Be: Where were you raised and where do you live now? I see a lot of “ragtime” videos and you post a lot of pictures of barns and country settings. I was wondering how much your location might have colored your music and art? How much do you feel your family has influenced your style of playing?
David: I grew up in Jackson County, Mississippi, in the southeastern corner of the state, very near the Alabama state line. I count the village of Kreole as my hometown, though it was annexed by Moss Point in my teens, which I’ve always regretted. It was a world of savanna remnants and piney clusters, of our cousins’ little stores, of the Finn church and the forest just beyond, of the rude dreaminess of Bayou Cumbest, and the ongoing clamor of the paper mill, that destination of log trains clacking through the night. I was deeply affected by landscape and the nuances of place from very early in my memory. In addition to the pine thickets and buttercup savanna flourished much river swamp sporting the usual sensuous hardwoods, such as sweet bay magnolia, red bay and black gum. The Escatawpa River was nearby, and the mighty Pascagoula itself only a bit further. The mystery inherent in this heavy, ultra-green world became a central theme in my consciousness, and would remain a leering force in my work. I’ve carried the intrigue of structures pressed upon by the darkness of timber throughout my locale-obsessed life, reveling in its irreplaceable thrills from the Piney Woods of the Gulf South, to the Missouri Ozarks, to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, just to mention the regions exerting the most intense hold upon me.
I now live with my wife, Teresa, in Walnut Creek, California, in the east Bay Area, and have for some years. We’ve known each other since our late teens, when we were attending the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. Having been in and out of California for much of my adult life, I’ve developed a poetic relationship with much of this territory, too, especially far northern California and the subtly magical California Delta just east of here. To say that I continue to prioritize a highly reflective, intimate relationship with place barely suggests how deeply influential this factor in my thought continues to be. It drives my longings and the lyricism of my sanity, and I daily dwell upon it as I endeavor to decide where an archive/museum devoted to my work should be created.
"The Window" by David Thomas Roberts
Be: Even with your unlimited and eclectic compositions such as “The Window” I hear a ragtime influence. Are your compositions played exactly the same every time or do you add bits as you play, according to your mood or what you have in mind to express?
Can others buy sheet music of your compositions or are you completely unique each time you play?
David: Ragtime came into my life in early childhood, thanks to the late years of the first ragtime revival, which roughly lasted from 1949 to the early ‘60s. I lost contact with it, in effect, for some years, especially as I focused upon painting more than composing from age 9 to 14, after writing my first piece at age 8 (a waltz which I still play in concert!). It reentered my life as I was returning to composition much more intently, thanks to my discovery of the extraordinary music of Charles Ives, who utilized ragtime in his uniquely prescient, visionary, collage-like works. This was also the time when Joshua Rifkin’s first recording of Scott Joplin’s rags appeared on Nonesuch, a project that yanked me onto the path of becoming a ragtime composer and, in the view of many, the most significant one of the second half of the 20th century and beyond. Ragtime-based composing is but one face of my NeoRomantic language, though perhaps the most revealing, and thoroughly explored one. For me, the piano rag became an affectionate vehicle of lyrical, confessional utterance, a precious vessel for my most vulnerable and trusting expression. One can’t miss my roots in Romantic piano music in general, or my love of hymns, much popular music and various ethnic expression when hearing such ragtime-based works as “Camille,” “Waterloo Girls,” “Pinelands Memoir,” “Through the Bottomlands,” “Roberto Clemente,” “Nahyr” and dozens of others. The sheer melodic appeal of these pieces as well as their unabridged, yearning expressivity, has much to do with my being disproportionately associated with ragtime to this day, despite the increasing availability of other branches of my musical output. It was as the composer of *Roberto Clemente* in particular that I found at least a cultish, niche recognition while still in my twenties.
Like most other classical/art music/serious music composers, I greatly value the specificity and precision of scores, and my ragtime-based and other Americana/PanAmericana compositions are no exception. That said, I’m acceptant of very slight embellishments and hints of variation in many works in restrained keeping with the recorded legacies of 19th and early 20th century virtuosi such as Alfred Cortot, Ignaz Friedman and Vladimir de Pachmann, and what many of us like to think is the appropriate treatment of Midwestern rags as well, at least on the repeats of strains.
