| 09 June 2010
For My Father (Film Movement)
Release date: June 1
Standard list price: $22.49
I normally reserve the space for the largest review in this column to wonderful films that are worthy of your time, but occasionally a film so indefensible – so patently contemptible – will arrive on my doorstep that it prompts the need to vent for more than 150 words. For My Father, the latest installment in the usually reliable Film Movement line, is one such title.
“There have been so many films, documentary and fiction, about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that, sight unseen, For My Father could seem like just another tired vision of this unfortunate problem,” says a Film Movement representative in the DVD's liner notes before explaining why the movie is better than all that. On the contrary: If only For My Father represented such a benign, forgettable homogeny with other movies about Middle Eastern strife, it could have been absorbed and digested without much criticism. For My Father is different, all right – but for all the wrong reasons.
Though shot in Israel and filmed in Hebrew, For My Father is as close to the art house as Transformers. The film opens on Tarek (Shredi Jabarin), a wannabe suicide bomber, being picked up by two terrorist buddies who strap explosives to his chest and discuss protocol – i.e., don't explode yourself until you're in a crowd of people, etc. Then comes the pep talk right out of a Hollywood action movie: “We don't have an air force, Tarek. If we had an air force, we wouldn't have to do this. You're our air force.”
Sounds trailer-ready, doesn't it? This kind of artificial nonsense also sounds disgustingly maudlin and completely inappropriate, but it speaks to Tarek's indecisiveness. According to the film's (il)logic, radical Islamic suicide bombers are just like you and me – they need a little coaxing. It's a big day, after all!
This scene is, unfortunately, of a piece with the rest of this ludicrous picture. The unintentional absurdity continues when Tarek's bomb fails, leaving him stranded in Tel Aviv while a local repairman fixes his doomsday switch. All the while, the jihadist thugs are on his case: They've wired a fail-safe cellphone to Tarek's body, threatening to activate his explosives remotely if and when he can't do the job himself. They give him 48 hours, during which time Tarek realizes that there's some nice people in Israel; he works under a kind shopkeeper and forms a friendship with an unorthodox and slightly retarded girl.
That a suicide bomber can, or would, ever have a “change of heart” and decide to embrace love rather than hate, is a dangerously naïve Hollywood fantasy whose rosy vision is insulting to everyone's intelligence – even suicide bombers themselves. Though Bill Maher lost a job admitting it, anyone who has done the most basic research about Islamic suicide bombers knows that these men are not hesitant, cold-footed cowards who would forego jihad at the slightest resistance. They are dyed-in-the-wool religious fundamentalists who would, in the name of Allah, love nothing more than to sacrifice their earthly bodies while obliterating their enemies so they can properly ascend to heaven and fornicate with 72 virgins.
For My Father suggests otherwise and, making the whole affair even more offensive, suggests so through a filmic grammar of Hollywood clichés – a pop song-scored lovers' bike ride, the sharing of headphones on the beach, Tarek's heroic dispatching of a ridiculous band of Orthodox thugs threatening his new girlfriend for not being dogmatic. The screenplay feels written by a Hollywood hack with no understanding of life in Israel, and we can only blame the translators to a point. This melodramatic pap is so utterly disingenuous that it makes me wonder if the whole thing isn't a joke played on us, the spectators – a kind of Israeli Lady in the Water, subtextually subverting stereotypes by obviously overplaying them to the point of parody. If director Dror Zahavi wants his film to have any credibility at all, I'd suggest he frame it this way.
