Biography
ROBERT JARVIS (b. 1963) began his professional music career 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 would be on the creation of a music 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 type of work he finds himself involved with today.
Currently Robert is based in Faversham, in Kent, and is involved in a wide range of creative activities. As a keen collaborator he works with 'experts' from many disciplines, including outside of the arts; however, much of his work also engages with those who do not see themselves as specialists.
His projects have at their centre not only the creation and performance of new work but also the process of creating that work. As a result, he often engages with local communities as a piece is developed, making the connection in order to understand how others interpret a particular concept as well as to help demystify his creative process.
In recent years Robert has been concentrating on soundscape composition using 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' sound 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) and 'Keybird'; as well as outside pieces such as his recent project (entitled 'Grow') for the Hannah Peschar Sculpture Garden in Surrey.
In addition to this composition work, Robert still plays trombone, working internationally as an improviser, performing, amongst others, with Asphodele Danses Envol, the London Improvisers' Orchestra and the Dutch NDIO project.