Composer/Violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain challenges stylistic boundaries

If you're a rigid respecter of musical boundaries, you may be inclined to steer clear of Haitian-American composer/violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain. On the other hand, a dose of his wide-ranging style might be the perfect medicine to break down some mental barriers.

Roumain, better known by the moniker DBR, has a résumé that at first glance seems bewilderingly diverse. He's presented chamber and orchestral works at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center, and he has a forthcoming major commission with the Sphinx Consortium, a coalition of symphonies including Nashville's. He's also collaborated with composer Philip Glass, singer Cassandra Wilson, brainiac turntablist DJ Spooky and avant-jazz standout David S. Ware. He even accompanied Lady Gaga recently on American Idol.

Confused yet? Well, his work is often categorized as classical/hip-hop fusion, though it clearly integrates a broader spectrum than that summary suggests.

DBR will make several visits to Nashville this academic year as visiting composition professor at the Blair School of Music, where he is an alumnus. This week's trip includes a Thursday concert/discussion featuring his music alongside that of Blair faculty composers and a Saturday performance of his recent Darwin's Meditation for the People of Lincoln.

Planned future concerts include a collaboration with fellow electric violinist Tracy Silverman and will involve students of both Blair and the W.O. Smith school. DBR lauds Blair's involvement with the community music school. "I try to foster the social aspects of music through my educational work," he says. "I see the composer as a kind of ambassador or social worker."

The Blair appointment feels like a homecoming to DBR. "Much of my professional life began in second-floor practice rooms of the old Blair building," he says. His undergraduate teachers Michael Alec Rose and Michael Kurek, he recalls, "went out of their way to keep me on the right track when I was young and arrogant," imbuing him with a sense of craft and of the importance of service.

Darwin's Meditation commemorates the bicentennial of Darwin's and Lincoln's near-simultaneous births, and it's a good window into DBR's multivalent approach. He calls piece "interdisciplinary," which is something of an understatement.

"It's an oratorio and a pocket play and a quartet concerto," DBR says. "I started with the notion of a pocket play from [playwright] Daniel Beaty, but the text became a dense amalgamation." It includes material from letters of its principal subjects, but also from sources as far-flung as Barack Obama, Trent Reznor and DBR himself.

Darwin's Meditation features solo parts for actor, singer, piano and DBR on his six-string electric violin. Visiting Haitian pop singer Emeline Michel gives her text mainly in Creole, and DBR says he aimed to explore musically the connections between England, the U.S. and Haiti—partly through the historical figures of Lincoln's Haitian barber William Fleurville (also a violinist) and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who served as U.S. envoy to Haiti.

The idea of a musical creole fits DBR's work better than a conventional crossover model. He's not shifting between "legit" and "vernacular" musical registers; his musical language naturally integrates a diverse musical environment and cultural experience. His series of études exploring hip-hop elements, represented on Thursday's program, aims to continue the pedagogical tradition of Bach, Chopin and Bartók. He embraces the notion that Darwin's Meditation takes a "remix" or "mashup" approach, but he's also quick to point out that composers have always juxtaposed and recontextualized existing material.

And DBR certainly has his eye on questions about music's place in our culture. "Where are the last bastions of democracy and equality?" he asks. One of them, he suggests, can be the concert hall.

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