Bob Becker

Bob Becker

Bob Becker holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the Eastman School of Music where he studied percussion with William Street and John Beck, and composition with Warren Benson and Aldo Provenzano.  He also spent four years doing post-graduate study in the World Music program at Wesleyan University where he became intensely involved with the music cultures of North and South India, Africa and Indonesia.  As a founding member of the percussion ensemble NEXUS, he has been involved with the collection and construction of a unique multi-cultural body of instruments which responds to his wide background of training and experience. 

Becker's performing experience spans nearly all of the musical disciplines where percussion is found.  He has been percussionist for the Marlboro Music Festival and timpanist with the Marlboro Festival Orchestra under Pablo Casals. For several years he was percussionist with the Paul Winter Consort, and he has performed and recorded with Gil Evans, Steve Gadd, Paul Horn and Chuck Mangione.  He has also performed and recorded with such diverse groups as the Ensemble Intercontemporaine under Pierre Boulez, the Ensemble Modern of Germany, the Schoenberg Ensemble of Amsterdam and the Boston Chamber Players.  He has appeared as tabla soloist in India and has accompanied many of the major artists of Hindustani music.  He is also a founding member of the Flaming Dono West African Dance and Drum Ensemble in Toronto.

As a member of NEXUS he has appeared as soloist with the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Cleveland Orchestra among many others, and has received the Toronto Arts Award and the Banff Centre for the Arts National Award.  In 1999, he and the other members of NEXUS were inducted into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame. As a regular member of the ensemble Steve Reich and Musicians, he has appeared as soloist with the Israel Philharmonic, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic and the London Symphony and recorded for Deutsche Grammophone, EMI and Nonesuch.

Generally considered to be one of the world's premier virtuoso performers on the xylophone and marimba, he also appears regularly as an independent soloist and clinician.  He has served as editor for the contemporary percussion issue of the British publication Contemporary Music Revue and served for two years on the Board of Directors of the Percussive Arts Society. 

Becker's compositions and arrangements are performed regularly by percussion groups worldwide.  He also has a long history of association with dance and has created music for the Joffrey Ballet in New York, among others.  In 1991, he and Joan Phillips were awarded the National Arts Centre Award for the best collaboration between composer and choreographer at Toronto's INDE '91 dance festival.  His most recent works include There is a Time, commissioned by Rina Singha and the Danny Grossman Dance Company; Noodrem, commissioned through the Canada Council by the Dutch ensemble Slagwerkgroep Den Haag; Turning Point, composed for the NEXUS ensemble; Cryin' Time, a setting of poetry by the Canadian artist Sandra Meigs; Never in Word and Time in the Rock, settings of poetry by the American author Conrad Aiken; and Music On The Moon, commissioned through the Laidlaw Foundation by the Esprit Orchestra in Toronto.

Becker's solo CD album There is a Time was released in 1995 on the Nexus Records label and features many of his recent compositions.  In the spring of 1997 he was selected to be composer-in-residence for the Virginia Waterfront International Festival of the Arts which featured the United States premier of Music On The Moon by the Virginia Symphony and a concert of his chamber works by his own group, the Bob Becker Ensemble.

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