Chris Sansom

Chris Sansom the Musician

Stop Press: New YouTube and SoundCloud channels

Chris has now created channels on YouTube and SoundCloud where you can hear his own MIDI realizations of his works which are either unperformed or have not received accurate performances. YouTube also gives you a glimpse of the scores. So far there are five works there: Return of the Son of the Bebop Variations, Variations on a Theme of George Harrison, Music for an Imaginary Ballet, Five Pieces for Saxophone Quartet and a little musical joke called Porterstraum.

Meanwhile...

Chris studied music at King's College, London between 1970 and 1973, resulting in a B.Mus. degree. This course included his only formal composition studies, principally with Geoffrey Bush, with extra advice at the more radical end from Ian Bent.

In the 1970s his String Quartet (which was subsequently broadcast by the BBC in an Arditti Quartet programme) and Sleep for 60 solo strings with keyboards, harp and percussion were given public airings by the Society for the Promotion of New Music.

His Trumpet Concerto, the middle movement of which is in memory of Duke Ellington, was premièred in 1978 by James Watson with the Grimethorpe Colliery Band under Elgar Howarth and broadcast in 1985 with Håkan Hardenberger as soloist. It was recorded for the Doyen label (in a slightly abridged version) in November 2005, again with Howarth conducting the Grimethorpe Band, with the band's brilliant principal cornet player, Richard Marshall, as soloist. It is included on the CD The History of Brass Band Music, Vol.6: New Adventures (DOY CD165), available from 4 Bars Rest, World of Brass or Amazon, among others.

The meeting with Hardenberger led to his largest work, Invisible Cities (1986/7) for trumpet, trombone and orchestra, which was written for Hardenberger and Christian Lindberg, who gave the première in The Hague with the Residentie Orchestra and a further broadcast performance in 1989 with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, both times conducted by Elgar Howarth.

Double Entendre (1985), for piano and stereophonic brass band, has now received three performances, the first two with Andrew Ball as soloist. He played it in 1990 at the Royal Academy of Music in London with their brass students conducted by Harold Nash, and the piece was included in the Visions of Paradise festival in February 1995 at the Barbican Centre, London, to celebrate the 90th birthday of Sir Michael Tippett. On the latter occasion, Elgar Howarth conducted the Grimethorpe Colliery Band in a London Sinfonietta programme. Double Entendre was also performed later that year by Richard Casey with the Royal Northern College of Music's brass students conducted by Chris Houlding.

Son of The Bebop Variations (1992) for trumpet, trombone and tape, has now been performed by Håkan Hardenberger and Christian Lindberg at least four times: at the Wigmore Hall in London, at the Stockholm New Music festival, at the Bath International Festival and at the 1997 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. That piece was one of several spin-offs from Chris's Bebop for brass quintet (1986), which is now part of the repertoire of Fine Arts Brass. Other spin-offs from that piece were Big Bo Bebop, written as an encore piece for Son of The Bebop Variations, and Be, Bop and Away (in memory of Dizzy Gillespie), which Hardenberger performed with a jazz group on a Swedish television game show in 1993.

Following the success of his music for The Europeans (see below), the same theatre in Luxembourg invited Chris to provide the music for their 1998 production of director Eric Schneider's stage adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Heart of a Dog (Coeur de Chien in the French adaptation). This time it involved a live musician, Marcel Lallemang, who played the bass clarinet with electronic sound provided on CD. The seven-minute Entr'acte from this set, Music from the Heart of a Dog, was recorded by the leading British clarinettist and co-founder of Lavender Hill Opera, Andrew Sparling in 2004 for NMC Records and released on the CD Andrew Sparling (NMC D092).

After a ten year gap, and after hearing Son of The Bebop Variations, Odaline de la Martinez, founder and conductor of Lontano, asked Chris to write a new piece for one of their two Brazil-themed concerts in the 2008 La Linea festival of Latin American music. The resulting 8-minute piece was The Bossa Nova Variations for flute, cor anglais, bass clarinet, violin, cello and piano, and was performed (and enthusiastically received) in London's Purcell Room on 2 April 2008.

Having thought from the start that it might be possible to arrange Son of The Bebop Variations for ensemble, in 2012 Chris finally got round to it - and thus it morphed into Return of the Son of The Bebop Variations for chamber orchestra with drumkit (15 players in total). He is now looking for a performance. Hear it on YouTube or SoundCloud.

Other works include:

Over the Christmas period of 1995, Chris was one of the three judges (with Elgar Howarth and Michael Blake Watkins) for the Royal Philharmonic Society's annual Composition Prize, which was awarded to Sang-Eun Lee for her O-Zone.

Chris has always maintained an interest in "popular" forms of music. Over the years, he has composed, played and recorded everything from experimental jazz to pop songs and cites Zappa, Ellington and the Beatles among his main influences, along with the likes of Bartók, Berio, Birtwistle, Ligeti, Messiaen, Nancarrow, Stravinsky, Varèse and Xenakis.

On the rare occasions when he actually goes out and plays an instrument, it is a fretless bass guitar.