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. 
