Chris Sansom the Musician

Chris studied music at King's College, London between 1970 and 1973, resulting in a B.Mus. degree. This course included his only "official" 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 1995, again with Howarth conducting the Grimethorpe Band, with the band's brilliant principal cornet player, Richard Marshall, as soloist. This recording is still awaiting release.

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 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, for whom Chris also acts as webmaster. 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 Andrew Sparling in 2004 for NMC Records and is available here.

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.

• Variations on a Theme of George Harrison for bass clarinet, trombone, double bass, harp, keyboards (celesta and clavinet: one player) and 2 percussion (wood and metal only).
• lovesongs: seven poems by e e cummings for voice and piano.
• Five Pieces for Saxophone Quartet, also transcribed as Five Pieces for Guitar Quartet and Five Pieces for Brass Quintet.
• Music for an Imaginary Ballet for jazz/rock sextet and orchestra - Chris's second largest work and still awaiting a performance.
• Nights in Tunisia and Elsewhere, subtitled A Collection of Semi-Tasteless Pastiches, a set of variations for brass band on Dizzy Gillespie's A Night in Tunisia.
• Short Change - all 30 seconds of it - written for and performed by the Grimethorpe Colliery Band under Elgar Howarth in their The Band Plays On concert at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1993. (Chris was the only one of the four composers asked to compose a piece for this event who kept to the 30-seconds brief!)
• Incidental music, which Chris composed and recorded for a 1995 performance at the Théâtre d'Esch, Luxembourg of Howard Barker's play The Europeans, directed by Eric Schneider in his own Luxemburgish translation.
• 60 Minims, for trumpet and general MIDI (or tape), a 60th birthday present for Elgar Howarth.
• Cog-Dance for divided orchestra, which reached the top 10% of entries for the 1997 Masterprize competition.

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.

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