Mary and Max (IFC)
Release date: June 15
SLP: $18.99
This claymation feature by Australian writer-director Adam Elliot has been a favorite at dozens of film festivals since its 2009 Sundance premiere, and it's easy to see why. Toni Collette voices Mary Daisy Dinkle, a lonely and peculiar girl living in the suburbs of Melbourne in the late '70s who, through a random search through a phone book, writes a letter to Philip Seymour Hoffman's Max Horovitz, an overweight, anxiety-addled New Yorker with Asperger's syndrome (has there ever been a character more tailored to Hoffman's outcast onscreen persona?). Thus a pen-pal relationship is formed, and it's as unconventional as the movie's style. The film's episodic script follows one letter with another, punctuated every now and then with Barry Humphries' gravitas-laden fairy tale narration; there is very little verbal communication between characters. An adult animated film all the way, Mary and Max explores some awfully dark terrain, from alcoholism and depression to obesity, suicide, electroshock therapy and oodles of death. But the bizarre, surrealist sense of humor and hilarious visual whimsy – recalling The Ricky Gervais Show – keep even the most morbid elements in comedic check. Ultimately, Mary and Max is a fine picture about friendship, forgiveness and overcoming fear and anxiety.
Cinema Pride Collection (Fox)
Release date: June 8
SLP: $44.99
Gays and lesbians have come a long way in the modern media, emerging from decades of showbiz demonization, caricature and insensitivity to claim their own radio and TV stations, film festivals and niche movie theaters. So it was surprising to learn that Fox's new Cinema Pride collection is the very first LGBT box set released by a major motion picture studio. The long wait for such a collection is most likely due to Fox's dragging its feet until it could tie the DVDs in with Gay and Lesbian Pride Month. It's smart marketing, and at least we have this set now. The 10-disc collection includes mostly worthy titles: La Cage Aux Folles and its lesser remake The Birdcage, Stephen Frears' wonderful My Beautiful Laundrette, The Children's Hour, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Bent, Boys Don't Cry, Kissing Jessica Stein and a couple of throwaway titles that probably shouldn't be included in any collection, LGBT or otherwise: The Object of My Affection and Imagine Me & You.
Collapse (MPI)
Release date: June 15
SLP: $16.49
American Movie director Chris Smith made this exhaustive interview film in the stylistic vein of Errol Morris' The Fog of War. His subject is Michael Ruppert, a police officer turned investigate journalist whose radical theories, published in his From the Wilderness newsletter, led to his marginalization from the mainstream media and, he says with pride, made him a personal enemy of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. But this eloquent, erudite conspiracist, doom prophet and major buzzkill foretold many catastrophes – mainly surrounding the 2008 financial collapse and its ripple effects –and he has profound observations about our overreliance on oil, the eventual demise of what he calls our “fiat currency” of printed money, our diminishing resources and our political structure, which he considers as antiquated as the Jurassic period. It's too bad Ruppert goes well beyond rational thought and into crackpot forecasting about shifting paradigms and our inevitable extinction as a human race (he deploys the word “perish” with newscaster gravitas) if we don't abandon our cars, grow our own food, pee on our soil, etc. It's a fascinating, endlessly watchable movie nonetheless, and Smith, to his credit, challenges Ruppert from time to time rather than let him bloviate.
| 08 June 2010
Dan Domingues and John Herrera in When the Sun Shone Brighter.
Florida Stage ends its residency in Manalapan on a high note, with the world premiere of a smart, verbally adroit political play by a new writer with a natural affinity for the theater.
Unclear is what lies ahead for the company when it moves into the uncomfortable quarters of the Kravis Center’s Rinker Playhouse beginning this summer, but if it can keep serving up scripts of the quality of Christopher Demos-Brown’s When the Sun Shone Brighter, they can succeed in any venue.
Well-timed to match the increasingly combative mid-term elections, Demos-Brown offers the morality tale of a youthful, well-meaning Miami-Dade mayor, Jose “Call me Joe” Sanchez, who is seduced by the potential power and prestige to run for the United States Senate. Within minutes of the beginning of this well-oiled production, as clean-cut family man Sanchez embraces his secret gay lover, we know that this will be a campaign of compromise, duplicity and treachery. In short, a very American story for our times.
Right-wing, Republican and Cuban-American seems a likely winning combination for Joe Sanchez, who is visited by “kingmaker” Manny Arostegui. The bellowing but avuncular party boss is ready to engineer Sanchez into the newly vacant Senate post, but he’s heard some rumors and demands that Joe come clean about any skeletons in his closet that could short-circuit his rise. And that is when Joe has to start lying to Manny.
