Robert S. Winter

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Robert Winter received his B.A. from Brown University, M.F.A. from the State University of New York at Buffalo and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He joined the UCLA Department of Music in 1974, unleashing his inimitable energy, dedication and passion for performance to students and audiences. His love of performance shaped a critical break from traditional academic curricula in 1989 when Winter, along with three colleagues, retooled the music department’s curricula to craft new courses combining performance and scholarship. That break led to Winter’s course on The Art of Listening, in which non-music majors learned about classical music from the perspective of performance. Winter has continued to shape the department by creating two graduate performance degrees, the master of music and the doctor of musical arts.

A popular public speaker, Winter became widely known to the general public in 1979 through a 10-week live music series for American Public Radio on Mozart and Beethoven. He has lectured or performed for countless audiences in a wide array of venues including the American Symphony Orchestra League, the New York and Los Angeles philharmonics, the San Francisco and Chicago symphonies, the Met, the Smithsonian and the Getty. A Wall Street Journal article in 1993 described him as “the best explicator of music since Leonard Bernstein.” His work has been honored with numerous awards, including the the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983 and the Frances Densmore Prize from the American Musicological Society’s Board of Directors in 1990.

Live performance also has led him into the digital world. He authored the Voyager Company’s first interactive CD-ROM in 1989, regarded today as the first commercial interactive publication. This led to seven more CD-ROMs that have collectively sold more than 1 million copies and shaped learning in thousands of classrooms around the world, from kindergartens to post-graduate seminars.

At UCLA, Winter was named to the Presidential Chair in Music and Interactive Arts. From 1996-2000 he was the founder and director of UCLA's Center for the Digital Arts. During this same period he also served as associate dean for technology in the UCLA School of the Arts & Architecture.

As president of Calliope, a multimedia publishing company devoted to originally authored programs in the arts, humanities and entertainment, he authored or produced numerous titles from Robert Winter's Crazy for Ragtime to Interactive Perlman that have continued to receive wide critical acclaim.

As he continues to drive innovations in music education, Winter remains certain of why he teaches. He highlights his first lecture at UCLA, given in September 1974. “What I discovered in the first hour was what has fueled me ever since - an addiction to watching people learn. When you witness neural networks rewiring themselves in front of your eyes, you are about as close to the miracle of being human as you will ever get.”