Christopher Roberts Trios for Deep Voices Roberts Morton Bergman - CB0030 - Contemporain

Five intimate yet intensely animated pieces for a trio of double basses performed by the composer and two other virtuosos of the instrument. This music, much of it inspired by composer Roberts‘s life in Papua New Guinea, subtly extends the double bass’s standard playing techniques via such expressive elements as bowing patterns inspired by the sound of hornbills in flight. Roberts writes about the Trios: In 1981, I ran off to the jungles of Papua New Guinea to study the natural prosody of music. I lived with the people of the Star Mountains and introduced them to my double bass, while they introduced me to their songs. I took part in drumbeat initiations and listened to the sound of hornbills in flight. I was overwhelmed. I had a dream in which I moved my bow across the strings of the bass in an entirely new way that recreated the drums, and the hornbills’ wings, and the voices of the people whose every song tells a story. The sounds in New Guinea and their constant shaping and recurrence hit me right away as a deep signature of a place, the way the water moved through its gorges, the tone of the insects, the way people there would sing, and the particular choruses of the birds. In fact I cannot imagine the vocal music without the environment surrounding, as my house was as open as a woven basket, and the sounds of the rivers and insects followed the cycle of day and night, drought or deluge. To remember songs, I stand near streams. The Trios describe being in New Guinea, as the strings of a bass would tell it.… Hearing the hornbills in a mist-shrouded forest moving across the unseen world just above you…the atmosphere of being outside at dusk with the insects screaming and the water rushing … In the composition of music, I work with the medium of a written score, and the natural idiomatic way of a given instrument, following the technical inclinations of resonant strings.… Over time, over years, the impressions, the motifs most resilient in improvisation and memory unfold their stories to me in a developing variation proportionately whorled like some sort of topography across the score paper.” [CD and folder in jewel case]