It is not just the politically poisonous boyfriend, or even the drug-addicted teenage son or the loose-lipped alcoholic wife that threatens Joe’s future. What makes When the Sun Shone Brighter a uniquely South Florida drama are the vagaries of local politics and Joe’s personal history of watching his anti-Castro father gunned down on the streets of Miami 30 years earlier. He has worn that tragic incident as a badge of political honor, but it suddenly appears that perhaps his father was killed for being too soft on Castro, a perceived sin of the father that could ruin the son.
While those decades-old wounds are still fresh to the Cuban-American community, Demos-Brown widens the theme by drawing thought-provoking parallels with today’s hard-liners against post-9/11 terrorists. Still, this could all be mere airport pulp fiction if the playwright did not keep the focus on the human drama, on Sanchez’s moral drift in the heady world of backroom politics.
Louis Tyrrell directs a strong cast, headed by former Tony Award nominee John Herrera (The Mystery of Edwin Drood) as wily, hot-tempered Manny, as full of bluster as he is of carefully calibrated charm. He may not be the central character, but he owns the production.
That is not to take anything away from Dan Domingues’s Joe, who exudes affable confidence, at least in public, while his private demeanor is more easily shaken. Cliff Burgess oozes a nothing-to-lose smugness as Joe’s boy toy, Natasha Sherritt is martini-cool as Joe’s fed-up wife, and even Brandon Morris comes off well in an underwritten role of the Miami detective assigned to the cold case of Joe’s father’s murder.
Performed with a brisk pace that adds to the play’s urgency, When the Sun Shone Brighter is likely to gain subsequent productions, because it is not just about the race for a political post, but a tug-of-war over a man’s soul.
WHEN THE SUN SHONE BRIGHTER, Florida Stage, 262 S. Ocean Blvd., Manalapan. Continuing through Sunday, June 20. Tickets: $45-48. Call: (561) 585-3433 or (800) 514-3837.
| 08 June 2010
The Excursion (1995); illustration for Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara, by James Gurney.
When not reduced to a still pile of bones, dinosaurs appear to us as skeletons trapped in glass cases. In two colors, usually: dark brown or white.
This summer, for three months, we can see them like never before. They play games, dance, sing, have their own alphabet and brush their teeth. They come in all colors: light and dark browns, grays, pinks.
Dinotopia: The Fantastical Art of James Gurney, running now through Sept. 5 at the Norton Museum in West Palm Beach, consists of more than 50 original oil paintings from Gurney’s illustrated books Dinotopia: A Land Apart From Time (1992), Dinotopia: The World Beneath (1995), and Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara (2007).
“It’s great for the kids and their imagination, but the quality of the works is so high it appeals to adults,” said Brianna Anderson-Guthrie, 24. Dinotopia is her first official show as main curator.
The storyline behind the pictures follows the experiences of Professor Arthur Denison and his son Will on a mysterious island where dinosaurs and shipwrecked travelers from all over the world live in harmony. The three rooms housing this exhibit show us dinosaurs that are very much alive and still evolving, in an artist’s mind.
An apatosaurus is a yellow school bus that stops at each house while officials use red-tasseled poles to stop ongoing traffic. A brachiosaurus’s long neck is used by firefighters as a ladder. A ceratosaurus with a big ego attempts to walk on stilts.
The struggle of convincing adults to dig his picture books, which are actually not children-level reading, are nothing compared to the kid-adult struggle inside us as we walk this show. We know none of this is real, but then again, why not? We rationalize it. We find it soothing, like a familiar lullaby.
Birthday Pageant (1995); illustration for Dinotopia: The World Beneath, by James Gurney.
Pieces such as Tuggle, featured on page 59 of the Chandara book, is one of many that steal that smile from us despite our conviction that this is a show for kids. In this game, where the first to fall to the ground loses, neither strength nor weight is a determining factor. Psychology is. A smaller player (in this piece, a blonde girl) can win by tricking a larger player (a dinosaur) into predicting a strong tug. Then a sudden release of tension will make the other fall backward. But in Gurney’s Tuggle, both players still look very determined to win. We can guess.
