Parson Brown

A beautiful sight, we're happy tonight, walkin' in a...

Ah, Christmas! Or should I say the holidays? No matter, I trust you and you get it. It's that time of year of giving, getting, wanting, and hopefully, thanking. And like most of us, some reflecting, too.

I'm so thankful for everyone who came out to the shows. From Melbourne to Brooklyn to Des Moines to Iowa City, we had a blast! As I like to remind myself, it seems everyone I meet makes their way to my fingertips and end up in a song, composition, or improvised riff. That's one way a violinist makes communion with the world. There's nothing more beautiful than peering out from the stage into the audience and seeing you, in all of your diversity, looking back at me, at us. It's a beautiful sight, indeed.

In the meadow we can build a snowman, then pretend that he is Parson Brown. He'll say 'Are You Married?' We'll say 'No man, but you can do the job when you're in...'

The towns I'll visit next year will be Chicago, Adelaide, Manchester, West Palm Beach, and a few others. I look forward to our conversations there and then. I try not to get too ahead of myself, lest I forget where I've been or where I come from.

Join MYSPACE, become a friend, and then you can really let me know what you think and what you want. I can't grant every wish, but I can listen to it all and respond. For now, I'll imagine myself going home, making some hot chocolate, taking a big blanket, and planting myself underneath Mom's perfectly dressed Christmas tree. To me, that's home. How about you? What's home and what do you do to honor that precious place? Let me know.

Take good care and I really can't wait to see you next year. I wish you nothing more than what you want or need.

He sings a love song, as we go along, walking in a...

ps. Two points and a Christmas gift if you can tell me who Parson Brown is.

Ft. Lauderdale
December 2007

9:11 AM - 3 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Home

I've been home now, each night of this week. It's a wonderful feeling.
Is there any place that feels as safe and secure than the four walls you own
or rent?

Perhaps I am too sentimental.

November 30
Harlem, NYC

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DBR from Iowa

Hello my friends,

I'm in the simple and lovely city of Des Moines, Iowa, preparing for weekend performances of VOODOO VIOLIN CONCERTO with the symphony here. As I return to this work, and its rich amalgam of folk, classical, secular, and sacred Haitian music (or rather, my compositional impressions of those genres!) I am at once reminded---as I stand before the 100 musicians of the orchestra; violin in hand; marching with them; an army of one unified sound---of how fortunate and fragile I am as an artist to be afforded an opportunity to practice my profession on a grand scale, and how fortunate we all are, as Americans, to have an opportunity to participate in the communal world of our collective performing arts.

This coming week marks the world premiere of One Loss Plus, a work for six-string violin, prepared piano, and video. As a part of the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the work will also feature filmed performances by DJ SPOOKY, TONI BLACKMAN, friends and family from YOUTUBE and MYSPACE, and a very special live performance by one of Haiti's most important popular voices, Emeline Michel. It's loud, fast, fierce, intimate, and (I think) an honest work, one that asks the question, What is gained when something or someone is lost?

I hope you can attend on either November 14, 16, or 17 and in doing so, become a very important part of what I hope will be an answer to those things lost and gained and those ever present, but ever elusive, feelings of enduring optimism that we should all take to the time to consider and share.

Des Moines, Iowa
November, 2007

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Call for submissions: ONE LOSS PLUS - now due 8/5/07

Call for submissions - DEADLINE EXTENDED

This is an invitation from Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR).

8:03 AM - 2 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

We All Suffer But Not All of Us Survive

THE TUSCALOOSA MEDITATIONS is my latest work. It's scored for string orchestra, two flutes, and solo (offstage) trumpet. It was commissioned by the University of Alabama to commemorate Vivian Malone Jones and James Hood, the first African-American students to attend that university in that state.

I traveled with my friend, Janet Wong, down to Tuscaloosa, Alabama (upon invitation from the University of Alabama) to learn more about George Wallace and his stand in the school house door; Vivian Malone Jones, James Hood, and their stand against him; and to stand, gaze upon, and learn from Foster Auditorium itself. Being in that building, walking along the dusty floor, and playing the violin through that same, infamous door, has, in very real and significant ways, changed my life. My life is changed because I have a better understanding of what happened there, why the events there unfolded as they did, and just how much consideration was given to everyone involved.

And that is all I want to do, really, is to be considered---that is, for you to consider me and this music, this meditation on everyone who has gone through all the things that we all do just to live and to be alive. There's a saying someone once told me: we all suffer but not all of us survive.

The American composer Charles Ives' THE UNANSWERED QUESTION asks similar questions in its musical language. That work inspired this one. More than anything, Vivian's courage and James' strength, in the face of so much opposition and oppression, laid the foundation for why I chose to memorialize them and to pay homage to Foster Auditorium. There are still so many questions to be answered, so many stories that still linger in the hallways of that place. Mine is only one of them. All the rest must be answered by us.

Are we prepared?

Paris, France
17 March 2007

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iPodding

The iPod is the greatest musical instrument and musical invention of the 21st Century. Like any instrument when you buy it, it's blank, empty, and waiting to be filled, wanting you to put your hands on it. You input your tastes, your music, your ideas. You input your arrangements of those ideas exemplified by your playlists. You make it your own. By shuffling your ideas, or allowing them to be randomized, you are participating in a compositional idea, a compositional technique, an aleatoric procedure. The unexpected nature of what might come next, of what might be heard next, helps to liberate the mind and the ear and expand the very personal nature of one's perception of music, and I think, one's taste. And like any great musical device, the iPod can grow and expand and respond along with the player. Several companies offers ways in which two iPods can be used as two turntables. Podcasts are becoming more and more common and blue collar (the NYPD features one now on its homepage). Today, I noticed there were 235,000,000 "hits" when the word "iPod" was googled.

