Dr. Jeff Roberts is a composer-improviser and sound artist working in interdisciplinary acoustic and electroacoustic contexts. His music explores relationships between different music styles and cultures. Described as ‘bewitching’ and ‘delicately affecting’ by the Boston Globe and Boston Music Intelligencer, Roberts’s compositions has been performed and commissioned worldwide by ensembles including Philharmonisches Orchester Cottbus, Eighth Blackbird, Dinosaur Annex, Ensemble Emex, Ensemble Interface, Wet Ink, Music From China, Cellophone and Duo Antwerp. His work has been recognized by a Fulbright Fellowship, an Asian Cultural Council grant award and an award from the Franz Goethe Stiftung to fund study and collaborative work in Germany. His compositions have been awarded the Wellesley Composer’s Conference Kaske Prize, 2008 Bent Frequency Competition winner and finalist selections in several international composition competitions. He has held artist residencies at the Banff Centre in Canada, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Brush Creek Foundation and the STEIM Foundation in Amsterdam. From his studies with guqin master Li Xiangting in Beijing, China, Dr. Roberts performs frequently on guqin in solo and collaborative improvised contexts, often using sensor-interactive live-electronic setting to expand the sound of guqin and integrate guqin performance with modern, cross-cultural contexts. Recent guqin performances have taken place in New York, Toronto, Edmonton, Toulouse, Antwerp and Seoul. He co-founded the East Asian improvisation ensemble ‘PAN Project’ with Korean piri master Gamin. This ensemble was awarded a 2016 Avaloch Farm Ensemble Residency and will tour Canada and the US in late 2016 and early 2017. As sound artist he has presented shadow theatre/sound art collaborations with Colombia-based performance artist Adriana Rojas-Pretel at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in the US and World Stage Design Festival in Cardiff, Wales, England. Continued collaborations in 2017-18 will take place in Bogota, Colombia. Dr. Roberts founded the Music Beyond The Moongate International Chamber Music Festival in Beijing, China which has held festivals of modern Western and intercultural music. He holds a PhD in Music Composition and Theory from Brandeis University, was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Composition at Williams College and currently teaches in the Music and East Asian Studies Departments at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

Artist Support Program 2018: Recording of guqin solo and ensemble improvisations and compositions for a CD.

New Media Gallery 2016-17 (with Roger Feldman): The New Landscape: Reconstructed Ecologies

Exhibits

Sound Clips

Education Projects