In the third room we find a nurturing oviraptor – once mistakenly thought by scientists to be egg thieves – cradling a dinosaur egg that needs to stay warm. A gentle and very warm piece, this is Outside the Hatchery (Warming the Eggs), an illustration from the Land Apart from Time book. In Dinotopia, most dinosaurs are born in the hatchery, where females go to lay their eggs in indoor nests.
Then there is Convoy Surrounded, an illustration for Dinotopia: The World Beneath. This is perhaps the most violent in the show, or at least less sweet than the other pictures. Turns out danger exists in Dinotopia, where going through tyrannosaurus lands is not exactly a picnic, hence the armor protecting the brachiosaur bus depicted here.
Garden of Hope (1995); illustration for Dinotopia: The World Beneath, by James Gurney.
If bright abundant colors, slow movements and dreamy-like light reigned before, here everything changes. The light is quite dramatic and bright colors nonexistent, except for a touch of red on the left. The dinosaurs’ aggressive stance tells us a battle is inevitable. We can move on to happier pieces or imagine the outcome in our minds.
Even if drama lives here, it is still an ideal world, given to us by an idealizing artist.
“There are many places in Dinotopia I haven’t been to,” says Gurney, who lives in New York with his family.
He loves heading outside with a portable kit to observe the behavior of living things. He listens to classical music when painting skies and water. That mystical striking sky in the Waterfall City illustrations is probably connected to Mozart and Bach, two of Gurney’s favorite composers. Family members and neighbors play a role as his models. Sketching trips, such as the ones to Niagara Falls, Venice and the Grand Canyon, give illustrations like Dream Canyon a powerful realism and majestic presence. In Dinotopia, young pilots go to Dream Canyon to train to fly on gigantic winged pterosaurs, which are closely depicted in another fine piece titled Skybax Ryder.
Waterfall City: Afternoon Light (2001); illustration for Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara, by James Gurney.
Pterosaurs, known as skybax in Dinotopia, were the largest creatures ever to fly. Depicted in this 1992 illustration is young Will doing what many young pilots on the island dream of: flying. For us it’s great because of the simple atmospheric perspective it offers. The images in the distance appear blurred, which only makes Will appear scarily high up.
Light, however, is the hardest thing to invent for this California-born author/artist. His new book, which discusses color and light, will be released in the fall. To study forms and the effects of light from all points of view, he builds models and maquettes, one of which has never been shown before. Making its debut here is a model of Bix, the parrot-beaked protoceratops in Dinotopia that speaks many languages and is one of the main characters.
As Bix, Gurney’s creations do unimaginable things but look scientifically accurate.
As if to reinforce this point, the museum has borrowed fossil specimens from the Broward College Graves Museum Collection. An allosaurus claw cast, an anatotitan skull cast and a coelophysis skeleton cast share the first room with eight of his illustrations.
How do they compare to us? The fossils seem to be asking.
Well, those dinosaurs seem to be having more fun, for one. They come in all colors. They listen and move slowly and even cry.
Archway Scene: Waterfall City (1992); illustration for Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time, by James Gurney.
Detailed enough to impress, light enough to entertain, Gurney has given the Norton what every museum might want to show, and not just in the summer: a visual lullaby for grown-ups, masked as a children’s attraction.
Dinotopia: The Fantastical Art of James Gurney runs through Sept. 5 at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach. Tickets: $12 adults; $5 ages 13-21; free 13 and under. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Also 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. second Thursday of each month. Closed Mondays and holidays. Call 832-5196 for more information or visit www.norton.org.
Artist James Gurney.
| 07 June 2010
Leonard Gilbert.
Unlike many younger musicians these days, Leonard Gilbert doesn’t go in for a lot of demonstrative behavior at the keyboard.
The 19-year-old Canadian pianist, who recently won first place in his country’s Chopin Piano Competition, shows admirable form at the instrument, letting his fingers and arms do the bulk of the work as he plays. And as his recital Saturday night at the Broward County Main Library in Fort Lauderdale showed, that playing is of a high caliber, and the kind that excites an audience.
