Robert Carl’s music is performed regularly throughout the US and abroad. It concentrates on solo, chamber, orchestral, vocal, choral, and electroacoustic media. Its aim is to create a sense of space that provides the listener with a sense of freedom and openness. He has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Chamber Music America, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (the 1998 Charles Ives Fellowship as well as a 2016 Arts & Letters Award). Residencies include MacDowell, Yaddo, UCross, Djerassi, Bogliasco, Camargo, Copland House, Tokyo Wonder Site, and Bellagio. He lived in Japan for three months as an Asian Cultural Council Fellow in 2007. New World Records has released three CDs his works (music for strings; electroacoustic pieces inspired by Japan; and large ensemble/orchestral). Neuma has just released a two-disc retrospective featuring music in precise tuning with technological extensions. In 2021, an all-orchestral CD was released by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project; and Harmony, an opera based on the meeting of Charles Ives and Mark Twain, with libretto by Russell Banks, was premiered in August 2021.
He writes regularly on new music in a variety of forums and magazines, and is the author of Terry Riley’s In C (Oxford University Press). In 2016, Bloomsbury Press released Jonathan Kramer’s posthumous text Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening, which Carl edited. In Fall 2020, Bloomsbury also published a book of his essays titled Music Composition in the 21st Century: A Practical Guide to the New Common Practice.
He was chair of Composition at the Hartt School at the University of Hartford from 1992–2022. In Fall 2022, he was Slee Professor of Music at the University at Buffalo.