Robin Lopez-Hanshaw is a composer, conductor, author, and metalworker in bronze and steel. She has a deep interest in music that transcends cultural boundaries, and a belief that even ordinary singers can achieve extraordinary musical heights.
Her music has been commissioned and performed by many of Tucson’s classical ensembles, notably including the Tucson Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in 2020, and a series of pieces for the Tucson Girls Chorus in 2016-2019. In 2018, she organized, composed, rehearsed, and conducted an hour-long “Chanukah Cantata,” featuring solos by all of Tucson’s Jewish cantors, which was performed with SASO at the Tucson JCC, introduced by then-Mayor Jonathan Rothschild. She has also composed original scores and provided sound design for seven theatrical productions by Scoundrel & Scamp and Winding Road Theater Ensemble.
Robin studied music composition at the University of Arizona, where she also sang in the Symphonic Choir under Dr. Elizabeth Schauer, and served as the Assistant Conductor of that ensemble for a year. She taught music at various K-12 schools in Tucson from 2010-2015, and was choir director at Temple Emanu-El (now Kol Ami Synagogue), the Tucson chapter of HaZamir International Jewish Teen Choir, and the UA Faculty-Staff Choir variously from 2015-2021. She also formed a chamber choir, Camerata Sonora, which she co-directed for three seasons, before this too was disrupted by the pandemic.
Her writing on microtonality has been published by New Music USA; her articles on microtonal choral pedagogy in the International Choral Bulletin (for which they were also translated into Spanish, French, and German); and she was invited to contribute a chapter on musical evolution to the volume Music in Human Experience (2022) edited by Dr. Jonathan Friedmann. She has presented on microtonal topics at conferences in Pittsburgh and Phoenix. She is currently finishing a textbook on microtonality and a children’s fantasy novel.
Her metalworking career has led her to work on both industrial and decorative steel fabrication, and artistic production in bronze. She has been part of the team creating dozens of monumental bronze sculptures for clients across the US and the world, notably including the Kobe Bryant memorial statue installed at the Staples Center in LA. Many pieces she has helped work on are visible in Sedona, AZ, including the massive 33-foot Living Christ at the Chapel of the Holy Cross. With her skills in handiwork, she has also built and restored musical instruments, performs her own luthiery on her basses and guitars, and has designed and built microtonal experimental instruments including an adjustable-fret guitar and a midi-controlled microtonal saxophone. Her abiding hope is to build an Octobass to play with Tucson orchestras.
Robin is married to the fabulous Alisha Nichols, also a composer, and a fellow bass player in SASO. Her children from a previous marriage are also musical: her son is a classical guitarist who sang in the Boys Chorus, and her daughter has sung in the Girls Chorus for thirteen seasons.