bio

Bobby Halvorson is a composer, performer, conductor, songwriter and multiinstrumentalist from Northern California. Having been raised among the sounds of Simon and Garfunkel, The Beach Boys, Joni Mitchell, and the Eagles, his ear for harmony was keenly and creatively developed. After years of playing guitar, drums, bass and other various noise makers in addition to singing in choirs throughout his developmental years, Bobby decided to take a more serious and formal approach to learning and performing music at the end of his high school years. He was accepted to UC Santa Barbara based on a vocal audition and soon thereafter transferred into the College of Creative Studies to study music composition. Under the instruction of Jeremy Haladyna, Halvorson honed his compositional and songwriting abilities while composing for ensembles of all sizes and sounds including but not limited to orchestra, choir, solo piano and chamber ensembles. After graduating with a BFA from UC Santa Barbara, Halvorson went on to earn his MFA in music composition and is currently pursuing his DMA in performance and composition both from the California Institute of the Arts. While at CalArts, he has discovered a new and more experimental voice both figuratively and literally while researching and studying extended vocal techniques including throat singing, overtone singing, growling, and joiking (a form of song native to Northern Scandinavia). He is currently writing music for Jomama Jones, pop country band The Murderous Cowboys, progressive-folk band King and the Cattail, a film titled “EEL,” which was written and directed by James Kaelan, as well as a set of pieces catalogued as “voice and…”: a collection of etudes that study the timbral relationships between voice and other instruments. Additionally, seeing an enormous value in the study and evolution of popular music idioms, he plans to spearhead an effort to integrate experimental popular music into the academic environment, a subject, which has thus far been scarcely examined.