Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 October 2017
Christopher Butterfield is a composer and composition teacher. His music has been performed across Canada and in Europe, with recordings on the CBC, Artifact, and Collection QB labels. He is currently the Director of the School of Music in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Victoria. Christopher was born in 1952 in Vancouver, BC. He studied composition at the University of Victoria with Rudolf Komorous and at the State University of New York at Stony Brook with Bülent Arel. He was a performance artist, rock guitar player and composer while living in Toronto between 1977 and 1992, after which he returned to the University of Victoria as Assistant Professor of Composition.
I studied composition with Christopher between 2000 and 2005. Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to sit down with him in Victoria. During our interview, I asked him about his life and work, and for his thoughts on how Czech-Canadian composer Rudolf Komorous has influenced composition in Canada over the last few decades.
1 Frank Wedekind's original play Spring Awakening was written in 1890–91.
2 Gas 1 (1918) and Gas 2 (1920) are two plays by German dramatist Georg Kaiser; R.U.R. (1920) is by the Czech writer Karel Čapek.
3 Claude Gauvreau (1925–1971).
4 Karel Janeček, theorist (1903–1974)
5 Contes pour enfants pas sages was premiered in Toronto by Continuum Ensemble in 2012. It is an adaptation of Jacques Prévert's 1947 collection of stories by the same name.