Roberts, Christopher - Trios for Deep Voices
SKU
05-CB030
Christopher Roberts (double bass), Mark Morton (double bass), James Bergman (double bass).
"The five trios that comprise this work evoke -- sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly -- the composer's experiences of the life and sounds he found in the mountain jungles of Papua, New Guinea. Some of this music came to Roberts in his dreams while living there. The third movement, 'Kon Burunemo' ('trembling leaf') was written in memory of the extraordinary bassist and teacher, David Walter. The composer writes about Trios For Deep Voices: '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 -- initiation ceremony music, when men as "hornbills" beating only taro enter the ritual house to become "birds of paradise" and emerge beating actual drums. 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. The first trio describes the initiation, and what it was like to be there in it. The harmonic lyric contours describe the echo of the initiates singing as they approached the ritual house at a dead run straight up the mountain. [In the booklet] my photos of the houses up in the Star Mountains evoke every sensation of being there, where you would be if you were singing in the way of the slow movements. Some trios begin as lone preambles, and all are gathered into contemporary chamber music forms that I could relate to my friends.'"