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Assimilating the sounds of life
Composer Paul Rudy turns the resonance of every day into award-winning electroacoustic music.
by Melanie Zuercher
For Paul Rudy, there’s no such thing as luck.
“My life has been a series of synchronicities,” he says. “Some would call it luck, but I don’t believe in luck.”
Paul was born in Indiana, but as the son of a Mennonite pastor (Carl Rudy), he “moved around a lot” before the family settled in La Junta, Colo., when Paul was in junior high school. That was when, he says, “I began playing in jazz band and getting excited about music.”
He applied to only two colleges, Bethel and Berklee College of Music in Boston. “I wasn’t ready for the big city,” he says, nor, after falling in love with Colorado, interested in moving very far east. “And Bethel had such a great jazz artist in residence” – Mike Steinel, “a phenomenal trumpet player and a great teacher,” Paul says.
He spent three years working one-on-one with Steinel. “I have managed to be in the right place at the right time,” Paul says, “and fortunate to be shepherded by the right people at the right time.”
At Bethel, Paul majored in music with a concentration in trumpet. He did a full classical recital – with Rosi Penner (Kaufman) ’85 playing organ – and then a jazz recital with members of Wichita State University’s big band, with which Paul had been playing. “Don Kehrberg helped me contact Tom Fowler at WSU and he let me in [the band] – he probably took a lot of heat, but he really wanted me.”
After graduating from Bethel in 1984, however, Paul left music behind. He went to Rocky Mountain Mennonite Camp near Divide, Colo., where he met and became friends with Allan ’73 and Susan ’74 Bartel. For the next six years, Paul spent as much time as he could at the camp. “It became my spiritual portal,” he says, “not the camp itself but the geography. It’s where my ashes are going to be spread after I die.” He traveled, did carpentry work and, very briefly, played with a group called Festival of Praise.
“It was the most amazing, stark cultural experience,” he remembers. “I was coming back from El Salvador, the civil war, the refugee camps. It was supposed to be for a year – I lasted two months in this charismatic Christian group that seemed so detached from the reality I’d just seen in El Salvador. I lived at home in La Junta and realized that wasn’t going to work. I was a vagabond – doing whatever. I hated practicing [music]. I wanted to be outside.”
In 1988, he moved to Hesston, where he got back into music – teaching jazz improvisation and directing the pep band at Bethel College during the 1988-89 school year, and returning to play under Tom Fowler in the WSU big band.
“Tom said I needed to be a WSU student in some form to play in the band, so I thought, ‘What about composition?’” Paul says. “I’d never done it at Bethel, even though I’d always wanted to try it. So at WSU, I took a class with Katherine Murdock, the professor of composition, who is still teaching there. She played George Crumb’s ‘Ancient Voices of Children’ and Joseph Schwantner’s ‘And the Mountains Rising Nowhere.’ I thought, ‘I could really get into this.’ It blew me away – it was contemporary classical and I had heard only standard classical and jazz.
“These composers were dealing with sound and resonance. I had been assimilating this in my ear as a carpenter and didn’t realize it – four framing hammers going at the same time, the sounds of construction.”
The piece he did for that class was “the first thing I’d ever composed besides maybe a cheesy love song, and Katherine said, ‘Dude, this is not undergraduate work – you should really pursue this.’”
He had already applied to the University of Colorado graduate program in music but was not sure if he should pursue trumpet or composition. He sent in his piece from the WSU class and as a result got acceptance and an assistantship offer.
“It was not luck, but what was supposed to happen,” Paul says. “To compose my first piece at 26, and have it be a really decent first piece – the [training] I received, and the ear I developed at Bethel, had clearly given me a highly developed sense of musicianship.”
From 1989-94, Paul completed a master’s degree in composition and got halfway through the doctor of musical arts (D.M.A.) program at the University of Colorado. He completed his D.M.A. at the University of Texas-Austin, where he lived from 1994-97.
