Chicago native Ken Rubin began seriously writing music after moving to the Washington, D.C. area in 1991. Several of his choral works have been performed by the Washington Men's Camerata, of which he has been a member since 1993. A number his songs and instrumental pieces have been featured in concerts put on by the Composers' Society of Montgomery County (CSMC) (Maryland). He plays the cello in the Montgomery College orchestra in Rockville, Maryland, which recently performed the world premiere of his first orchestral piece "That Sounds Like...".

Sue: My piece 'Shine, Shine, Shine' was inspired by some Walt Whitman poetry I found that had a good gospel beat to it. The mood I was trying to get is a little bit of Aaron Copland and a little bit like Philip Glass. It's written for piano, clarinet and voice. The clarinet has an important contrasting part and the vocal part comes in half-way through. I wanted to write for an alto I know, but she wasn't available so I wrote it for soprano.

Chris: Where's the Copland part?

Sue: That's the open fourths at the beginning.

Chris: You succeeded in capturing his distinctive 'wide open spaces' sound. His music always seemed quintessentially American to me because of that sound - it's a big country and he spreads his chords out more than other composers. How about the Philip Glass?

Sue: That's the minimalist repeating pattern in the beginning. That part started out bigger but I decided it was too oversized, so I cut it down.

Chris: I enjoyed his score for the movie 'Koyaanisqatsi' twenty years ago but his music doesn't seem to me to have gone anywhere since then. There's another minimalist composer - Steve Reich - who I find much more inventive. Sue, how did you draw inspiration from the words of the poem - to set the emotional context or for their cadence?

Sue: Both. Definitely the cadence. The words are going on about birds so, in terms of emotions, I adapted the words in my mind to include human relationships and love. I think of the emotional setting as a positive affirmation of togetherness and nature. Kind of like John Denver - 'you fill up my senses'.

Ken: I was just thinking of that song!

Chris: That's amazing, You obviously communicated something, Sue.

Ken: From a tone color perspective, you move the theme from the piano to the voice and clarinet giving the theme a different color each time. I like the dark quality it takes on when it goes under chalumeau [the chalumeau is the lowest register on the clarinet producing rich tones from E above middle C to E below middle C].

Sue: I was afraid that was a little muddy myself.

Ken: And I like it when you put the clarinet in the brilliant upper register, where the clarinetist has great control over the volume. How did you come up with 6/8 time?

Sue: I wanted it to be more irregular, but I couldn't figure out how to notate it so I settled for 6/8. The fast part is at 140 beats per minute.

Chris: That's really fast. Ralph Vaughan Williams in his 'Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis' keeps changing the meter, 4/4, 6/8, 2/4, etc. [The meter or time signature is the number of beats per measure - a waltz can be counted 1-2-3,1-2-3, etc.] Sue, what form did you use for your piece?

Sue: I've written tons of songs all my life, so here I was trying to get beyond simple AABA song form [where A and B represent different sections]. I ended up with something like a 'mini-suite' that doesn't go back to A. Each section could be developed into something bigger, but I left it at three minutes.

Ken: It doesn't return?

Sue: The themes come back, but this time in the vocal and in a pastoral way. So the mood of the beginning comes back, but not the patterns in strict repetition.

Chris: The ending sounded to me like the same notes at the beginning but slowed down and extended.

Sue: Yes, and then I took it down a half tone. The repetitive nature of the beginning pattern is defeated. It's concluding. It's winding down.

Ken: That sudden shift to C-minor 7 [a four-tone chord composed of C, E flat, G, and B flat] is totally unexpected. It's what makes it nice. The different voices [piano, clarinet, and vocal] don't agree harmonically at that point, but there's nothing wrong with dissonance when it's done right.

Sue: I do it for mood. Music should evoke a response, make you feel something, and not just be a head trip. It's an art form, not a science.

Ken: I agree. Sometimes you write something just because that's what you feel or it's what sounds good to you and you have to leave it at that.

Chris: I like dissonance, too. My problem is with composers who start with a perfect system or instrument, like the piano or the major-minor tonal system, and try to warp it into something new - strumming the piano strings with a stick or hitting notes on the keyboard seemingly at random. The instrument or system was perfect to begin with and the results they get from this kind of experimentation are inferior. If they want to go beyond extended tonality and standard instrumentation, then they should start over from scratch, with microtones [notes 'between the keys'] and computer-generated sounds for example, and go from there instead of destroying something that's already perfect. Ken, you're up next.

Ken: My piece is called 'Ariel's Dance'. [View the score.] It started out as a song but ended up as a piano piece. There are three songs for Ariel in Shakespeare's 'The Tempest'. Ariel is a spirit, so I wanted something otherworldly. The form is ABA'. I can't bring myself to repeat exactly [the A', or A-prime as it is called, indicates a repeat with variation]. The piece is in 3/4 time but it's not a waltz.

Sue: Are you a pianist?

Ken: No, a cellist. I had to guess which notes lie easily under the fingers on a keyboard.

Chris: A mixture of black and white keys is easier than all white keys, contrary to what a beginner might think.

Sue: It's hard to go from sharps to flats in the notation the way you do. Also, it's a little fast to me. You could slow it down to get more expression.

Ken: That's what the pianist did when the piece was performed in concert, which I now agree with. Another thing that makes it hard is the running eighth notes but I didn't want to lose the relentless motion of a dance.

