Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts (b. 1980) has composed works for individuals and ensembles such as the Arditti Quartet, le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, the Boston Conservatory Wind Ensemble, Ensemble FA, Guerilla Opera, Fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center, Transient Canvas, Garth Knox, Nolan Pearson, and Gabriela Díaz, among others. Roberts’ output includes a chamber opera, Giver of Light, which sets the life story of the Sufi mystic-poet Rumi in the modern American Midwest. Roberts’ recent projects include Dark Matter, commissioned by the Swiss countertenor and recorder duo Ums ‘N Jip. This work is a setting of ten poems by Pulitzer Prize winner Rae Armantrout and was recently performed in Switzerland and NYC. Roberts is currently composing a chamber work for the project “Music in the American Wild” in celebration of the centenary of the National Parks Service, which is scheduled to be performed in summer 2016 in national parks around the United States. Roberts is also composing a new oboe quartet, commissioned by the Rochester Society for Chamber Music for its 2016-17 season.

Roberts holds degrees from the Eastman School of Music (B.M.) and Harvard University (Ph.D.) where his primary mentors were David Liptak, Augusta Read Thomas, Julian Anderson, and Chaya Czernowin. Roberts was a Fellow at June in Buffalo (2000 and 2005), the Tanglewood Music Center, and the recipient of a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship from Harvard for study in Vienna in 2007-8. Honors for Roberts’ music include the Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, selection by the international jury for inclusion in the 2009 ISCM World Music Days in Gothenburg, Sweden, an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, the Bernard Rogers Prize (Eastman), the New York Bohemians Prize (Harvard), the André Chevillion-Yvonne Bonnaud Prize from the Orléans Piano Competition, the Earplay Donald Aird Award, the Christoph and Stefan Kaske Fellowship from the Wellesley Composers Conference, the Leonard Bernstein Fellowship from the Tanglewood Music Center, and the Blodgett Prize (Harvard). Roberts has taught at Harvard University, Northeastern University, and the Center for Advanced Studies at Istanbul Technical University. Roberts’ debut CD, Leaf Metal, was released on Tzadik Records in 2014.

Photograph credit: Vicki Kolomensky