Composer Spotlight
CHRISTOPHER ROBERTS
Trios for Deep Voices
Wed., March 11 @ 7:30pm
Jack Straw Productions
4261 Roosevelt Way NE Seattle map FREE
Christopher Roberts will present his Trios for Deep Voices, recorded recently through the Jack Straw Productions’ Artist Residence Program and released by Cold Blue Music. These double bass works began in 1981 when he first traveled to Papua New Guinea. He lived with the people of the Star Mountains and introduced them to his double bass, while they introduced him to their songs. The villagers put him through a drumbeat initiation and built him a cane house, where he learned to decipher the sounds of the jungle around him. An idiosyncratic improviser, Roberts developed new string techniques in composing these unique chamber works, which will be featured in this Composer Spotlight performance.
Christopher Roberts - a 2007 Artist Support Program Participant - is a composer and musician who draws from the classical, jazz, and Pacific Rim musical traditions. He grew up the son of a jazz bassist in Southern California, where his own first bass was the "prop" bass, with bullet holes, from the Billy Wilder movie Some Like It Hot. He studied music in New York at the Juilliard School, where he earned master's and doctoral degrees in both composition and double bass. Following the focus and intensity of the conservatory environment, he shouldered his bass and went to live in Papua New Guinea on a quest to understand natural prosody in music. He then traveled to Taiwan on a Fulbright grant to study the Chinese classical qin, which inadvertently led to research of the island’s aboriginal music. He taught composition, theory, and double bass for a number of years at Soochow University in Taipei and is now the music program director at Whatcom Community College in Bellingham.
Supporters
Jack Straw Productions gratefully acknowledges The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, City of Seattle’s Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, 4Culture King County Lodging Tax Fund, Washington State Arts Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, PONCHO, ArtsFund, Seattle Foundation, and individual contributors for their support of Jack Straw Artist Programs.