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Timbre is Your Lover's Voice

Music changed my life

Music changed my life and saved my life. Statistically speaking, as a young Black man in America, I should have at least one child; I should have used or should be using illegal drugs; I should have been arrested, been to jail and/or prison at least once; I could be HIV+; I could be unemployed; I could be dead. When I tell you music changed my life and saved my life, that is not an exaggeration.

***

In service to music

You have to decide whether or not you are going to have music serve you or if you are going to live your life in service to music.

***

It is, is it?

History, tradition, and classical music---are these words related?
Who decides what it is or when it is---is it you or them?

***

Composers are

Composers are historians, documentarians, ethnomusicologists, and pathological liars.

***

B to MJ to M to PRN

Brahms is to Michael Jackson as Mahler is to Prince. The formers are most concerned with melody with little attention paid to timbre. The latters provide substantial melodic construction supported by overwhelming timbral patterns and design.

***

SSS

When everything else is over, music and silence should be about selflessness, selfishness, and pleasure.

***

Listen and move

If you want to understand music, take a dance class. If you want to learn how to dance, don't ask a musician. Listen and move to your favorite music instead.

***

Listen to your lover's voice

If you want to understand timbre, or the color of sound, that is, what distinguishes the sound of a piano from the sound of a violin, listen to your lover's voice. Have you ever recorded the voice of someone you want to love and listened back to it? Have you ever called someone's voicemail just to hear the sound of their voice if only for a few, passing moments? Have you ever kept a message from them on your cell phone for days, weeks even, because you love the sound of their voice that much? That is timbre, or for me, the best definition.

11:22 PM - 1 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

WHAT ONE MUST DO

you have to challenge yourself.
you have to stretch your imagination.
you have to play as though you will not be able to play tomorrow.

you have to play when it hurts because no one else will.
you have to play until it hurts because no one else can or will dare to.
you have to play until the pain is gone.

you have to think about your mother.
you have to think about your mother murdered.
you have to think about your mother's murderer and play to him.
all the rage.
all the anger.

you have to think of your first child.
you have to think of her name.
you have to play to her and be as gentle as the mother you might be.
all the tenderness.
all the patience.
all the pride.

you have to beat your instrument.
you have to play your cello like a bass drum.
you have to play your violin like an electric guitar.
you have to play your drum like a flute.
you have to play your flute like a drum kit.

you have to have so much pressure on the bow it all becomes pure noise.

you have to listen with your whole body.

you are way too comfortable with what you think you know.

you have to keep learning.
you have to want to.
you have to go to new places and then you can take me there.

you have to have balls and know when not to.
you have to see with your father's eyes; no one is blind.

you have to find the beauty in one note and then share it with me.

you have to want to be new.
you have to listen to things you don't want to listen to.

you have to make NIN a part of your DNA.

you have to play tired and make it beautiful.
you have to be poor and shallow and play rich and deep.

you have to try 1,000 times harder and that is only a start and you have to know that.
you have to count and make it count.
you have to not take it for granted and i think you do.
you have to not become a broken record doing the same things everyday.

everyday do the same thing and see how it feels; tomorrow do one thing
different and see how that feels. pick one and repeat.

ask yourself, "why would i want to listen to you?"
i ask myself, "what am i playing that hasn't been played before, better?"

are you original?
where does originality exist?
is there anyone in the world like you?
no?
prove it!

you can.
play it!

you have to decide.
you have to make the choice to be a great musician in the hopes that
you might make good music.
you have to be able to make great conversation first.

there is nothing i can teach you that you don't already know.
don't you know this?

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On God and Grooves

There is nothing special about any composer combining hip-hop music with classical music. As a composer, I see myself and my work as an extension of what rap and hip-hop producers did and still do: combining seemingly disparate music (and musical IDEAS) within a singular, unified vision. The earliest rap records used James Brown records, a classic, black soul music, and the earliest hip-hop records sampled classical recordings and symphonic scores.  Barry White often led an orchestra of 70 musicians, backed by a fierce rhythm section of drums, bass, and keyboards.  More than the celebrated conductor/teacher Pierre Monteux, White had the biggest stick and conducting arm in "classical" music.

Today, I'm not the only "hip-hop violinist", with international stars including BLACK VIOLIN, NUTTIN' BUT STRINGS, and MIRI BEN ARI all on the scene, all using violins, strings, and classical music within their own unique expression. 

A reporter from UCLA asked me is there "something else" going on in my music. Good question.

Marvin Gaye asked a similar question years ago, in response to the Vietnam War.  As a black composer living in Harlem during a time of war, I do feel a call to duty. My violin is my sword, my gun, my weapon of choice.  As a composer, I can enlist an army of 100 symphonic musicians.  For them to play HIP-HOP ESSAY FOR ORCHESTRA then takes on a very special meaning for me, and I hope, the audience.  I hope to bring my own brand of democracy to the concert hall so that my compositional pursuits and preferences are not seen as something exceptional, special, or unusual, but rather, that hip-hop and classical music might CONTINUE to live side-by-side and that we all might truly become one nation under God and a mighty, might groove, too.

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Composing Time

Composing and finding time to compose is a commitment you make with, not only yourself, but with other musicians and an audience that doesn't exist yet.  I am always aware that at the moment of conception, the idea for a new work, a new note, a new melody will actually become REAL in another space and time.  So composing time is dream time---it's fantasty, imagination, and all facade. 

Composing is like creating a mirage in a dreamworld of ghosts.

3:05 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment