24018: Minsky: (pub)NYTimes (Another Example of Haitian Musical Talent) (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: "tminsky@ix.netcom.com" <tminsky@ix.netcom.com>


Another example of Haitian musical talents.

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This Is Really Longhair, and the Violin Is Cool

January 2, 2005  (Arts Section)
 By ALLAN KOZINN





DANIEL BERNARD ROUMAIN may be getting tired of being
described as the only classical composer and violinist who
has dreadlocks and loves hip-hop. Yet since he is still in
the early stages of his career, distinctions of any kind
can be useful.

Mr. Roumain has found that once people get past the visual
image and hear his inventive, energetic music - a varied
body of work that runs from Coplandesque orchestral scores
to chamber pieces inflected with various forms of pop and
electronic music - they want to hear more. And having seen
him, they don't forget him. So if the description irks him,
he isn't saying so, yet.

"See, I used to be a black man," he said one afternoon in
early December. "Then I became a black American composer.
But if you ask me today how I feel, I'll tell you I feel
like a very lucky young man."

Wearing oval-rimmed glasses, a sweatshirt from his
undergraduate alma mater (Vanderbilt University), an
earring and red sneakers, Mr. Roumain sat at a table in the
back of the Bowery Poetry Club, where his band, DBR's
Mission, had performed the night before.

"Why do I feel lucky?" he added. "I'm making a living
entirely from my music. I've been able to combine the music
I grew up with - hip-hop, classical music, rock, jazz and
soul - and in some ways, to be an ambassador, certainly for
what's going on in Harlem, where I live, but also for
what's going on in contemporary classical music. I think
contemporary classical music has found its soul, or maybe
regained its soul and found its heart. I'm very excited by
what's going on now."

Mr. Roumain will perform some of his latest music at Joe's
Pub on Jan. 15, but these days he is everywhere, thanks to
artist- or composer-in-residence positions at Pace
University, Arizona State University and the Bowery Poetry
Club. He is also the assistant composer in residence at the
Orchestra of St. Luke's, and he has collaborated with the
composer Philip Glass, the choreographer Bill T. Jones, the
jazz singer Cassandra Wilson, the hip-hop artist DJ Spooky
and the new-age composer Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Mr. Roumain claims no responsibility for the musical
omniverousness of the world he works in. As a graduate
student of William Bolcom, Michael Daugherty and Bright
Sheng at the University of Michigan, he saw up close how
diverse musical styles can be blended. And during his
student years, he became a fan of Bang on a Can, a New York
group of composers that encourages stylistic integration.
By the time he arrived in New York, on New Year's Day 1998,
the intersection of pop and contemporary classical music
was getting crowded.

But Mr. Roumain has been quick to make innovations of his
own, including the use of hip-hop techniques. Some of his
recent experiments will be heard in the performance with
DBR's Mission at Joe's Pub. The program is built around his
"Hip-Hop Studies and Études," of which he has composed 24,
one in each major and minor key. True to form, these vary
greatly in style, from slow, introspective Neo-Classical
ruminations to rhythmically complicated, riffy pieces that
would not be out of place in a dance club.

The instrumentation is flexible, too: Mr. Roumain has
performed them on the violin and the piano, on his own and
with his band, which includes an amplified string quartet,
bass, drums, keyboards, a D.J. and a laptop. Although the
études are written on a full scale, he said, they can be
performed by any combination of musicians, who are free to
rearrange and repeat certain of the works' "cells," or
short thematic passages, just as hip-hop D.J.'s do with
sampled music.

"I'm looking at all aspects of hip-hop," Mr. Roumain said,
"especially aspects that are oftentimes overlooked. There's
a wonderful melodic aesthetic to hip-hop that never gets
explored. Depending on the artists, hip-hop can be
increasingly complex, with sophisticated structures. So my
focus is not so much the rapper, or the vocalist, but
what's happening in the track. I like the idea of isolating
a moment and trying to stretch it. Last night, when we
played these études, we added a lot of hip-hop beats for
the first time."

