Welcome!

Welcome to the official website of one of the most imaginative and insightful figures on the aesthetic and intellectual scene today - composer, pianist, visual artist and writer David Thomas Roberts. Driven to multimedia expression since his mid teens and conducting both art-making and career in independence from academia as well as most other institutional vehicles, he has fashioned a vastly encompassing and wildly personal family of languages and utterance, a legacy likely to fascinate, inspire and haunt for many years to come.

Introduction

Anyone entering the domain of my composition, visual art or writing should expect a curvaceous affair in which the lyrical is paramount, the personal and historical are always interchangeable and the supernatural and cerebral know no distinction.

The following online introduction to my recording Discovery tells not only of my musical aesthetics and underpinnings but reveals something of all my workings:

"I am above all a Romantic artist. Not only have my musical heroes been Romantic, but the tenets of Romanticism - faith in the imagination as turnstile to transcendence and preference for the subjective, the non-rational and the mysterious - are central to my practice."

Thus do I believe that human interiority can be voiced, explored, enriched and transcendently utilized. Elaborated concepts and detached musings, no matter how elegant, are never sufficient to capture a glint of the radiant magic at the base of this life. And it is above all the drive to access hints of such wonder that sustains my work, the offered evidence of my struggle to draw ever closer to what Paul Klee called "the heart of creation."

Interviews and Archives

Included below are selected archived materials:

NOTES: CDs and sheet music for many of the compositions included above are available. View the discography and folio pages for further information.

Thank You!

Many thanks to Jim Dee, designer of this website and devotee of my piano music since his teens, without whose expertise, creativity, commitment and generosity the site would not exist.

Many thanks to my wife and love of so many years, Teresa Jones-Roberts, not only for her profound faith in me and encompassing support and devotion, but for her crucial work on this website and countless hours typesetting my music for publication.

Thanks to my parents, who are no longer of this world, for their early encouragement and support of my determination to be an artist. Thanks to my first grade teacher, Virginia Lloyd Eselin for the consolation of her understanding me when so few did. And thanks to my cousins of the Roberts family for their various means of encouragement early in my life, Jackie, Glenda, Bo and Allen.

I express my gratitude to my closest friends, oldest friends and many people who have encouraged me and helped me to flourish in many ways: Steve Shepard, Fred Dale, Scott Kirby, Ann Westerberg, Audrey Whipps Field, Rene Gautier Hague, Trebor Tichenor, John Dawson, Takasi Hamada, Tom McDermott, Brian Keenan and Joani Holmes, Marie Dominique Verdier-Kirby, Frank French and Carolyn Massonneau-French, Jack Rummel, Rich Egan, Morten Gunnar Larsen, Rod and Carol Tillman, Fergus (Randall Stone), Ann Edwards, Sheila Holtgrieve and Dennis Schnabel, Karen Ann Simons, Carol McMillen, Lewis Motisher, Eric Jones and Donna Chnupa, Jack and Nita Dupen, Darrell and Norma Woodruff, Fred and Marianna Jensen, Dale and Robin Holtz Williams, Vernon and Mattie Johnson, Vicki Picou, Richard and Susan Larsen, P. R. Gibson, Bob and Nancy Martin, George Willick, Del and Nor Sewell, Trond Lindheim, Andy Campbell, Michael Hoffman, John Hancock, David Reffkin, Bing Gibbs, Steve Hancoff, Richard Riley, Paul Bailey, Reese Partridge, Virginia Tichenor, William Bailey, Giichi Oya, Hiromi Nakaoka, Hideo Shinma, George Winston, Joshua Rifkin, Robert Hardaway, Mark Nuismer, Carl "Sonny" Leland, Tom McWay, Mark Froelich, Raul Casso, Virtue Ishihara and Joe Adams. Thanks also to everyone who contributed to my effort to establish the home base in Missouri in 2001.

Finally, I thank my inlaws, John Paul and Catherine Jones for their kindness, and my step daughters, Alison and Jessie Badrous, not only for their helpfulness and support, but for having adjusted at all to having a difficult artist in the house.

- David Thomas Roberts

Contact

David Thomas Roberts
1862 Pomar Way
Walnut Creek, CA 94598

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