Composer Robert Kyr is a prolific creator who draws on diverse influences, including historical styles, world musical traditions, environmental concerns, and spiritual ideas. He is also an important teacher of composition and music theory. Kyr was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 20, 1952. He attended Yale University, earning a bachelor's degree summa cum laude. After a stint in Britain, where he studied at the Royal College of Music and the Dartington Summer School for the Arts (with Peter Maxwell Davies at the latter), Kyr returned to the U.S. for a master's degree at the University of Pennsylvania, which he received in 1978. He studied there with George Rochberg and George Crumb. In the 1980s, Kyr taught composition and theory at Yale, UCLA, and the Hartt School of Music in Connecticut, among other schools. Kyr went on for a PhD at Harvard (1989), where his teachers included Donald Martino and Earl Kim. He began to find commissions for his work during this period from the Harvard Glee Club, Radcliffe Choral Society, and Yale Camerata, among other organizations. In 1990, Kyr joined the faculty at the University of Oregon, where he has remained ever since. Many of his commissions have come from West Coast performing organizations, including the chorus Chanticleer, the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, and the Oregon Symphony, but others have come from as far afield as Scotland, Estonia, and Russia. His music is not classifiable as either modernist or neo-Romantic. It is tonal but incorporates a wide variety of influences from world musical traditions as well as various periods of the Western tradition. Kyr is often motivated by contemporary events and by a consciousness of environmental issues, and many of his works, such as the environmental oratorio A Time for Life, for chorus and string trio (2007), have a spiritual dimension. Recordings of Kyr's music began to appear in the mid-1990s, with his three violin concertos (subtitled "On the Nature of Love," "On the Nature of Harmony," and "On the Nature of Peace") issued by the Third Angle New Music Ensemble. More than 25 of his compositions have been recorded. In 2021, the album Robert Kyr: In Praise of Music was released on the Bridge label by the Antioch Chamber Ensemble.