Christopher Roberts - a 2007 Artist Support Program Participant - will discuss the process of composing 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 is a composer and musician who draws from the classical, jazz, and Pacific Rim musical traditions. 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.