Gilbert’s all-Chopin program included a number of big works, chief among them the Scherzo No. 1 (in B minor, Op. 20), the Sonata No. 3 (also in B minor, Op. 58), and the Ballade No. 4 (in F minor, Op. 52). The celebrated Polonaise in A-flat (Op. 53) was also included, along with three shorter works: two of the Op. 25 Études (Nos. 5 in E minor and 11 in A minor) and the popular Nocturne in D-flat, Op. 27, No. 2.
In all of these pieces, Gilbert demonstrated a large and impressive technique, especially in the multiple passages of speedy, glittering runs, such as in the second movement of the Third Sonata. There was no audible sense of strain or struggle in bringing off these measures; rather, it sounded as though Gilbert simply was taking another strand of well-formed pearls off an endless assembly line.
He also has a remarkably mature sound for someone still in his teens. Gilbert already is a pianist who knows how to create a persuasive deep mood, as he did most notably in the nocturne, which had a gentle, hushed, almost half-hearted quality that was very effective.
What he is not yet able to do, though this should come with time, is craft a unified long narrative. In all of the larger pieces Saturday night, the sections were too distinct from each other, and in addition there was a kind of rushed quality throughout the recital that at times took away Chopin’s subtler touches.
Frederic Chopin, as seen by Delacroix.
In the first movement of the sonata, for example, the main theme and secondary theme sounded like two different pieces, and while they are quite separate in character, they are part of a sonata form and they need to sound like they are part of the same line of reasoning. The same comment applies to the scherzo, which had a very clear, springy feel to the main section, but when it got to the Polish Christmas carol Chopin used for the middle section, Gilbert didn’t take enough time to set it up, slamming on his musical brakes before playing the carol.
In the polonaise, the second subject after the main theme didn’t have the kind of snap it needs as it goes through its swift harmonic rhythm, a rhythm whose periods are separated by that long glissando that ends in the high accented notes. Gilbert plowed through that passage with technical skill, but that run and its ending notes conclude that harmonic paragraph, and the break has to be clear and deliberate. It’s a musical palate-cleanser, and it has to be stressed so that the ear is ready for the next series of rapidly changing chords.
Perhaps that’s too nitpicky or technical, but it seems to me that these is the primary thing that Gilbert needs to work on next to become more than just the already excellent pianist he is. Chopin took great care with his transitional material, and if enough attention isn’t paid to exactly what’s going on there, the long line of the music’s argument won’t come through. Once that’s in place, he can concentrate on shaping the themes with more refinement, such as in the E major section of the E minor étude, which was too rushed Saturday night to be completely effective, particularly at the ends of phrases.
That said, there were many moments of really fine playing, such as the main theme of the sonata’s finale, which had color, strength and real bigness, and the ballade, which could have used more interpretive shading but otherwise had the kind of grit and fire that makes it epic. Overall, Gilbert’s best playing came in the nocturne, which was beautifully communicative from the first low bass notes to the simple cadence at the end.
As noted, Leonard Gilbert already is a formidable pianist at an early age. With his sheer command of the keyboard, in moments of virtuosity and those in which good tone color and expressiveness are at a premium, he has a good chance to build a strong career for himself. What he needs to do now is dig a little deeper into the music and understand more about it, so that it has its maximum opportunity to speak.
| 05 June 2010
Daniel Bernard Roumain. (Photo by Julieta Cervantes)
It’s not easy to categorize a musician who can write sonatas for turntables and hip-hop etudes, a violin concerto and dance scores, but the world of contemporary classical music is quickly getting used to the cross-genre fluency of people such as Daniel Bernard Roumain.
“I think there are a lot of composers my age and younger, who literally have played in rock bands, go to nightclubs, kind of hang out in what you could loosely describe as anti-classical music establishments,” Roumain said. “And I think that it’s reflected in what we’re all doing. There’s a whole scene of young American composers who freely embrace technology, work with rock musicians, work with DJs and laptopists … and who are also electronic musicians and remixers, and are adept at the handling of the technology.”