Sue: The dynamics change [loudness and softness] and it gets exciting.

Ken: It's one big long crescendo.

Sue: It got very complicated.

Ken: It's not exactly a rondo [where a theme returns frequently] but there are returns.

Chris: How would you compare the way you drew inspiration from the text versus what Sue did with Walt Whitman?

Ken: At this point in Shakespeare's play, it's an invitation to a dance. I wanted a not-quite-human dance effect. That's why there are the sudden shifts of key...

Sue: And meter.

Ken: ...Right. The harmony is complex but not way out. I used to write in a Vaughan Williamsy folk-songish way, to which I reverted for the middle section, but I've entered a chromatic phase in my writing [motion by half-steps whereas normal major and minor scales are a combination of whole steps and half-steps; moving from C to C-sharp is a half-step].

Sue: I'm looking at your key scheme - E, E-flat, E, F-sharp, A-minor.... [the key in which sections or phrases are written].

Ken: There's no logic, it just happened. I've been playing a lot of Brahms lately which has a lot of chromatic slip-sliding and is difficult to play. It made me want to ask him 'are you constitutionally unable to play the same chord two beats in a row?' Then I started doing it.

Sue: It's a much higher level of complexity than what I wrote. I want people to hum mine.

Ken: Nobody's going to be whistling this at the bus stop.

Sue: Where's the A-prime section?

Ken: The reprise is a telescoped version of what happens starting at measure 12. At measure 121, the theme returns but in an unexpected cadence [a sequence of chords that close a piece or section - it's possible for the same melody to be harmonized with different chords]. All the stuff in the middle is omitted and then it goes a half-step higher.

Sue: You might want to add a pause there, take a breath to call attention to the new section.

Ken: The performer did that.

Chris: I knew I liked it at the concert but I still don't know why. It must be the complexity and all the key changes, but what makes it all hang together?

Ken: The answer's not obvious, even to me. The middle section has a rising figure that goes from one hand to the other and holds that section together motivically [motivic writing is the intentional use of a repeated pattern to unify a piece]. The rhythm is constant in through there, also.

Chris: Let's hear it again...['Ariel's Dance' ]. Now I can start to identify the ingredients I like. The basic rhythmic pattern is very infectious, it really jumps. And the piece is spiced just right with dissonant chords. Your running eighth notes are partly arpeggiated [arpeggios are chord tones played sequentially instead of simultaneously, C-E-G for example] which I like and the lines shift direction frequently. They go up, they go down, they go up again several times over the space of a couple of measures and I have found that I like this very much in other pieces of music. It's something I try to do myself.

Ken: I didn't want to write running scales. It's such a cliché.

Chris: Now for my piece 'East of the River' (listen to sound clip). I got the idea when I was asked to write something for a film festival in Washington, D.C. I decided to use all D.C. ingredients. I started with go-go rhythm, something the bang-on-a-can kids invented on the streets of D.C. Duke Ellington was from D.C., so I started going over his music to see what might fit the go-go rhythm. I thought it might work because go-go is essentially just another swing beat not unlike what jazz and blues players have been using for decades. [Swing is a hard-to-define rhythmic groove where the notes are somewhat irregularly spaced rather than falling strictly on an even beat. You know it when you hear it because, as Ellington himself put it,  'it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing'.] I landed on Ellington's 'East St. Louis Toodle-oo' which fit the go-go beat very nicely. I used some of the chords from there as a point of departure. The title 'East of the River' refers to heavily black East St. Louis which is separated from St. Louis by the Mississippi River and also to a heavily black section of D.C., Anacostia, which is east of the river from downtown D.C. Both references pay homage to the richness brought to American music by black artists. I like to think I've ended up with some really American music.

Sue: It sounds like MJQ [the Modern Jazz Quartet from the 1950's].

Chris: It's definitely a throwback to an earlier time. I use some very traditional jazz harmonies.

Ken: I hear the Ellingtonian muted trumpet. It's fun to listen to. It swings. You really let your hair down. It's uncharted territory in some way.

Sue: But you have some very established elements. That's good art.

Ken: I want to ask you about the rhythm. You just wrote down what you were hearing on the street?

Chris: No, I didn't just copy. Aside from the basic rhythm, all my patterns are original. I do a lot of counterpoint with melody lines so I decided to see what would happen if I started layering complementary rhythm patterns on top of the basic beat. Each pattern fills in the interstices left by the other patterns, so the result is a dense, multi-layered percussion sequence, like the way whole African villages drum together. During this process, I made a discovery. By mistake, I moved one pattern exactly one beat away from where it should have been in the computer. This set up a whole new raft of cross-rhythms between the patterns. It was a real happy accident that I'll be exploring again in the future.

There were a couple of other things I wanted to show you. In the second chord progression, I have a whole string of diminished-7th chords [C - E flat- G flat - A for example] which I later discovered is very common in jazz. So that contributes to the retro sound in that section. The other thing is that I'm not working with standard instrumentation. I have an electronic keyboard and the soprano leads in later sections are made up of three keyboard voices, or 'patches' as they are called, which produce a new sound when they are combined. I'll be doing more of this in the future, too.

Thank you both for being my guests.

SHARE 
Digg | Del.icio.us | Reddit
Facebook | StumbleUpon | My Web
Newsvine | Mixx | Dig Article