B.A., Music Composition, College of Creative Studies, UC Santa Barbara
M.A., Music Composition, UC Santa Barbara
M.F.A., Music Composition, Princeton University
Ph.D., Music Composition, Princeton University
Professional Profile:
Robert Bowen is a composer and theorist with a background in jazz piano. As a composer, his music reflects his roots in the jazz idiom and his attraction to the forms and pitch narratives of Baroque and High Classical repertoire. His compositions have been performed in concert and radio broadcasts in California, the Midwest, throughout the Northeast and abroad. For his compositions, he has twice earned the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award/Foundation Grant as well as prizes from the Latin American Music Center of Indiana University, Metropolitan Theaters and the Arts Fund of Santa Barbara.
As a theorist, Dr. Bowen’s interests range from repetition and meaning to 8-bit music technology, the topic of a paper presented at the international Form, Culture and Video Game Criticism conference at Princeton University. Before joining the Mt. SAC faculty in 2006, Dr. Bowen taught theory and composition at Moorpark College, West Chester University and the George School of Pennsylvania.
Since 1999, Dr. Bowen has served as music editor, engraver and arranger for Music Together LLC, an international childhood music program. Also in the realm of childhood music, he is currently working in conjunction with the Orpheus Academy on the Chamber Music Project, a program dedicated to the creation of a graded chamber music repertoire for students levels one through five.
Dr. Bowen has been affiliated with ASCAP since 1993. He is also a member of the College Music Society, the Los Angeles Chapter of the National Associations of Composers USA, the American Composers Forum and the American Federation of Musicians Local 47.