Bob Gilmore

Bob Gilmore (6 June 1961 – 2 January 2015) was a musicologist, educator and keyboard player. Born in Larne, Northern Ireland, he spent his early years in Carrickfergus. He studied music at York University, England, then at Queen's University Belfast (PhD. 1992), and, on a Fulbright Scholarship, at the University of California, San Diego. He is best known for his books on American music: he wrote Harry Partch: A Biography (Yale University Press, 1998) and edited with an introduction "Maximum Clarity" and Other Writings on Music (University of Illinois Press, 2006—collected writings by Ben Johnston), both of which were recipients of the Deems Taylor Award from ASCAP. He also wrote extensively on the American experimental tradition, microtonal music and spectral music, including the work of such figures as James Tenney, Horațiu Rădulescu, Claude Vivier, and Frank Denyer. He wrote on the work of younger Irish composers including Deirdre Gribbin, Donnacha Dennehy and Jennifer Walshe in the Journal of Music in Ireland. He taught at Queen's University Belfast, Dartington College of Arts, and Brunel University in London, and was a Research Fellow at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent. He was the founder, director and keyboard player of Trio Scordatura, an Amsterdam-based ensemble dedicated to the performance of microtonal music, and for the year 2014 was editor of Tempo, a quarterly journal of new music. His biography of French-Canadian composer Claude Vivier was published by University of Rochester Press in June 2014.