Mr. Roumain, 32, is the son of Haitian immigrants who
apparently gave him his start as a musical polyglot. In
addition to Haitian folk music -Mr. Roumain used some in
his first orchestral score, "Haitian Essay," which was
performed by the Detroit Symphony when he was still a
student - they introduced him to rock, soul and classical
music. He remembers the family record collection including
everything from the Eagles, Abba and Stevie Wonder to the
huge Time-Life LP series devoted to Beethoven's complete
works. Other music filtered in from nearby Cuban, Jamaican
and Puerto Rican communities.

But for reasons Mr. Roumain can't explain, he was drawn to
the violin when he was 5.

"When I was growing up, playing the violin was not cool,"
he said. "To be a young black boy in South Florida, playing
the violin - that could get you beat up. But the violin
called to me. It wasn't even a choice. I just knew I was
supposed to play this instrument."

He attended a performing-arts high school, but nearly
didn't go on to college, partly because he found the idea
of a college campus unappealing and partly because he had
found a job with the rap group 2Live Crew.

"It was South Florida," he said with a shrug when asked
about that turn of events. "2Live Crew began as a group of
D.J.'s who played at parties. Everybody knew about them,
and I was out there, partying and hanging out. I did a lot
of different things with them: some production work,
playing on some records. Luther Campbell was very good to
me, very supportive. I was kind of an enigma to him. Who's
this young black kid who composes and plays the violin?"

Eventually, Mr. Roumain's father persuaded him to attend
Vanderbilt, in Nashville, which offered a full scholarship.
He went on to complete his doctorate at the University of
Michigan, and then gave New York a second try.

"Nobody told me how to make a career," he said. "Nobody can
tell you. You create it. You fight for it. So on a Monday I
did my dissertation defense. On Tuesday I was in New York,
and by Wednesday I found my apartment. By the end of the
week, I had packed up everything and was driving here."

Fighting for it meant working as a rehearsal pianist for
dance companies, sometimes as much as 14 hours a day, seven
days a week, over the three and half years he spent getting
his works around. He won the Whitaker New Music Readings of
the American Composers Orchestra, which led to a
performance of his "Harlem Essay," and he had music played
in the Music at the Anthology series, which brought him to
the attention of Mr. Glass. He was also commissioned to
write music for "The Breathing Show" by Mr. Jones, and he
became the music director of Mr. Jones's company.

But probably his most promising current association is with
the Orchestra of St. Luke's. In addition to playing his
music - most notably, the premiere of "Fast Black Dance
Machine" - the orchestra has put him in charge of a program
for young aspiring composers, an outgrowth of his teaching
at the Harlem School of the Arts. In addition to taking
private instruction and classes in which the mostly teenage
students play their works for one another, Mr. Roumain's
charges have spent time with Mr. Glass, Joan Tower (the
orchestra's composer in residence) and Aaron Jay Kernis.

Last August Mr. Roumain presented his students' chamber
works, all scored for strings, in a concert at the Studio
Museum in Harlem. Some were jazz-tinged, some were
quasi-Minimalist, and others were spiky, chromatic and
rhythmically complex. It was clear that he had encouraged
them to write the music they felt, rather than relying on
classical models.

"When I started working with some of those students, they
were terrified," he said. "You know, 'How do I write for a
string quartet? How do I write for a cello?' And the first
thing I told them was, let's not think of it as a cello.
Who's your favorite singer? Let's start there. And to be
honest, looking the way I do, playing the music I play, I
think they can identify with me. Joshua Bell is an amazing
violinist, but he might not have as much of a relevant
persona to children at the Harlem School of the Arts as I
do. That's not a boast, it's just that for them there is a
cultural thing going on here."

Still, Mr. Roumain is trying to transcend those issues in
his own work.

"I used to be very interested, as a composer, in
documenting the African-American experience," he said. "Now
I'm interested in the human experience. I'm interested in
reaching a broader audience, but I'm not as interested in
celebrity as community. I believe that where classical
music began was in forwarding an idea for the common good.
It's become something different in some ways. But I still
believe that composers are the priests of that, the keepers
of the flame."



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