Robyn Schulkowsky was born in Eureka, South Dakota, USA. She attended the University of Iowa, taught percussion at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and was a member of the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestra of Santa Fe. She has lived in Germany since 1980, first as a student and an assistant to Christoph Caskel in Cologne, then as a premiere percussionist of new music, taking part in the major contemporary music festivals throughout Europe.

Schulkowsky has worked with composers such as John Cage, Mauricio Kagel, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Kevin Volans, Christian Wolff, Luigi Nono and Walter Zimmermann, among others. She has also been involved in a number of notable recordings, especially works of Cage, Feldman, and Nono. Schulkowsky is also active as a composer. She has written music for theater productions and films, including a collection of solo and ensemble works for percussion only. She is also known as an improviser, both as a soloist and on the free jazz scene, notably with Derek Bailey. Schulkowsky performed in Ghana with the country's master drummer Ghanaba.

Schulkowsky is continuously exploring new ways of presenting music, often connected with visual arts and in alternative performance spaces. She organized a series of festivals at the Neue Pinakotheke in Munich around the music of Cage, Feldman and Wolff. She also organized a 24-hour concert of percussion music with performers from around the world for the 2000 World's Fair in Hannover, Germany. Recently, she premiered works by Christian Wolff, Rebecca Saunders, Tigran Mansurian, and Wolfgang Rihm, to name a few and released a recording on ECM with Kim Kashkashian and music by Luciano Berio.

At the Munich Musiktheater Biennial in 2002 she collaborated with Lukas Kuehne to create a new percussion instrument. This instrument, known as the Baers, consists of large, sub-bass, marimba-like bars. In the fall of 2002 Schulkowsky will perform and teach in Montevideo, Uruguay and Buenos Aires, Argentina, as well as work with Fredy Studer and Joey Baron on a new percussion project in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil.

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