Faculty Profile
Robert Pound
Professor of Music (1998)
Contact Information
on sabbatical 2025-26
Weiss Center for the Arts
717-245-1332
Bio
Composer and conductor Robert Pound teaches courses in theory, composition, and conducting. He is Director of the Dickinson Orchestra. Pound’s numerous compositions include orchestral works for the Atlanta Symphony and the Columbus (GA) Symphony, the St. Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra, and the Youth Orchestra of Greater Columbus. He has received commissions from such distinguished ensembles as the Corigliano Quartet, the Timaeus Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, and the Florestan Recital Project. Pound has also written music for professional stage productions, including Eurydice, Moby Dick Rehearsed, Oedipus at Colonus, André Gregory’s Bone Songs, Strindberg’s The Dance of Death, and the premiere G.D. Kimble's play What Passes for Comedy (2022). In March 2002, Pound was Composer in Residence at Columbus State University. He was guest composer and lecturer at the University of North Texas in April 2010. Pound has guest conducted with Verge (the performing ensemble of the Contemporary Music Forum, Washington, DC) with whom he performed at the June in Buffalo Festival in 2009. He was Music Director of the West Shore Symphony Orchestra (New Cumberland, PA) from 2000 to 2002. As a Fellow at Tanglewood Music Center in the summer of 2003, he participated in master classes with Robert Spano, Christoph von Dohnányi and Kurt Masur and conducted Peter Lieberson’s Razing the Gaze in Seiji Ozawa Hall as part of the Festival of Contemporary Music. More information and samples of Pound's music at: http://robertwpound.com/
Education
- B.M., University of North Texas, 1992
- M.M., The Juilliard School, 1994
- D.M.A., 1998
2026-2027 Academic Year
Fall 2026
FYSM 100 First-Year Seminar
The First-Year Seminar (FYS) introduces students to Dickinson as a "community of inquiry" by developing habits of mind essential to liberal learning. Through the study of a compelling issue or broad topic chosen by their faculty member, students will:
- Critically analyze information and ideas
- Examine issues from multiple perspectives
- Discuss, debate and defend ideas, including one's own views, with clarity and reason
- Develop discernment, facility and ethical responsibility in using information, and
- Create clear academic writing
The small group seminar format of this course promotes discussion and interaction among students and their professor. In addition, the professor serves as students' initial academic advisor. This course does not duplicate in content any other course in the curriculum and may not be used to fulfill any other graduation requirement.
MUAC 125 Keys to Music 2: Sacred Roots
Cross-listed with RELG 318-01.
MUAC 231 Keep the Peace/Spare the Clash
Two or more musicians, equal in importance, have to agree to some basic principles so as to make beautiful sonorities together and not merely clash in chaos. One such set of rules is the 500-year-old Western practice of counterpoint, the art and technique of combining multiple parts to create well-organized sounds and not sonic disorder. In this class, students learn to use this compositional technique, composing short etudes and studying 15th-18th-Century composers and repertoire as models. Each semester culminates in a short contrapuntal work for 2, 3, or 4 voices. May be taken out of sequence. Two semesters, 0.5 credit each semester. Prerequisite: MUAC 115 or 125 or substantial evidence of previous compositional experience, advanced theory placement by exam (e.g. into MUAC 126, 245 or 246) and permission of instructor.
MUAC 232 Keep the Peace/Spare the Clash
Two or more musicians, equal in importance, have to agree to some basic principles so as to make beautiful sonorities together and not merely clash in chaos. One such set of rules is the 500-year-old Western practice of counterpoint, the art and technique of combining multiple parts to create well-organized sounds and not sonic disorder. In this class, students learn to use this compositional technique, composing short etudes and studying 15th-18th-Century composers and repertoire as models. Each semester culminates in a short contrapuntal work for 2, 3, or 4 voices. May be taken out of sequence. Two semesters, 0.5 credit each semester. Prerequisite: MUAC 115 or 125 or substantial evidence of previous compositional experience, advanced theory placement by exam (e.g. into MUAC 126, 245 or 246) and permission of instructor.
RELG 318 Keys to Music 2: Sacred Roots
Cross-listed with MUAC 125-01. What are the deepest roots of contemporary music, popular and arcane? In this course, we begin by studying the earliest written music in the Western world. We trace its technical developments from the modal music of the secluded monastery to the contrapuntal complexity of Renaissance musical cathedrals. Doing so, we begin assembling a tool kit for musical performance, composition, and analysis, including modes and the incipience of the major-minor key system.
MUAC 493 SR Sem in Analytical Theory
Advanced independent study in musical analysis culminating in the creation of a major analytical essay. Open to seniors majoring in music. Prerequisite: 245, 246, the relevant 300-level seminar, and permission of the department chair.
Spring 2027
MUAC 246 Keys to Music 5
As Western culture and life endured some of its most tumultuous upheavals, Western music similarly experienced its own world-shaking changes. Composers and performers engaged in rabid experimentation like mad musical scientists, seeking new methods and materials to give voice to life in the Atomic Age and after. Many Western musicians sought inspiration and materials in the musics of other cultures. In this course, we continue to fill our musical toolkits with new elements for performance, creation, and analysis, studying the music from the 20th Century to the present, as well as scales and techniques such as Indian ragas and Arabic maqam. The course includes two fifty-minute classes of aural skills lab each week. Prerequisite: 126, placement exam, or permission of the instructor. Offered every spring semester.
MUAC 335 Comp Studies I: Orchestration
Permission of Instructor Required.
MUAC 345 Keys to Music 6
Having filled your musical toolkit with elements and techniques in previous semesters of this track, develop and apply your own theories of music. We will learn and apply sophisticated methods of analysis and theorizing, methods that propose what makes music coherent, how it makes sense, what holds a piece together. Reaching beyond the received, Common-Practice theory of parts 1 – 5, this course explores a wide variety of music theories from the 18th Century up to the present. Prerequisite: 245 or 246.