< speaks > with Matana Roberts

Free to attend. Please email Georgia at events@music.ox.ac.uk for the Zoom link.

Matana Roberts is an internationally renowned composer, band leader, saxophonist, sound experimentalist and mixed-media practitioner. Working across many contexts and mediums, including improvisation, new music composition, art, dance, poetry, and theatre, Roberts is perhaps best known for their acclaimed Coin Coin project - a multi-chapter work of 'panoramic sound quilting' that aims to expose the mystical roots and channel the intuitive spirit-raising traditions of American creative expression, while maintaining a deep and substantive engagement with narrativity, history, community and political expression within improvisatory musical structures. In recent times they have served as distinguished guest composer at the University Of Chicago, chair of the Music Sound department at Bard MFA and as music & sound fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin programme. New performance works and scores have been commissioned by Donaueschinger Musiktage (DE), Miller Theater's Composer Portrait series (US), The Crossing (US), Walthamstow Borough Of Culture (UK), Brooklyn Rider (US) and by the composers, Claire Chase, Elaine Mitchener and Johnny Gandelsman, while their mixed-media artworks have been shown across a variety of solo and group contexts including at Akademie der Künste, daadgalerie and Savvy Contemporary in Berlin and New York's Fridman Gallery.

About the Series:

Professor Jennifer Walshe convenes this online series in which visiting composers discuss their work. Free and open to all.