Scholar/pianist/media author ROBERT WINTER began his life as a three-letterman at Coral Gables High School and a physics major at Brown University. He eventually earned his B.A. in Music from Brown, an M.F.A. in Piano from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and a Ph. D. in the History & Theory of Music from the University of Chicago. Before joining the UCLA music faculty he spent three years in Europe on Fulbright-Hayes and Martha Baird Rockefeller Foundation fellowships researching his doctoral work on the sketches for Beethoven's String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, Op. 131.
In the first fifteen years of his scholarly career, Winter authored, co-authored, or edited four major books on Beethoven and published a substantial number of inþuential articles on compositional process, performance practice, and Franz Schubert (he contributed the Schubert article to the new 2000 edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians). The Beethoven Sketchbooks (with Douglas Johnson and Alan Tyson, published by the University of California Press) received the Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society for the best scholarly music book of 1985. Winter's other awards and honors in that same period included a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983 and, in 1990, the Frances Densmore Prize (for the best article on musical instruments between 1986-89) from the American Musical Instrument Association. He also served a term as an elected member of the American Musicological Society's Board of Directors.
From 1979 on, Winter became widely known to the general musical public for his nationally broadcast 10-week live-music series on Mozart and Beethoven (with the Sequoia Quartet) for American Public Radio (in which he both hosts and performs), as well as programs in the series PaciÞc Coast Highway. His audiences for countless invited live performances and lectures covering a vast range of musical and cultural topics (classical to popular, Western to world ) have included the national meetings of the American Symphony Orchestra League, Avery Fisher Hall (New York Philharmonic) and the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center, the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center, the Cleveland Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the 92nd Street Y, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver, B.C., the L.A. Opera League, numerous summer music festivals (including nine seasons directing a sold-out series at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California, and 25 years on the faculty of the Aspen Music Festival, making more than 400 appearances), and more than seventy colleges and universities. Residencies have included the Five Colleges (U Mass Amherst, Wellesley, Hampsire, Mount Holyoke, Smith) and the University of Iowa. He has also served as ofÞcial and unofÞcial coach of numerous string quartets and chamber ensembles. Writing for The Wall Street Journal in 1993, Mark Swed described Winter as "probably the best public explicator of music since Leonard Bernstein."
In 1989 Winter's career took a dramatic turn when he was invited by the Voyager Company to produce its Þrst original interactive software title-today widely regarded as the Þrst commercial interactive publication. An instinctively multimedia performer and author for whom blending scholarship and performance comes naturally, Winter's programs on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring; Mozart's "Dissonant" Quartet, and Dvorak's New World Symphony have been hailed in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, U.S. News and World Report, Newsweek (where he was profiled as one of "50 to Watch" in cyberspace), People Magazine, Wired Magazine, and elsewhere as milestones in multimedia publishing.
In addition to his interactive creating and authoring, Winter has become an articulate international spokesperson for the role of content and the arts in a digital world. He has been a featured or keynote speaker/performer at many professional conferences, including the Microsoft CD-ROM Conference, Digital World, Stuart Alsop's Agenda '90, the UCLA Multimedia Roundtable, the Japanese National Audio-Visual Conference in Tokyo, MacWorld Expos in the United States and Mexico, Milia (Cannes, France), Intermedia (San Francisco), the Governor's Conference on the Arts & Technology (Santa Clara), Chamber Music America, the Ziff Institute, and keynote addresses for the National Association of Schools of Music. He also recorded a live video music series for RCA Victor that was launched with three titles in February 1995. From 1996-2002 he led for the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (the major presenter organization, based in Washington, D.C.) an annual week-long seminar for arts presenters at Aspen and La Jolla entitled "Classical Connections" that explored broad issues of understanding and programming classical music with a focus on audience and community education.
Winter served as Chair of the Music Department in 1992-93 (overseeing the statewide approval of the new M.M./D.M.A. program whose development he spearheaded) and Associate Dean for Technology of the School of the Arts & Architecture from 1995-2000. In 1996 Winter was named to occupy the Presidential Chair in Music and Interactive Arts-the first such chair to be awarded in the arts at UCLA. From 1996-2000 he was the Founder/Director of UCLA's Center for the Digital Arts. In the spring of 2008 Winter was honored with UCLA's Distinguished Teaching Award.
As President of Calliope, a multimedia publishing company devoted to originally authored programs in the arts, humanities, and entertainment, Mr. Winter authored or produced numerous titles-from "Robert Winter's Crazy for Ragtime" (released in May 1996) to "Interactive Perlman" (a program exploring Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto with renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman) that have continued to receive wide critical acclaim. He was the recipient with Joseph Horowitz of an NEH grant for an interactive DVD entitled From the New World: A Composer's American Sojourn (built around the 1890s stay of Antonín Dvorák in New York), and was recruited by Carnegie Hall to help lead their new digital outreach programs with a comprehensive performer's guide to the Bartók quartets (with the Emerson Quartet). The Bartók project went online in 2006, while the Dvorák project was released in March 2008. In a projected series of new titles combining research and broad appeal, Winter is setting his sights directly on an archaic 175-year old music training/teaching system that is ripe for fundamental rethinking.
