Along with his extensive concertizing, Robert Mealy is deeply committed to education. He has taught and lectured on period performance practices, historical techniques, rhetoric, and improvisation at Columbia, Brown, Yale, Rutgers, Oberlin, Vanderbilt, and UC Berkeley. His talk at Columbia in celebration of Corelli’s anniversary may be found online here.
In 2009, Mr. Mealy joined the faculty of The Juilliard School in their new Historical Performance graduate program. There he teaches a second-year seminar in historical performance practice and works intensively with chamber music ensembles. In 2012, he was appointed Director of the Juilliard program, where he will oversee curriculum development that will ensure the students receive a well-rounded two-year education in historical performance issues from 1600 through 1835.
Mr. Mealy is also adjunct professor of music at the Yale School of Music, where he directs the postgraduate Yale Baroque Ensemble. From 2006-2012 he directed the Yale Collegium in an annual series of concerts at the Beinecke Library in a wide range of programs: students have explored works of the troubadours and trouvères, the music Lully wrote for Molière’s plays, and examined the music Charles Burney found on his tours of Europe, among many other projects. Mr. Mealy’s student players also perform regularly with the Yale Schola Cantorum. These collaborations have resulted in sold-out performances in both New Haven and New York, including projects with Mark Morris, Masaaki Suzuki, and Helmuth Rilling, and tours to China, Korea, and Italy. Several of these live performances have since appeared as critically-acclaimed cds: Biber’s Vesperae, Bertali’s Missa Resurrectionis. and Bach’s St John Passion in the 1725 version. He has also been closely involved in fully-staged productions of baroque opera at Yale as part of Ellen Rosand’s multi-year Yale Baroque Opera Project: productions have included Monteverdi’s Orfeo and Ulisse, Cavalli’s Giasone and Scipione Affricano, and the American premiere of the important Sacrati opera La Finta Pazza.
In 1995 he founded the Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra with Murray Somerville, and went on to direct the ensemble for over a decade. One of the only undergraduate baroque orchestras in America, the HBCO has collaborated with distinguished early music figures such as William Christie, Christopher Hogwood, Ton Koopman, Andrew Parrott, and Robert Levin, and has collectively improvised with Bobby McFerrin to a packed audience at Sanders Theater. Mr. Mealy also served as advisor to the Harvard Early Music Society, which has produced a fully-staged Baroque opera annually for the last ten years. Since its inception, the Society has produced Monteverdi’s Orfeo and Poppea, Cavalli’s Giasone and Orontea, Handel’s Acis and Galatea, Purcell’s Fairy Queen and Dido and Aeneas, Bonocini’s Triumphs of Camilla, and Charpentier’s Actéon and Les Plaisirs de Versailles. (Mr. Mealy music-directed this last production, which was then invited to Versailles.) According to the Boston Globe, “this group bears watching: it is serious, funny, and smart.”
In 2004, for his work with both Harvard and Yale, Mr. Mealy received Early Music America’s Binkley Award for outstanding collegium direction at the university level.
