Sometimes to find your own music—the music you feel compelled to make—you must escape to another world. “In 1981,” writes composer Christopher Roberts, “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.”

Nearly three decades later, the result is a remarkable disc, Trios for Deep Voices (Cold Blue), which contains five captivating pieces written for a trio of double basses. Roberts and his fellow bassists, Mark Morton and James Bergman, refute the stereotype of the double bass as too unwieldy for virtuosic chamber music. All three musicians impart an eerily vocal quality to their playing: Low, bowed notes not only hum, but purr, buzz, and sigh. The music is so speechlike, it's like listening to a field recording hewn by an ancient wax-cylinder phonograph.

Yet before the advent of recording technology, composers translated found sound into music. The "Jolly gathering of country folk" from Beethoven's Sixth Symphony still pads advertisements on TV. Too many film composers owe obvious debts to that symphony's aptly titled fourth movement, "Thunderstorm." Two centuries prior to Beethoven, Adriano Banchieri (1567–1634) made perhaps the earliest—or at least the funniest—attempt at composing with found sounds. His madrigal Contraponto bestiale all mente deploys a cappella voices mimicking the various brays, clucks, hoots, and barks of barnyard animals in vivid counterpoint.

When I mention this to Roberts, who will trek down from Bellingham for his upcoming Composer Spotlight presentation (Wed March 11, Jack Straw Productions, 7:30 pm, free), he agrees, adding that Trios for Deep Voices captures his memory of sound, music, and speech during his time in the Star Mountains.

Roberts heard music everywhere. "People start singing as they talk," he recalled. The chasing counterpoint that permeates the Trios stems from this hybrid of speech and song. "Everyone in the village composed songs: If two people witnessed an important event, both would sing about it, freely borrowing and varying each other's melody." Conversations could be polyphonic, he explains: "Sometimes the person behind me would sing the line I just said."

To my surprise, Roberts tells me that the scores for the Trios pieces are straight-forward. "I wanted the musicians to chime in, to concur like we're conversing. We're singing together but not necessarily keeping a strict pulse." The music on Trios does breathe like speech; Roberts describes as it "vocal, not verbal."

Roberts also points out that in the Star Mountains, music was shared, much like conversation, yet remained profoundly personal. Improvisation was everywhere: in speech, in song, and in what lay between. Everyone improvised. Everyone made music. Compared to our own limited musical life, where file sharing and the fear of improvisation cast intimidating shadows, Roberts has returned from a world that can teach us what music might become. recommended