Composers to teach at Con

More new and famous faces in the Conservatory

This semester, Oberlin Conservatory hosts two visiting composition faculty members with a striking dissimilarity. If John Luther Adam's music is the sonic equivalent of sub-Arctic landscape, Anna Rubin's works blaze with the fire of human experience and interaction.

Rubin has much to offer in the composition department, as she has explored a wide range of sound sources-electro-acoustic and instrumental-as well as programmatic ideas. This exploration has resulted in numerous commissions and awards, and her works have been performed in concert halls throughout Europe, North America and Mexico.

Among many important foundations for the arts, Rubin is a member of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the US (SEAMUS), which recorded her work "Remembering" for their recent collection. This piece for soprano, piano and tape is a memorial for the victims of the holocaust. It is one with the same sort of sociological concern as her 1979 work entitled "Die Nacht: Lament for Malcolm X." Both pieces are extremely successful in expressing intimate feelings of very large events.

"The intersection of the collective and the personal fascinates me more and more," Rubin remarks. "Constructing pieces which mine these historical-psychological fault lines challenge and delight me ... When I am working in this holistic way, I feel like I am drawing on every aspect of my being, and I've been gratified at the intensity of listeners' reactions."

Rubin's political voice has, at times, dealt with gender issues. "[Gender studies] broadens the point of view of the composer," said Rubin, "creating awareness and recognition of what one's music truly represents, whom it is directed to and what power paradigms are represented."

As a student with a long track record-including studies in sociology at Pomona College, music at California Institute of the Arts and Princeton University, the Sweelinck Conservatorium in Amsterdam for electronic music-Rubin encourages a rigorous, productive lifestyle for her pupils.

As a teacher, she hopes "to help students find their own voice and identify core concepts, which will then allow them to organize a broader field of information [the continuity of music from early to present] into a usable form."

Although her own style and inspiration is in no way forced upon her students, Rubin uses an innovative and unique palate of sounds in her work that cannot help but be influential to the listener. On the topic of electro-acoustic music Rubin said, "The acoustic research that composers in the field have compiled has illuminated issues that apply to music regardless of how you compose. Electronic media simply allows me to extend ideas I use in instrumental music and provide a far greater pallet of sources of ambient sounds and environmental sounds."

Rubin's most recent composition entitled "Family Stories: Sophie, Sally," is the biographical story of Rubin's mother, a child of Russian Jewish immigrants, raised by an African American woman. It is a blend of biography, race relations and deep southern attitudes at the turn of the century. "Family Stories," has been hailed as "a composition where the music is literally drawn out of the recorded speaking voice to create a quilt of luscious harmonies." This piece is to be heard on the composition faculty recital in November, and "Remembering," will be presented some time next semester.