Looking at the history of music from the vantage point of the early 21rst century gives the viewer a vast and indomitable landscape to digest. This history stretches back into antiquity and appears to be a series of never ending battles and conquests that continually raises the bar of musical sophistication and listening prowess. As a composer, it is nigh impossible not to be influenced by the greatness that has been handed down through the ages, regardless of one’s intentions or assertions. Yet, is this progress actually an improvement, as in say how the practice of surgical medicine has changed over time, or are we confusing the changing technical requirements in the creation and performance of music as progress?
Music’s raison d'être has always been to delight the senses in an emotionally rewarding and highly personal way. This fundamental property of music, while greatly altered to fit social conventions over time, has not changed to the present day. I believe this is why we can enjoy and compare music from all time periods equally. It is also why music of the past is not automatically deemed inferior to the music of later time periods. The average educated listener will only ask the question of when something was written after being touched emotionally, for better or worse, by the music in question. Compare this with the medical example used above and I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone undergoing a surgical operation that wouldn’t ask when the procedure was invented and how long it has been used. I doubt that there will ever be enough brave souls to fuel a surgical “period instrument” revival.
Yet music has fueled such a revival, and as such, must operate on a level that is in touch with our most basic of instincts and passions. In some way music acts as a vital force, a prime mover if you will, that regardless of it’s many guises and permutations, survives unscathed through the ages. Indeed, recent cosmological theories indicate that sound waves in the form of the overtone series are responsible for breaking up the super hot plasma right after the big bang. The subtle temperature variations created by the sound waves caused matter to form into clumps, which led to the creation of the first galaxies and eventually the universe that we exist in today. It is with this concept in mind that I present to you the listener, String Theory.
Darryl Kubian is a member of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra’s first violin section under the direction of Maestro Neme Jarvi and former principal 2nd violin of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra with Maestro Robert Spano. He has been a featured soloist with trumpeter Randy Brecker and the NJSO in a program of music by Charlie Parker entitled ‘Byrd Lives!’ as well as producing and performing arrangements of Duke Ellington’s ‘Sacred Songs’ in co-operation with the NJSO and the Jazz studies program at Rutgers University. In addition to his many solo and chamber ensemble performances Mr. Kubian has performed in many Broadway musicals including The King & I, Show Boat, Crazy for you and Tommy.
Active as a composer and recording engineer, Mr. Kubian’s music production company Xtreme Medium is involved with many diverse projects. Highlights include composing the music for the Discovery Channel’s docudrama ‘Raging Rapids’ which also ran theatrically at SONY’s High-Definition Television theatre, scoring for National Geographics ‘Phobias’, ‘Really Wild Animals’ and ‘Killer Ice’, producing two HDCD’s for the NJSO’s principal flutist Bart Feller, engineering and producing various CD’s for The Elements Quartet, The Oberon Quartet, The Halcyon Trio and violinist Garrett Fischbach from The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. Past projects include scores for National Geographic, Pangolin Pictures, NHK, Discovery Channel, CBS, The Learning Channel, The Travel Channel, Discovery Health and the Disney Channel.
Darryl has just released his first solo CD entitled String Theory. This CD explores the rich tradition of the violin as a solo instrument through original music and arrangements infused with the sounds, styles and techniques of modern music making. It features the Zeta 5-string MIDI violin, an 18-piece string section and internationally renowned drummer, Jay Dittamo. It is being distributed by CD Baby.com and the iTunes Music Store.
Future projects include an electric violin concerto with orchestra and a small chamber piece for strings and Theremin, which Mr. Kubian is an avid performer and proponent of. He received his BM and MM at Rutgers University where he studied violin with Arnold Steinhart, Hiroko Yajima, and composition with Charles Wuorinen.
Website: www.xtrememedium.com
Email: dtk@xtrememedium.com
MAC POWER: I have been an Apple User since 1981, although the first computer that I learned to program and make music with was a Radio Shack TRS-80 MkI. After my parents bought me an Apple IIe with the 80-column card and 128k RAM upgrade (WOW!) I saved my pennies and bought an ALF Music synthesizer which had an amazing 8-voice polyphony and graphic notation input with paddles. Pretty efficient for the time and it still works today.
