I sit down with this man, his massive collection of snaking, willow-like dreadlocks tied behind his head. He relaxes on a lobby sofa at a Holiday Inn, the classical interior decoration almost bending around his personage. I can almost hear the arrangements inside his mind, their number too loud and too great to be contained between two ears. The mark of a composer.
This is Daniel Bernard Roumain, also known as DBR, master violinist and composer for the group DBR and the SQ Unit. A Haitian-American and New York City resident, as well as a former member of the infamous rap group 2 Live Crew, he became a rebel on the classical music scene due to his shrewd business sense and his use of electronic music in conjunction with violins, viola and cello, among others. The pieces assault you with the sensation of having been to a folk, jazz, hip-hop, metal, rock and symphony orchestra all at once.
“As a composer I’d like to say I’m a blue collar guy,” Daniel said. “It’s not too sophisticated, not too pop.”
This past spring, DBR and the Mission played a concert at Stewart Theater, and as a part of their unplugged acoustic tour will be playing alongside N.C. State students this Tuesday night. Violinists Carol Akers and Daniel Cunningham, viola player Neda Pourdeyhimi and bassist Jessie Birckhead will be joined by Raleigh percussionist Andrew Munger in a piece with deep connections to Roumain’s roots.
“We’ll be performing a Haitian double quartet kompa, an octet designed to have a professional string quartet work with an ‘amateur’ string quartet,” Roumain said, who notes the important visual relationship the piece has between teacher and student. “The professional and amateur violins stand together and read off the same music. At one point the student even has to turn the page of the master. It’s not condescending but rather really endearing.”
His latest 90-minute piece for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, titled “Darwin’s Meditation for the People of Lincoln,” imagines a conversation between the two great Americans, one born only hours after the other yet spent their entire lives never meeting.
Whenever I find myself in the presence of artists, whether they’ve “made it” or not, I feel compelled to ask them if they have any advice.
“If I could talk to myself, I’d say first come up with a budget,” Roumain said. “A career depends on funding and collateral, so get some credit and start very slowly and very small in every way. Think locally, live at home. If you’ve graduated college there’s no shame in it. Art is the most important thing. Know the history of your industry and go read. This is the other part of it: self-education. Don’t re-invent the wheel, model your career.”
As a writer, I’ve always been told about the virtue of those artists who eked out a living on the razor’s edge of poverty.
“I can’t stand the notion of the starving artist,” Roumain said. “I mean, I’m making a living, and I think it’s a very 2008 aesthetic, that you can make a living as an artist. But you have to know Brahms, Rilke, Jack Welch, Beethoven, Christopher Cox and Nina Simone. The world needs you to be alive. …There is a direct relationship between personal longevity and your wealth.”
He laughs and tells me that he’s been called the anti-Christ of classical music. I ask why he’s so proud of this, many artists considering money to be the root of all evil and at the very least an obstacle to art.
“Some composers see that as a threat, that business is somehow less artistic,” Roumain said. “I disagree. It gives me even more freedom to compose. That’s one of the big fallacies about music. Composers have always been business savvy, and the proof is that we still know their works. Those artists who weren’t business savvy, their works are lost forever and will never come back.”
These compositions toy with the very spirituality of the listener. It is a mournful and energetic bombardment on the emotions that defies every expectation you have of their instruments. If you think symphonic composition is something only Germans did in the 18th century, then you are depriving yourself of true, life-affirming, all-encompassing art.
