Christopher Roberts (1956-)
Last Cicada Singing

Four serene, deeply emotive pieces for solo qin (a Chinese zither-like instrument). Quiet, sparce, slightly eerie, almost Feldmanesque, these pieces are performed by the composer, who mastered the qin while living and teaching for many years in Taiwan. Roberts writes about this album: “Chinese scholars in antiquity took their qins to the mountains to compose music in accord with the aesthetics of nature. They developed string techniques to convey the movements of birds, insects, streams, even zephyrs and mist. Gesture became music, a tactile rhetoric to describe the most distant or delicate notions. Silence was an integral motif. I was inspired by the old qin books of music notation and extended the calligraphy to include a contemporary language.” (28-minute CD EP, in digipak)