My first Mac was a Plus that I cashed all of my Series EE bonds in for in 1989. This act of desperation was initiated by the misguided idea that I could ‘get by’ with a 186 PC. We were using New England Digitals Synclavier at Rutgers where I went for undergraduate and graduate work which I knew I couldn’t afford ($50,000+) so in a momentary lapse of reason the PC seemed the logical choice. Eight hundred dollars later I had a beige box, some software and a MIDI interface and keyboard sitting on my desk. While Voyetra’s Cakewalk software was reasonably well behaved, the computer was an absolute disaster. I could only take it for 5 months before I realized how marginally better this setup was compared to my older Apple IIe MIDI setup. The final straw was seeing Opcode’s Vision demoed at a local music store on a Mac Plus. It was at that moment that I knew how pennywise and pound-foolish my decision had been.
Since that time I have never looked back and have owned and still own a Mac Iici, Quadra 950, Powerbook 5300, Original Newton and the 2100, PowerMac 8500, Blue & White G3, 15” G4 Powerbook and my present Dual 1Gig G4.
The level of integration and the functionality of Mac software and hardware are unmatchable on ‘the other platform’. I have resisted the urge to run both PC and Mac as there is always a work around that yields better results creatively in those rare occurrences where a PC program has a unique feature advantage. It’s better to expend your creative juices on a musical solution rather than having to manage multiple platforms for the convenience of having a program available ‘just in case.’
String Theory was produced entirely on Macintosh computers including the artwork which I designed and then had professionally tweaked by my friend, Gabrielle Gerwitz. You can check her out at http://www.gabart.com. My main computer is a Dual 1gig G4 with 1.5 Gb of RAM and 740Gb of disk space. I exclusively used Logic 6/7 with a MOTU 2408mk3 and a Tascam DM24 as the frontend. You can check out my website for additional info and photos. With the demise of Opcode’s Studio Vision in the late 90’s, which I still think was the best MIDI/Audio sequencer every made, I turned to Logic as it seemed to offer the most in-depth environment for experimentation and stability. While Apple’s purchase of Emagic led to some people predicting doom, I think it has only strengthened the core of Logic and it’s use in other Apple applications has only increased it’s ubiquity.
In capturing the acoustic sounds for String Theory, most notably the 18-piece string ensemble, I relied upon a quartet of AKG 414 microphones and a pair of Aphex Model 1100 mic-preamps, fed through my DM24 into a Fostex 8-channel HD recorder. While having great mics and preamps goes a long way to capturing great sound, I’ve found that mic placement and a great acoustic contribute at least as much if not more. Of course, having super musicians playing on old Italian instruments made by Stradivarius and Guarneri doesn’t hurt either.
My new on-location setup, which I’ve been using to record live concerts and a number of classical CD’s, is much less cumbersome and more versatile as it consists of a 15” G4 Powerbook mated through Firewire to a MOTU 896HD feeding Logic. Aside from a digital feed from my Aphex pre and a few cables for talkback, that’s it. I’ll occasionally use the Fostex or my Tascam CD-RW2000 as a confidence recorder, but it’s a much more powerful system in much less space. The added benefit is I can just transfer the material off the Powerbook through Ethernet and I’m ready to get to work on my main system which includes a TC Electronics Powercore with the SONY Oxford plug-ins for some amazingly transparent, but effective processing. As an alternate, I could record to an external firewire drive and just plug it in to the main system when I get back to the studio. This is a far cry from having to transfer, in real time, all of my recorded tracks from the Fostex into a new sequence in Logic. Not only did this double the length of the recording session, but the possibility of introducing some digital transfer gremlins into the audio always made me paranoid about the process.
This leads to my closing point that the Mac just works, especially since the maturing of OSX. Even with massaging extension sets in the OS9 days things generally worked, certainly more effectively than the Windows software/hardware of that time. Today with Windows more of a ‘plug and play’ environment, it still can’t match the elegance and overall compatibility (i.e. stability) of the Mac platform. Can anybody really count how many motherboard variations exist on the Wintel, AMD, etc. side of things? There are many great individual audio programs available only for Windows, but once you leave those environments your stuck. I would rather have a limited number of high quality choices than a gaggle of mediocre and poor choices that at the end of the day leaves you with a pencil and paper in your hand just to get any work done. By the way, pencil and paper next to a Mac, is the best way I know to get those creative juices flowing, which after all, is why were spending all of this time and energy making music in the first place. Now where did I put that sharpener?
