composition in 1980. He studied computer music at Stanford with John Chowning and James A. Moorer. He currently is Chair of the Arts Department and directs the iEAR Studios at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, NY.
“His music is state-of-the-art computer stuff, but Rolnick has good senses of humor and showmanship, and he's never cold or inhuman.”
- Kyle Gann, Village Voice
“The best work came from Neil B. Rolnick, whose vernacularly flavored electronic music is already known and admired… fun serious works of art.”
- John Rockwell, New York Times
“[ElectriCity] is a magnificent work of pastoral beauty and sinister industry… essential listening for anyone interested in where 'classical' music is going in the next century.”
- Cliff Furnald, College Media Journal
“This… is what distinguishes Rolnick's music from the majority of today's electronic music. It has an ability to enchant, and to amuse without reducing the power and beauty of the traditional material it emulates.”
- Cliff Furnald, College Media Journal
“Among the brighter lights on the horizons of contemporary music.”
- Bob Doerschuk, Keyboard Magazine
“Rolnick's unexpected moves re-focus ears that are prone to drift off… [and] recreate a welcome sense of tonal form and steer minimalism in a direction where its -ism falls off from disuse, and it becomes once again simply music. What better direction to take it?”
- Kyle Gann, Village Voice
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