Starting in 1995 until 2001, Paul also spent summers teaching at the Aspen Music Festival, where he served as faculty in composition technology and founded AMPS, the Amplified Music Performance Series. “It was an amazing gig and really helped my resume stand out,” he says.
“In my last year of doctoral work, I applied for a Fulbright Fellowship to go to New Zealand, but I was pretty far down on the waitlist,” he says. “I also did a job interview at Southern Methodist University for a one-year appointment that could lead to tenure-track. I was at Aspen that summer [of 1997] and at the end of my first week there, I got an offer from SMU and also found out I’d gotten the Fulbright.
“I was being told by peers and mentors, ‘Take the SMU job.’ But then my dad, who’d been asking me for years when I was going to get a real job, said, ‘You have to take the Fulbright – it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.’”
He took the Fulbright, went to New Zealand and a year later was back at Aspen, with no permanent job prospects. “People were saying, ‘Didn’t we tell you it would be like this, a year ago?’”
Once again, he pursued a one-year appointment with the possibility of applying for tenure-track, this time at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) Conservatory of Music. He got the job and then “worked my butt off the first year … and got the tenure-track position.”
At the conservatory, he is associate professor of composition and the coordinator of Composition Studies, which has 50-60 majors a year, from freshmen to graduate students. “We’re in the Top 20 composition programs in the country,” Paul says. “Maybe the Top 10, but that’s pretty subjective. Almost every month, though, our students are winning competitions, jobs and commissions, all over the world.”
Meanwhile, Paul had begun to branch out in his own composing. Once, at Rocky Mountain Mennonite Camp, he put together a 25-minute slide presentation that combined his own photography with music by guitarist Pat Metheny, which began to show him the possibilities of combining media. At the University of Colorado, he took a class in beginning techniques of electronic music “and fell in love with the studio, the process of composing with technology. You get immediate feedback – you put it on the computer, press ‘Play’ and you hear it.
“I found myself in the studio 12 hours a day, at Christmas break, in all my spare time.”
In mid-2007, Paul sent his composition “November Sycamore Leaf” to the Sounds Electric ’07 international electroacoustic music competition. He was one of six finalists along with composers from France, Portugal, Taiwan and the United Kingdom. “November Sycamore Leaf” won first prize.
“That was the start of a good nine months,” he says, in which he got five more prizes or commissions, including the 2008 Kauffman Award for Artistic Excellence from the UMKC Conservatory of Music and Dance, commissions from organizations in France and Italy and, perhaps most notably, a Guggenheim Fellowship.
While in Taos, N.M., during a sabbatical in 2007, Paul composed a piece he called “a culmination of a lot of things that had been brewing – the beginning of a personal spiritual odyssey, discoveries in the philosophy of mind and in physics. Life began making sense to me for the first time. I began composing as a whole person.”
The result, written over nine days, was In Lake’ch (“I am another yourself” in the Mayan language), which Paul has called his first symphony.
“I listen to it two years later,” he says, “and hear parts I don’t remember writing. I still hear something new. I feel like, honestly, I was channeling the music.”
In Lake’ch became the foundation for “Drift,” a three-way collaboration that included poetry by Nathan Bartel ’02 (son of Allan and Susan and Bethel assistant professor of English) and film by UMKC film faculty member Caitlin Horsmon and which was part of the conservatory’s ArtSounds series on Feb. 12, 2008. Paul has since composed and recorded Kuxan Suum (“road to the sky”) as a follow-up to In Lake’ch. (See www.paulrudy.com to download music.)
Paul’s Guggenheim semester, which began in February 2009, will take him to residencies at Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras (CMMAS) in Morelía, Mexico, and the Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, stints as guest lecturer and composer at the University of Colorado and the University of Northern Colorado and into the studio to work on his third CD.
“[Composing] is something I’ll keep doing until I run out of ideas,” he says, “which I don’t see happening any time soon.”