For almost 20 years, Rob Kapilow has brought the joy and wonder of classical music – and unraveled some of its mysteries – to audiences of all ages and backgrounds. Characterized by his unique ability to create an “aha” moment for his audiences and collaborators, whatever their level of musical sophistication or naiveté, Kapilow’s work brings music into people’s lives: opening new ears to musical experiences and helping people to listen actively rather than just hear. As the Boston Globe said, “It’s a cheering thought that this kind of missionary enterprise did not pass from this earth with Leonard Bernstein. Rob Kapilow is awfully good at what he does. We need him.”

Kapilow’s range of activities is astonishingly broad, including his What Makes It Great?® presentations (now in their fifteenth seasons in New York and Boston ), his family compositions and Family Musik® events, and his “Citypieces”. The reach of his interactive events and activities is wide, both geographically and culturally: from Native American tribal communities in Montana and inner-city high school students in Louisiana to wine-tasters in the Napa Valley, and from tots barely out of diapers to musicologists long out of Ivy League programs, his audiences are diverse and unexpected, but invariably rapt and keen to come back for more.
A frequent guest speaker for business groups, foundations, hospitals, law schools, math departments and conferences, Rob Kapilow is constantly finding connections and intersections between music and the outside world, making art essential to everyday life.

Kapilow’s popularity and appeal are reflected in notable invitations and achievements: he appeared on NBC’s Today Show in conversation with Katie Couric; he presented a special What Makes It Great?® event for broadcast on PBS’s Live From Lincoln Center in January 2008; and he has written two highly popular books published by Wiley/Lincoln Center: All You Have To Do Is Listen (2008) which won the PSP Prose Award for Best Book in Music and the Performing Arts, and What Makes It Great (2011), the first book of its kind to be especially designed for the iPad with embedded musical examples.
A documentary film, named Summer Sun, Winter Moon after Kapilow’s choral/symphonic work of the same name, which traces the process of that work’s composition from its conception through to its premiere, has been broadcast more than 250 times on Public Television since 2009.

Rob Kapilow dedicates his summer months to writing and composing new music, most recently a large-scale work commissioned by the Marin Symphony to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge, which will be premiered in June 2012.

Kapilow’s career has been marked by numerous major awards and grants. He won first place in the Fontainebleau Casadesus Piano Competition and was the second-place winner of the Antal Dorati Conductor’s Competition with the Detroit Symphony. As a composer, Kapilow was a featured on Chicago Public Radio’s prestigious “Composers In America” series and is a recipient of an Exxon “Meet-the-Composer” grant and numerous ASCAP awards.

Kapilow has conducted many of North America's finest orchestras including the Philadelphia Orchestra, the National Symphony, the St. Louis, Atlanta, Toronto, and Detroit Symphonies and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. He is an exclusive Schirmer composer and his many compositions have been performed by nearly every major American orchestra as well as orchestras in Europe, Asia and Australia.
He lives in River Vale, NJ, with his wife and three children.

 

What Makes It Great?©

 

Kapilow’s What Makes It Great?©(WMIG) made its auspicious debut on NPR’s Performance Today more than a decade ago, and with its accessible ten-minute format it quickly attracted a wide base of fans and followers. Snowballing in popularity, it developed into a full-length concert evening and was soon snapped up by presenters looking to build new audiences. What Makes It Great?©now sells out regular subscription series in Kansas City (13^th season) and Cerritos, CA (tenth season), as well as at New York’s Lincoln Center and Boston’s Celebrity Series, both in their eleventh seasons. On January 10, 2008, PBS’s Live From Lincoln Center will broadcast a special What Makes It Great?© show, bringing it to TV screens throughout the US; worldwide audiences will be able to see and experience Kapilow’s trademarked presentations when Lincoln Center inaugurates a series of WMIG video podcasts in October. In November, Chicago audiences will get a chance to experience WMIG first-hand – and on the radio – when Kapilow joins the Pacifica Quartet at its Beethoven Festival and the proceedings will be broadcast by WFMT. WPAS will introduce WMIG to Washington audiences in the spring of 2008. Kapilow’s interactive presentations take form in a range of musical genres – from Chopin piano étudesand Bach choral masses to Gershwin song standards. In 2005, Kapilow introduced a series of WMIGevents, designed especially for teenagers, to thousands of middle- and high-school children in collaboration with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. At the end of 2002, Kapilow’s Bernstein “Songbook” event at the Lincoln Center was selected as one of the New York Times’s “Top Ten Moments” of 2002’s theater offerings.

Rob Kapilow’s What Makes It Great?©programs are available on CD, on the Vanguard Everyman Classics label. In discs devoted to Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusic and the “Jupiter” Symphony, Kapilow breaks the music down in a listener-friendly way – pulling themes apart, demonstrating how the tunes might sound in lesser hands, guiding listeners through the maze of melodies – and then finishes up with a complete performance of the work.