Robert Paredes: composer, multi-reed performer---(clarinet, saxophone, flute)--- visual artist and essayist was born in San Diego California and educated at San Diego State college and at the University of Iowa where he earned the MA and Ph.D degrees in composition.
From 1991 to '93 he was visiting assistant professor at the University of Iowa in which capacity he directed the electronic music studios and taught composition. Most recently he served as visiting adjunct professor of Jazz Studies at the U of I where he taught improvisation, transcription, assisted in the jazz theory program and performed widely with the faculty jazz ensemble.
Over the years, Paredes was
- a freelance musician in Melbourne Australia, 1984-86;
- artist in residence at the Festival of Improvised Music/Evos , Perth, Australia, 1986;
- artist in residence at Unit One/Exptl. Sch. Of the U. of Ill., Champaign, Urbana, 1989-89;
- artist in residence/festival de inverno Universidade Fed., Belo Horizone, Brazil, 1992
- and composer in residence under the auspices of Meet the Composer, Southern Arts Federation, National Endowment for the Arts & the Alabama State Council of the Arts, Birmingham, Ala., 1993.
In addition he was composer-adjudicator for the McKnight prize, American Composer's Forum, 1992. Recordings in which he performed include
- Out On the Western Plains, 1987 (with Alex Coke, Stephen Feld and Tina Marsh)
- Shalom Y'all 1987 (Austin Klezmorim);
- Harry Partch's, The Bewitched, 1980;
- John Rapson's Blood and Water, 2000 (with Billy Higgins, Kim Richmond, Vinny Golia and Roberto Miranda);
- PHD, Paredes-Hatwich duo, 2001 ( with Anton Hatwich, contrabass)
- and John Rapson's Mallicked Simulacrum, 2002 (University of Iowa Faculty Jazz Ensemble).
As yet unreleased recording projects include performances of eighties pop covers with Matt Wilson and Dan Moore and Dostoevsky, Jews and Gypsys: Klezmer/Gypsy music with early music specialist, Oleg Timoffiev and Russian Gypsy guitarist, Vadim Kolpakov. As well, he performed in concert with John Rapson, Vinny Golia, Kim Richmond, Reggie Thomas, Kenny Wheeler, Anthony Cox and Matt Wilson.
His essays and text pieces have appeared in Open Space Magazine and Perspectives of New Music. Art exhibits in which his visual work has appeared include Texas Musicians in Art, 1987, and Composition as Eco-System, 1990. In addition to the above, compositions by Paredes include (On)e for flute and clarinet, 1985; Forgetting and Remembering for two-channel tape (a multi-track accumulation of improvisations on clarinet, 1986 and Speakers, a series of seventeen tape compositions-as-writings/drawings, 1987-93. Recordings of his compositions include #16 (Speakers)/Fiesta, 1992, (electronic music on the Music and Arts label); Forgetting and Remembering and #17 (Speakers)/In Every Moment of Decay), 1993 (electronic music on the Innova label) and Small Writing (compositon for solo cello on the Innova label).
His final composition, Fleeting Ecologies in an Ontology of Halting is for solo organ.
Robert Paredes died of cancer August 20, 2005.