Now, with his custom-made six-string violin (whimsically named Bernadette), Roumain is pursuing a multi-pronged career that sees him as composer, performer, bandleader, teacher, and conductor, a far cry from the regimented concert life he once thought he would be leading when he first heard a violin in the halls of Margate Elementary School and knew what he wanted to do for a living.
Roumain, 39, grew up in Margate as the son of Haitian immigrants who moved from suburban Chicago to Broward County when Daniel was just 5. After graduating from the Dillard School of Performing Arts in Fort Lauderdale, it was off to Nashville for study at Vanderbilt University, then north to Ann Arbor for a master’s and doctorate at the University of Michigan.
Since then, he’s held enviable compositional residencies at prestigious organizations such as the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, the American Composers Orchestra and the Seattle Theater Group, and schools such as Arizona State and Drexel universities. He’s written for theater, film and television, and for world-class instrumentalists such as guitarist Eliot Fisk, who in 2007 premiered Roumain’s guitar concerto, We March!, with the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra.
In late March, Thirsty Ear Records released Roumain’s second album, Woodbox Beats & Balladry. It contains music Roumain has written over the past three or four years, and unlike his first album, etudes4violin&electronix, released in 2007, Woodbox was designed to be a showcase for his nine-piece band.
“It’s always about the violin first, and it’s always about a conversation,” he said. “The first record was a conversation with other composers – Philip Glass, [Ryuichi] Sakomoto, [DJ] Spooky, and so forth – this is really a conversation with the members of my band, DBR and the Mission. It’s [also] kind of a conversation between my violin as performer, and my work as a composer.
“We focused on works that were written down – very little improvisation, including the ‘Sonata for Violin and Turntables’ -- and really the conversation had to do with musicians I’ve been working with for years,” he said. “And the compositions we’ve been playing for years. So this is something that’s much deeper, much closer to home, and I think the record reflects that.”
The cover of Woodbox Beats & Balladry.
Woodbox Beats & Balladry is an energetic, eclectic mix of music that makes use of radically different sound worlds: from the chugging rhythms of Armstrong (based on one of Roumain’s Hip-Hop Etudes) to the moody stasis of Simone, with its long, simple piano chords and a melody that climbs by repeated notes slowly up. Although Roumain’s widely varied violin playing stands out as the focus of the disc, it still has the feel of a band record on its dancier cuts [here is the official trailer for the disc].
But there are also tracks such as Moonshine, for which Roumain did “everything: the production, the keyboards, the track, the bass – and that’s just not unusual at all anymore.”
“There’s a really big difference between the previous generation of composers, who were more about ensemble work, and who were maybe less comfortable with some aspects of the technology. Maybe that’s a fair argument, I don’t know,” he said. “But certainly what’s happening now is you’re seeing composers who have huge interest in film, television and the dance scene, and the rock hipster scene, the indie scene. I think all this is finding its way into their voices.”
The final track on the album, Our Country, is a deeply expressive meditative fantasy on My Country, ‘tis of Thee, in which the familiar tune is played and then varied in gradually higher registers, most of it over a gentle ostinato pattern in the piano. The piece begins in the lowest strings of the six-string, and it sounds very much like a cello. The violin was made for Roumain by Eric Aceto, a luthier who owns Ithaca Stringed Instruments in upstate New York.
“I’ve been working with him for a few years, and we started talking casually about ‘How can we make a violin that has very low strings? What would we have to do to make it really sound good?’” Roumain said.
The scroll of Bernadette.
The violin has two added strings on the lower end, a C below middle C (like the lowest string of the viola) and an F below that. Roumain said he sometimes tunes the bottom two strings to E-flat and B-flat and explores the resulting chord, a nice, jazzy E-flat with a major seventh and a flat fifth and ninth.
“It’s the only instrument of its kind in the world. It has a very unique sound,” he said. It’s also heavier, like a viola, and there was some learning curve for Roumain to get comfortable with it. “The first few months, I was getting this weird tennis elbow … It’s a monster. It’s not something you just pick up and play.”