"Waterloo Girls" by David Thomas Roberts
A great many of my piano pieces are published, and are generally available via my website, DavidThomasRoberts.com
Be: Have you been to many countries on concert tours? I saw that you played in Japan. Do you paint when you travel? Do you feel your music and painting are closely connected somehow, like different expressions of the same ideas? They both strike me as energetic and “jazzy”.)
David: I’ve performed in Canada, Norway and Japan, but would love to concertize in many other countries, including England and Brazil. I’m friendly with a good many people in Brazil, and am an admirer and interpreter of Ernesto Nazareth. These days I would be gratified to appear far more often here in the States, too.
As for links between visual art and composition, yes, they are deeply intertwined in my psyche; indeed, I’ve often referred to them as facets of the same invention. I’ve been engaged in polymathic expression nearly my entire life, and have relished the interplay between poetry, music and visual art from early on. When asked in the fourth grade what I wanted “to be,” I answered in accordance with what I’d been becoming for a while---“A painter, poet and musician.” By my mid-teens, I was fashioning the essentials to be explored in all three media right up to the present. Even then, my sensibility was in keeping with Kandinsky’s maxim that the purpose of art is to present mystery in terms of mystery, as an encounter with my earlier poems and paintings is likely to suggest.
In the Little Belt Mountains
by David Thomas Roberts
In the Little Belt Mountains lacquered and steered like a lunar galleon
Where ice lore yanks its own banquet into trances
And timber guffaws its prissy way to dream-history
Roars a cosmic tide beyond reckoning
Booming autotelic tales unregistered everlasting
As if treatises and haughty manuals were nothing more than
Bruised brickbats powdered in Butte alleyways,
Sweeping the troposphere in sacred arrogance
Oblivious to sing-song patter and horsepussy foundations
Orating wintergreen fortresses into rocket-jangled archives
Oh!
In the montane bevy of ramrod visions
Lodgepole pine and polestar fed
This jack-o'lantern-hearted glacier-blaster primed for centaur nights
Spikes the prank of oceans in spirit-heat
Rearing to grin from vortex to beer joint like some ascendant pumping station
Thrashing in limitless green-eyed delirium
Tossing Neihart like a frosty infant Jupiter bound
And hugging it back to the spinning wheel of stoves and log spasms
Sure as upland paroxysms grind their stories
And clocks are hummed to testify to green glimmer of night
This the stocking yammer and winter-warmer ongoing
When a continent romances itself to planets
In the cartography of ultimates
In this the book of singing explosions
In the Little Belt Mountains.
Be: I see a lot of sexual imagery in your poetry and a lot of your paintings. Is that a conscious or intuitive thing? (Sometimes it feels there’s something haunting there.)
Be: Are you still actively composing, painting and writing. Have you ever had long periods where you didn’t feel creative? If so, how did you handle that?
David: Oh, I’m always at work in one medium or another, and prefer to be in the thick of efforts in all media simultaneously. For me, writing, making visual art and composing are not optional actions, but obsessive drives, screamingly visceral needs and purposes. My sense of rightness, fragile as it is anyway, would be crippled without fidelity to these drives that are the carriers of my very notion of selfhood.
Be: I suspect you make your living through the arts. Care to elaborate?
David: What income I’ve ever generated has resulted from my life as an artist. Composition commissions, sales of paintings and drawings, concerts, and sales of recordings and sheet music have provided my income. The only day job I ever had lasted about a week, but fulfilled its purpose---to fund my entering the state chess championship in Natchez in the summer of 1973. As it turned out, this was part of a crucial chain of events, as it led to my meeting a young man whom I would befriend at college three months later and who would soon introduce me to Teresa Jones, the indisputable love of my life.
These days, the creation of my archive as the world grows increasingly insecure and, for me, inhospitable, is a relentless concern. I continue to hope for a decisive benefactor’s emergence, but accept that I might well be forced to disseminate and promote my work as never before to guarantee the creation of this citadel.
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David Thomas Roberts |
