Newfoundland-based composer and musician Robert Humber will release his next album, Into Air, on February 27. The album, available on Redshift Records, includes four tracks of imaginative contemporary classical music.
The album uses an intriguing approach. Each track is recorded with one musician, then overdubbed with multiple parts for the same instrument. It creates highly textured and dense works, including the SOCAN award-winning titular work for five violins.
It’s been variously described as post-spectralist in its use of texture, and pulsed minimalism. It’s thoroughly modern, melodic, and microtonal in turns.
LV spoke to Robert Humber about his music.
Robert Humber
Composer, singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer Robert Humber has written and performed concert music, as well as music for films, dance, and installations, among other things.
He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Music Composition at Memorial University of Newfoundland, followed by a Master’s Degree in Music Composition at University of British Columbia, where he studied with Jocelyn Morlock, Stephen Chatman, Dorothy Chang and Keith Hamel. Along with his 1st prize in the 2024 SOCAN Young Composer Award (Chamber Ensemble) for into air, he won the 2024 CMC Emerging Composer Prize for his piece “warmth comes”, which was premiered by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra.
He’s collaborated with a number of artists, including dancer Hilary Knee and pianist Stephen Eckert on the piece to unwind a sea shell, which premiered during 2024 NL Sound Symposium.
Robert Humber: The Interview
Humber’s music is modern in its aesthetics, but emotional at its core. As a musician, he’s something of a chameleon.
“Last year, I released, I had this project called R Sheaves,” he says. “It’s kind of alternative rock with some folk.”
Classical music, through early classical training, was always at the back of his mind, no matter what genre he was playing in over the years. “I came up through schooling as a composer. I was always, in the background, or in bands, I was in my room composing quietly.”
He wanted to sing and write songs. “I was honestly too chicken,” he laughs. “COVID happened, and I got into producing. Last year, I finally had my first songwriter album.”
That included varied instrumentation. “The orchestration in that, is mainly me, playing, multitracking instruments,” he explains. “I played saw, musical saw, for that album. My background in composition makes that album sound the way it does.” Then came Threnody for Rocking Chair, an electroacoustic album.
For that release, he played harmonica, acoustic guitar, and upright bass, all instruments with folk roots.
“I’m from Newfoundland. My early experiences in music was […] my dad playing in jams,” he says. “That’s where it started.”
Into Air
into air incorporates four tracks, using four different musicians. The tracklist is:
- Into Air, for five violins, with violinist Adrian Irving
- Mothmouth, for three guitars, with guitarist Ben Diamond
- Murmurations, for six pianos, with pianist Stephen Eckert
- Singing in Circles, for cello and cello octet, with cellist Heather Tuach
Into Air, the title track, covers a range of moods, from frenetic to melancholic and moody. Moth Mouth, with Ben Dianmond, is strongly rhythmic, and virtuosic in its technical demands of guitarist Ben Diamond. Humber incorporates non-traditional sounds with more conventional classical and Spanish-style riffs.
Murmurations really does resemble its title. Multi-layered and kinetic, the music moves en masse in varying directions. Singing in Circles makes full use of the cello’s capabilities and sounds, ranging from lyrical to rapid fire.
“All four of the musicians […] they’re either from Newfoundland or I met that at my time in Memorial University,” he explains.
Adrian Irving, he notes, is a producer who often works on pop albums. “He recorded himself playing violin in his home studio,” Robert says.
“It’s a lot of people I wanted to work with for a long time.”
Cellist Heather Tuach is now based in London, UK, but originally hails from the west coast of Newfoundland, still spending a lot of time in Canada each year. “We recorded [her piece] in a heritage church,” he says.
“There’s no classical musicians around me,” he laughs. “I found the perfect excuse to work with them.”
The Music
“This album, I would describe as — it’s eclectic, and something that most of these pieces share is seeing just how far I can go in the texture,” Humber says.
All the pieces are multitracked, meaning he’s recorded one musician, and layered several tracks.
“I wanted to see if I could create a mega violin,” he says. It’s about extending each instrument in various ways.
For Murmurations, he had a specific effect in mind. “How can I just create, make you drown in piano while you’re listening to it?”
Along with the technical and recording experimentation, the music also has an emotional heart.
“That’s absolutely true,” he says. “There’s certain things, I think with every composer, their voice — you almost can’t shake certain things.”
Robert relates that, during his graduate studies, he attempted to purge that emotionality out of his music. “But it just didn’t work.”
Themes & Ideas
“I wasn’t thinking of into air as an overarching thing outside that track, but one thing I was thinking about with all these pieces was a sense of wildness, of the natural world,” he says.
“Something that I thought about with all these tracks — the first three — was positioning,” he says. “Because it’s a multitrack work, because it’s panning, a lot of the interest for me was hearing how the left guitar, for example would stop in its tracks,” he adds.
For the title track, into air, he relates that he was thinking in part of synchronized swimming, and the way that different parts of the body emerge from the water.
“I was thinking spatially a lot with these pieces.”
- Find the album (either to pre-order or to order after the February 27 release date) on Redshift Records [HERE].
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