Robert Parris

Robert Parris (21 May 1924 – 5 December 1999) was a composer and professor of music.

He was born in Philadelphia, attended the University of Pennsylvania, then the Juilliard School in New York. Among his teachers were Otto Luening, Aaron Copland, Jacques Ibert, and Peter Mennin (although he always claimed that the effect of these teachers on his own composing technique was 'minimal'). After a year of study on a Fulbright Fellowship in Paris (where he was meant to study with Arthur Honegger, but hardly ever saw him), and a year teaching at the University of Washington in Seattle, he settled in the Washington, D.C. area in 1952. Parris joined the faculty of The George Washington University in 1963 where he taught theory and composition.

Parris liked to describe himself as a 'colorist', and he therefore tended to write for small ensembles or a single instrument accompanied by piano or orchestra. His first international recognition came in 1958 with his Concerto for Five Kettledrums and Orchestra, premiered by tympanist Fred Begun and the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, under Howard Mitchell. Parris was notorious for pushing instruments to the limits of any player's abilities: his solo violin sonata is particularly difficult, and the composer-directors of CRI believed his trombone concerto to be unplayable until they heard a recording of it. But he was also the most inventive of orchestrators: Parris's concerto for kettledrums was always a crowd-pleaser in performance because it was so surprisingly melodic: its last movement is built around a traditional hymn (like Copland's Appalachian Spring) but Parris gives the initial statements of that hymn—and its dramatic summation—to the kettledrums. Begun, the NSO principal tympanist who premiered the piece, made the original suggestion for the piece, but he later remarked, ""I suggested five drums jestingly."

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