Jeff Roberts is a composer-improviser and sound artist working in interdisciplinary acoustic and electroacoustic contexts. His creative work explores relationships between different music cultures and styles and between the natural world and musical world. As a Fulbright scholar, he studied guqin performance and improvisation with guqin master Li Xiangting at Beijing Central Conservatory of music in China. This context allowed him to research ideas of intuition, spontaneity and creativity and the man-nature connection in Daoist philosophy (which is a foundation for the guqin tradition) and compare, contrast and integrate it with similar ideas in American thought specifically related to the New England Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, as well as the music of Charles Ives. 

 

His compositions have been described as ‘bewitching’ and         ‘delicately affecting’ by the Boston Globe and Boston Music Intelligencer, Roberts’ music has been performed and commissioned worldwide by ensembles such as Philharmonisches Orchester Cottbus, Eighth Blackbird, Dinosaur Annex, Ensemble Emex, Ensemble Interface, Wet Ink, Microcosmos, Music From China and IO Ensemble. He has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, Asian Cultural Council Grant, Franz Goethe Stiftung Grant and his compositions have been awarded the Kaske Prize from the Wellesley Composer’s Conference, winner of the 2008 Bent Frenquency Competition and finalist selections in  Città di Udine, Music07/Eighth Blackbird and Ensemble Et Cetra composition competitions. He has held artist residencies at The Banff Center Leighton Artist Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Brush Creek Foundation and the STEIM Foundation.

 

Rooted in his studies in Beijing with guqin master Li Xiangting, Dr. Roberts performs frequently on guqin in solo and collaborative improvised contexts, often using a self-developed, a sensor-interacitve live-electronic setting to both expand the sound of guqin and integrate historical guqin performance with modern, cross-cultural musical contexts. He is currently developing an improvisation ensemble with Korean piri master Gamin and other traditional instrumentalists from Korea, Taiwan and Serbia. He has collaborated in the past with guqin master Wu Na and has also worked and performed with members of the Silk Road Ensemble and Music from China Ensemble. As a sound artist, he collaborates with Colombian performance artist Adriana Rojas Pretel on modern shadow theatre projects and Seattle-based installation artist Roger Feldman on sound installation projects.

 

Dr. Roberts founded and directs the Music Beyond The Moongate International Chamber Music Festival held at Yishu8 House of Art and the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, China. He holds a PhD in Music Composition and Theory from Brandies University, and M.M. in Composition from Boston University and a B.M. in Contemporary Improvisation from New England Conservatory of Music. Dr. Roberts has taught at Beijing Center for Chinese Studies, Tufts University Experimental College and as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Composition at Williams College. He currently teaches in the Music and the East Asian Studies Departments at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.