Rhyme, for a reason

By Cindy Landrum  

MAY 19, 2011 1:04 p.m. (0)

Converse College music professor Scott Robbins was one composition into his latest CD project when he decided the world didn’t really need any more polite Emily Dickinson songs written for voice and piano.

He decided to do something radically different – and unexpected – for “Bees: 5 Poems of Emily Dickinson.”

He set the 19th Century poetry to the electronic sounds of the 21st Century using GarageBand, a music program that comes on Apple computers.

“Usually Emily Dickinson is set to music that is serene, very concert sounding, very proper,” Robbins said. “The world does not need any more of it. I wanted to set her poems in an environment that wouldn’t be obvious.”

“Bees: 5 Poems of Emily Dickinson” is the first CD Robbins has produced himself. It is available on Amazon.com and iTunes. Soprano Donna Gallagher, a Converse master’s graduate, sings on the CD.

“The only musical instrument used on the CD that doesn’t come with an Apple computer is Donna’s voice,” Robbins said. “Granted, that’s a lot of it.”

Robbins compared a musician using GarageBand to a pro golfer playing the Master’s with a $6 set of toddler clubs or a triathlete competing the bicycle portion of the race on a Big Wheel.

“GarageBand is much, much worse than Facebook as far as the time you can spend on it. But if you mess around with it long enough, you can actually make music with it,” he said. “That’s part of the neatness of it. Anybody with an Apple computer could have written the piece.”

Robbins said he chose the five poems because they were short and had a “sort of rhythmic-ness to them.”

And one, “Birds…Hours…the Bumblebee” is so repetitive that Robbins thought it should be a rap.

“I guess it was a bad gene in me,” he said. “I started thinking of it as a joke, but then I realized it should be a rap.”

He realized he couldn’t ask a classically trained singer to do the rap.

“They either wouldn’t do it all or they would do it badly,” he said.

That left two options: he could find a real rapper or he could do it himself.

Once he figured out he could electronically alter his voice, he decided to do it himself. It took him almost a year to actually do it, though.

“I wound up doing it on my front porch at 5:30 a.m.,” he said. “The newspaper had already come and there were no lights on in the neighborhood. I made sure nobody could hear me.”

If listeners listen closely, they can hear traffic noises during the song.

During the song, Robbins has four different versions of his voice rapping at once.

“Birds…Hours…the Bumblebee” is the only track in which Gallagher’s voice is not featured. Instead, she’s the atmospheric background voice.

Gallagher, recommended to Robbins by another Converse music professor, said the CD was different than anything else she’s performed.

“I really enjoyed feeling a little bit like a pop star,” she said.

The most challenging part was singing along with pre-recorded music, she said.

“I’m used to being the one who leads and having the pianist follow me or singing with an orchestra and following the conductor,” she said.

Robbins allowed Gallagher to interpret his work within limits.

“Most of the time, the composer has written exactly what the composer wants. With Scott, he gave the pitches and left the rhythms up to me,” she said. “That allowed me a huge amount of freedom. I had never experienced that before when doing somebody else’s music.”

But as Robbins said, nobody has put Dickinson to music like this.