“The whole world of music comes at us from all sides these days,” says Neil Rolnick, oblivious in this Indian restaurant to the guy playing ambient music on the African kora immediately behind him. “Looking back, what I got from studying with [French composer] Darius Milhaud is that–he lived over the Place Pigalle [the red-light district] in Paris. He loved to open the windows, and there would be all this music and sound, and it all went into his music. A lot of what I’m doing now, especially since it’s become possible to do sampling and grab actual pieces of that soundscape, is the same way.”
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Rolnick’s art and life are cut from the same cloth, for he’s lived all over. Born in Dallas in 1947, today he directs the iEAR electronic studios at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. After studying with Milhaud in high school, Rolnick took the first of many detours and got a bachelor’s in literature from Harvard. A novel he wrote brought his first stack of rejection slips. “It took me quite a while to get more in music than I had for the novel.” To make a living, he played in square-dance bands in Cambridge; then, after moving to San Francisco, he became a flower-child rock and roller.
Rolnick made a lot of false starts. “I auditioned to play piano for Eddie Money once. He listened and said, ‘You got to have more balls, man!’ I looked around [Rolnick gives a helpless downward glance] and said, well, OK.”
“The first performance was iffy. We couldn’t get the machine to stay running for the entire piece until the day of the premiere. I hadn’t slept for days, trying to get this thing running. I kept saying, what is this thing supposed to sound like? Trupy had planned for things that hadn’t been implemented in the machine and never would be. One friend said, when it was over, that the piece flew 15 feet off the ground for a hundred yards before it crashed.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Phyllis Galembo.
