Ronald Robboy began performing with the SDSO in 1970, and the next year with the San Diego Opera. His early teachers included SDSO veterans Paul Anderson and Vivian Bark, whose 1779 English cello Robboy plays today. His principal later teachers were Gabor Rejto and Rafael Druian. Robboy attended UC San Diego and counts composers Kenneth Gaburo and Pauline Oliveros as mentors, as well as conceptual artist/filmmaker Eleanor Antin. He was also assistant to instrument inventor Harry Partch, helping refurbish Partch’s visionary creations.
Robboy’s mother worked as a synagogue music director, and from her he developed an appreciation of Jewish music. He became an early figure in the klezmer revival and was leader of The Big Jewish Band and other experimental groups in the 1970s and 80s. Now a scholar of Yiddish theater music, he has taught Yiddish literature at UCSD and presented his research at academic conferences internationally. A current interest of his is the music of Yiddish films, on which he has been lecturing extensively.
(See http://conneyproject.wisc.edu/videos-2009/ronald-robboy/)
As Senior Researcher for conductor Michael Tilson Thomas’s Thomashefsky Project, Robboy conducted archival research, translated texts, and reconstructed musical numbers for Tilson Thomas’s Yiddish theater evening at Carnegie Hall in 2005. He has collaborated with numerous artists, composers, and writers, and has presented his own music at venues as varied as The Kitchen and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the San Diego Jewish Film Festival, who commissioned his score for a silent Yiddish film of the 1920s.
With recording credits on Warner, Innova, and New Tone (Italy), Robboy is also a contributor to the new edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica and has written for numerous arts journals and CD liner notes as well as small-press magazines and anthologies. Ron is married to SDSO violinist Susan Robboy.