Roumain, like many musicians of his generation, is working at a time of great change. The advent of relatively cheap but excellent computer technology has radically altered the music industry from the standpoint of recording and distribution. It also has encouraged compositional efforts from writers who until relatively recently would have had little chance of getting a hearing for their music.
“I’m not sure, but I would imagine there’s never been more composers living and working in New York,” said Roumain, who also lives there with his wife, Jill, a special education teacher, and their 11-month-old son, Zachary. “At the same time, it doesn’t necessarily feel that way … The people getting the attention don’t necessarily reflect not only the vastness of the industry, they also don’t necessarily reflect the depth or even the interests of the industry.”
Still, while the tendency of cultural activity to organize itself into hierarchies of “in” composers and players hasn’t changed, almost everything else has.
“The biggest change is you do have access. Composers do have their own websites, they do get their music out over the Internet, they do have their own online mechanisms, not for publication, but for performance,” he said.
“I think that for me, I’m always thinking about what I want to do next ... You’re kind of always competing, not only with yourself in a way, but the people who came before you, the people right next to you, and the people coming from behind,” Roumain said.
“I think that’s also a big difference. John Cage didn’t have to compete with a 16-year-old who has 200,000 views on his website.”
Much of Roumain’s work life is taken up with education. He has just finished a year of occasional stops at Vanderbilt as a visiting associate professor of composition, and during a recent appearance in Boston, he toured six schools in the Massachusetts capital. The chief question he gets from aspiring musicians is this: How do I do what you did?
When they ask, Roumain tells them who his models were: Philip Glass, Prince, Madonna, Nina Simone, Thelonious Monk, among others. “And sure, I definitely have a whole list of activities, my kind of Ten Commandments for a career, and I just try to give them very practical, specific guidance.”
Roumain also defines himself as a Haitian-American artist, and he remains passionate about aiding his parents’ native country, especially in the wake of the Jan. 12 earthquake that killed an estimated 230,000 people.
“Every opportunity I get I’m flipping my previously scheduled concerts into relief efforts,” he said. “I think, moving ahead, it’s my job as a self-proclaimed Haitian-American composer to just keep talking about it, to remind people that Haiti still needs help.”
Roumain will visit Haiti this summer with other artists to give some concerts, and he notes that music has the power to bring people together. “The thing about a concert, or the arts, is that it really gives you a sense of your humanity,” he said, and he hopes the music will help Haitians who have lived through such a punishing catastrophe be reminded of their humanity as well.
Daniel Bernard Roumain finds inspiration in many different genres. (Photo by Julieta Cervantes)
One major event still to come this year is scheduled for Sept. 25, when the New World Symphony in Miami Beach will give the premiere of Roumain’s new Symphony for Dancers, Dreamers and Presidents, written for the Sphinx Foundation, and scheduled for performance by 11 other major symphonic ensembles including the Detroit, Philadelphia and Cincinnati orchestras. Roumain has written a good deal of music for dance, having worked for six or seven years with the eminent choreographer Bill T. Jones, and plans to soon release a recording of some of that music.
“I have found a way to make all of these endeavors have a fluid and effortless conversation with one another,” he said. “And that’s good for me. If you talk to my wife, I tour too much; if you talk to the band, we don’t tour nearly as much as we should.”
Most recently, last month he led the New England Conservatory of Music student orchestra in his new Symphony for the Dance Floor, and he’s begun work on another commission for the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Despite all these different activities and the relentless pace of change in the industry, certain things about an artist’s life are the same as they ever were, Roumain said.
“Changes involve a hyper-branching out of many different things at once,” he said. “The only thing you can do as an artist, the thing that has not changed at all, is that you have to know who you are, you have to understand your audience, and you have to build it and cultivate it every single day.”
“In that sense, nothing has changed,” he said. “The commitment – that hasn’t changed at all.”
Daniel Bernard Roumain’s website – www.dbrmusic.com – has a large selection of sheet music excerpts from his compositions, which helps gives visitors a better idea what his music is all about.
