ABOUT
"…every note, every sound carries its own narrative weight, as if it were a puzzle piece in a vast, borderless picture. A standout example is Shui Jiezou (Water Rhythm), where field recordings of rain are artfully interwoven with Korean, Japanese, and Chinese instruments. This piece, which merges natural sounds with musical interpretation, serves as a reminder of how closely music and the environment can be intertwined.”
~ AM:PLIFIED (Germany)
Jeffrey Roberts is a composer, improviser, and researcher working at the intersection of acoustic/electroacoustic composition and improvisation, experimental music, and East Asian music traditions. His music explores the relationships between different musical styles and cultures. His work has been recognized with awards and funding from the Fulbright Foundation, SSHRC (the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council), the Asian Cultural Council, the Franz Goethe Stiftung, the Korea Foundation, and the National Gugak Center, among others.
His compositions have received awards and recognition including the Composers Conference Kaske Prize, first prize in the Bent Frequency Competition, and honorable mentions in the Città di Udine International Composition Contest and the Eighth Blackbird Music/07 Composition Competition. His compositions have been jury-selected for festivals worldwide including the Frankfurt Gesellschaft für Neue Musik (Germany), Wellesley Composers Conference, June in Buffalo, Contempo New Music Festival (China), Fresno New Music Festival, Contemporanea Festival (Italy), Toronto International Electro-Acoustic Symposium, Warebrook Contemporary Music Festival, Composition in Asia Festival, I/O Festival, Now Hear This Festival (Canada), New York Electroacoustic Music Festival, World Stage Design Festival, and the CHIME Festival-Conference in Beijing. His music has been performed by multiple international ensembles including Philharmonisches Orchester Cottbus, Eighth Blackbird, E-Mex Ensemble, PAN Project Ensemble, Ensemble Mikrokosmos, Music from China, Ensemble Interface, No Left Notes Ensemble, CAMP Ensemble, Cygnus Ensemble, Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble, Wet Ink Ensemble, and Bent Frequency Ensemble.
His study of guqin performance with guqin master Li Xiangting (李祥霆) as Senior Scholar at the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music has led to an active international performing career on the instrument. He co-founded and serves as co-artistic director of PAN Project Ensemble (in partnership with Korean piri player Gamin Kang), a group of master musicians performing in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese traditions dedicated to creating modern music rooted in the intercultural history of East Asia. As a guqin soloist and co-leader of PAN Project, he has performed across North America, Europe, and East Asia at such venues as Arena Stage (Washington DC), Hopkins Center for the Arts (Dartmouth College), Slosberg Concert Hall (Brandeis University), Roulette (NYC), Shapeshifter Lab (NYC), Atlantic Center for the Arts (Florida), Array Space (Canada), Canadian Music Centre (Canada), Badcyup Centrum voor Muziek (Netherlands), Bleek Stage (Belgium), Folkwang Museum (Germany), Moulin à Nef (France), Namsungol Concert Hall (Korea), W-Stage Concert Hall (Korea), Chin-yuan Arts Center (Taiwan), and Beijing Central Conservatory of Music (China).
His ongoing work with interactive electroacoustic performance, field recordings, and found objects has led to a variety of collaborations with performance artists and sculptors. Working with Colombian performance artist Adriana Rojas, he co-created and live-performed electroacoustic sound design for the shadow theatre pieces "Shadows of Darwin's Nightmare" (Atlantic Center for the Arts, Florida) and "Lucida Hecha a Mano/Handmade Lucid" (World Stage Design, England). He collaborated with American sculptor Roger Feldman to co-create a large sensor-interactive sound sculpture, "The New Landscape: Reconstructed Ecologies" (Jack Straw New Media Gallery, Seattle). In 2027, CAMP Ensemble will premiere a new work for percussion quartet, sixteen amateur found-object percussionists, and electronics. He has also written a hardware-software package that allows for timbral expansion of guqin resonance, controlled via accelerometers, while playing guqin. He has performed his electroacoustic guqin compositions and improvisations worldwide.
Dr. Roberts's compositions are published by Babel Scores (France). Recordings of his music have been released on the Neuma (USA), Telos (Germany), and Taukay (Italy) record labels. He has been invited to present his research at multiple conferences, and his research has been published in journals in the US, Canada, the Netherlands, and China. He is currently co-editing, along with co-editor Michael Frishkopf, an edited collection of papers on the topic of historical and modern intercultural music improvisation across Asia and North Africa.
He holds a PhD in Music Composition and Theory from Brandeis University, an M.A. in Composition from Boston University, and a B.M. in Improvisation from the New England Conservatory of Music. He studied with German composer Hans Zender at the Hochschule für Musik Frankfurt am Main and was a Senior Scholar at the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music, studying guqin performance with master Li Xiangting.
He is an Associate Professor of East Asian Music and Culture in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada.