John Robison
Professor of Musicology, Early Music Ensemble
Email: robison@usf.edu
Phone: (813) 974-2311
John Robison is Professor of Musicology and Early Music Ensemble director at the University of South Florida, and has been on the School of Music faculty since 1977. He teaches history surveys, graduate history seminars, symphonic literature, intercultural composers, and other topics at USF. He received his Doctorate in Musicology from Stanford University in 1975, where he specialized in Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque topics with an emphasis on historical performance practices. Since 1990 his research interests have become more global through his work on contemporary composers from diverse Asian, African, and Latin American cultures.
Dr. Robison’s books over the past decade are devoted to intercultural composers and modern compositional trends from China, India, and Korea. Due to the significance of one composer’s centennial anniversary, his book on the symphonies of Zhu Jianer (1922-2017) has been published twice in 2022, most recently by Peter Lang Publishers in Europe as The Symphonies of Zhu Jianer: A Western Perspective, and also by Zhejiang University Press as Zhu Jianer and the Symphony in China (bilingual in English and Chinese). His book on Wang Xilin, Human Suffering, and Compositional Trends in Contemporary China has also garnered significant attention since its publication in 2021, and he is also the co-author/editor with Dr. Yu Hui of the book of essays entitled China’s International Contribution to Contemporary Music (Zhejiang University Press, 2022). Dr. Robison’s other book publications are From the Slums of Calcutta to the Concert Halls of London: The Life and Music of Indian Composer John Mayer (2019), Korean Women Composers and Their Music (2012), Johann Klemm: Partitura seu tabulatura italica (1998), and A Festschrift for Gamal Abdel-Rahim (1993). His book chapters and articles on Renaissance, Baroque, and Twentieth-Century topics have appeared in various American, European and Asian books and journals.
Dr. Robison is a performing musicologist who concertizes professionally on numerous woodwind and string instruments (recorders, historical double reeds, Baroque oboe, oboe/English horn, lute, archlute, theorbo, viola da gamba). As both a performer and scholar, he has appeared at international conferences and by invitation at various universities throughout China (Beijing, Shanghai, Qingdao, Suzhou, Wuhan, Anhui, Changchun, Harbin, Kunming, Zhoukou, Hong Kong, etc.), South Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, Australia, and other venues.
His contributions to USF’s global initiative include the creation of courses entitled Folk and Traditional Music of World Cultures, Intercultural Composers of the 20th and 21st centuries, History of Musical Instruments, and revisions in the undergraduate history curriculum. He has organized four Composition in Asia International Symposia at USF, and during his USF career has been honored with the USF Awards for Outstanding Global Engagement (2019) and Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching (1993).