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ROBERT JARVIS began his professional music career in 1985 as a trombonist playing in wide range of spaces - from busking outside to
performances in schools, residential home and hospitals. This soon grew into project work where the focus was on musical composition and often involving collaboration with other art forms.
At the same time, his interest in composition grew as he not only wrote pieces for the various ensembles he played with, but also continued his teenage experiments with manipulating raw sound using tape and whatever else was to hand. Over the years, as Robert refined his ways of working, he eventually found ways to bring together his project work with his composing, and this, in turn, lead him to the types of work he now finds himself involved with. These days his concentration is on creating compositions for performance or exhibition that have at their centre the process of creating that work. As a result, he often engages with local communities as a piece is developed, making connections in order to understand how others interpret a particular concept as well as to help demystify his creative process. In recent years, Robert has concentrated on compositions that make use of found-sounds from specific areas or scientific data collected from natural processes. This work is concerned with encouraging people to rethink their environments and for them to question how they relate to their surroundings. As a result, his pieces open up new worlds for those that come into contact with his work, posing new questions and enticing new appreciations of the sonic landscape. These pieces haven taken many forms, for example as surround sound gallery pieces such as his Sound & The City installation for Chongqing, in China, or his Disappear composition (winning work in the New Media category of the 2005 British Composer Awards); as interactive games, such as Magic Stones (winning work in the 2006 awards) or Keybird; as well as outside pieces such as his gr0w installation for the Hannah Peschar Sculpture Garden in Surrey, or his touring bat-inspired Echolocation. In addition to this composition work, Robert still plays trombone, working internationally as an improviser, performing with a variety of groups, such as the London Improvisers' Orchestra, Chris Wood, and the Dutch NDIO project. |