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  Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR)

An interview with
Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR)

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We had the opportunity to email DBR and ask a few questions:

CD: I'd like to start by thinking about distinctions, to get an idea of how you think about things.

DBR: I have purposefully started thinking less and less about things more and more. I am in a mode of non-restraint and imposed freedom. That last sentence seems incredibly politically correct these days...no?

CD: Do you make distinctions between say “art” music and “popular” music, and their audiences?

DBR: I don't make much of a distinction personally, though I am well aware of the reality of the marketplace, the business of the performing arts, and branding. To me, Bjork is an amazing talented avant-garde composer, who also happens to be an electronica star. I am modeling my own career after hers. My music is a hybrid form, comprised of all the music I grew-up listening to. I am a proud product of the public school system and a card-caring member of the iPod generation. The very best promise for art music audiences is to be open to my work and the work of some of my peers who are bringing our own tribes into the art music scene.

CD: Do we expect too much of contemporary classical music? Do we burden art music with excessive seriousness? In the visual arts we can get a lot out of a colorful Matisse painting of a vase of fruit - why all the angst with classical music?

DBR: I am not sure why contemporary classical music IS so serious it seems, so dark, and brooding, and overwhelmingly atonal. The most successful composers, in terms of CD sales and publication might be contemporary tonal composers, though I have no proof of this, only a hunch. I am committed to beats and strings and much of music can be and is danced to, both my modern dance companies and in downtown NYC clubs. I am really not too concerned about the "life" of classical music or it's future. I am more concerned with the contributions I can make.

CD: You want to push the limits of the violin, what are your associations with the traditional sound of the violin?

DBR: I'm a trained violinist. I started playing when I was 5 years-old. At the same time, I was always improvising and learning songs using my ears as a guide, not always depending on my music teachers or notated music. Extending the technique of an instrument is part of the history of classical music, particularly the work of great, 20th Century, modernists, and third-stream composers including Cage, Feldman, Schuller, Boulez, Davidovsky, Reich, Glass, and Babbit. I strike my violin, I beat my violin, I approach my violin like a drum kit, electric guitar, or synthesizer. But that is the thing: in the end, it is MY violin and like so many before me, I wish only to express myself.

CD: I can see that the violin could be a cultural signifier, (in a PBS interview) you have said that you felt that violin doesn’t represent your culture and history.

DBR: Actually, I said classical violin playing doesn't necessarily represent my culture and my history. My parents are from Haiti, I grew-up in South Florida, and now live and work in Harlem. It would be unrealistic to say that classical violin has had a significant role in those cultures, (I don't think that it does), even though slaves in the ante-bellum south did play the violin and those escaping to the north were often advertised and caught because of their fiddles. My grandfather was an amateur classical violinist in Haiti. Harlem has been home to numerous Black violin players, including the photographer James VanDerZee. In my own brand of violin playing, you end up with a distinctive sound made by striking the instrument with the wood of bow on specific areas on the violin (the bridge, the fingerboard, behind the bridge, etc.), using a type of modified sul pontincello that involves gradually moving the bow towards and away from the bridge, and plucking the strings with a tremendous amount of force and speed. ALL of these techniques are in fact, extensions of traditional violin playing, re-imagined by the composer to reflect today's hip-hop and rock timbres.

CD: What, made you turn to composing?

DBR: A deep and profound need to express thoughts, ideas, feelings, and emotions that had no other outlet. Mozart could not do for me what I needed to do for myself.

CD: What is that makes you stick with formal composition, I have to assume that in light of all the different sources that you pull together to make the works there must be a lot of possible paths to take for yourself?

DBR: I am always finding new ways to compose. I have to. I collaborate with a broad range of artists, some of which are not composers. Composing has been a part of my personal language of self-expression for over 20 years now. I love to compose, but I am compelled to create new techniques, styles, and methods that allow for the composition and collaboration of new works by artists not versed in traditional notation. Graphic, numerical, and text-based notation are all a part of the compositional techniques I have used in my musical scores.

CD: OK, so on to Hip-hop. Is it thematic material or something else, I am not talking about culture or race, only on musical (or emotional) grounds, do you think of hip hop as a way that can enrich your music (in my opinion the traditional way classical composers use source material) or do you want to take a piece of the hip-hop and bring it somewhere where it might not naturally go? (At the risk of anthropomorphizing)

DBR: I think Hip-Hop music is exceedingly complex because of its intrinsic contrapuntal nature. There are 3 fundamental layers in Hip-Hop music. The first layer consists of the beat, the percussive track. The second layer consists of the sampled sounds, live performance and/or other musical tracks. The third layer consists of the vocal track, often through-composed, ever-changing, and exceedingly complex rhythmically (I challenge anyone to transcribe, RHYTHMICALLY, anyone record by Wu Tang, Eminem, Snoop, or Tupac). These layers form a unified track, a unified ideal. This is no different than Bach or Brahms or Copland. The differences in Hip-Hop music are the specific rhythms that qualify as Hip-Hop rhythms and how the first layer dictates the rhythms and tendencies of the other layers. In my own HIP-HOP STUDIES AND ETUDES, I am applying these fundamental aspects of Hip-Hop music to my own music while simultaneously placing a microscope upon these rhythms and fragmenting them into something unique and my personal.

CD: How has Hip-hop redefined sound/music/rhythm for you?

DBR: Hip-Hop music has very specific rhythms. If you don't know or utilize these rhythms, it's not Hip-Hop music...period. My love and study of Hip-Hop music has increased my musicianship and made me a more aware and informed musician and person.

CD: We seem to be focused on hip-hop, but your work is built on the vocabulary of minimalism, can you talk a little about how minimalism affected you and your ideas.

DBR: You call it minimalism, but I do not.
Repeat.
You call it.
Repeat.
Minimalism.
Repeat.
You call it.
Repeat.
Minimalism.
Repetition is older than minimalism.
Black people repeat things.
Black people repeat things, and.
Black people know how to repeat things and make.
Black people have been repeating things far longer than a White man's minimalism. Repeat.
Black people know how to repeat things because we have always known that it's impossible to repeat something and not change it, slightly.
Black people repeat things because we love to groove.
Black people repeat and are brave enough to.
Black people repeat.
Repeat. Repeat.
The joy of repetition.
The joy of repetition.
Repeat.
Repeat.
Repeat.
Repeat.
You dig?
You call it minimalism, but I will not.
You catch that last one?

CD: Then can you comment on the synthesis of styles in your work?

DBR: I am not interested in a borderline view, I want the real thing. I do think DBR & THE MISSION can compete with any band in the world. I have held my own with DJ's, jazz singers, dancers, composers, and rock stars. I think that classical composers think that they can study a style of music and then compose in that style. NO CAN DO. You have to live it, drink it, breathe it, swallow it whole, and then maybe what comes out might be worth a damn.

CD: Your musical and performance style is very inclusive, what’s the degree of improvisation in the MISSION?

DBR: It varies. DBR & THE MISSION are a collection of virtuoso musicians. Some things are fully notated. Other works are completely improvised. I don't think the audience cares much in the difference. More, I don't most of our audience could tell the difference. I really don't think the answer to the question is important anymore. Those needs are gone for me.

CD: If you can you define what a DBR musical experience is or might be what does it include?

DBR: Dance-Beats-Rhythm. DBR.