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Steve Rouse, composer
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REVIEWS (Jump to a list of reviewed works) What people are saying... "...powerful statements whether he writes for orchestra or chamber ensembles, or other medium." - The American Academy of Arts and Letters, in bestowing the 1995 Hinrichsen Award "...a brilliant, original composer with superb craft and extraordinary spirit." - John Corigliano, composer "...an ingenious composer...Rouse is not one to waste notes...another of today's masterful orchestrators...(an) expert practitioner of the composing craft..." - Andrew Adler, Courier-Journal, Louisville "...this is an exciting piece. The first movement, "Fanfare Polka," is full of rollicking carnival sounds and jazzy riffs. The second, "Clouds in Slow Water," is, as the title implies, a reflective meditation, but one that billows downward to a blissful inverted peak of introspection. The final movement, "Radiant Edge," is an intensely compressed gallop through sharp-edged textures. This ain't your great-great-great-grandad's approach to symphonic music; it's wild, wooly and raucous....great fun..." - Marty Rosen, Louisville Eccentric Observer "...appealing in its strutting confidence, teasing and playful while emphasizing the sheen of a modern symphonic ensemble....The symphony's central movement boasts some very fine, restrained string writing: This section's title, "Clouds in Slow Water," is indeed an apt allusion." - Andrew Adler, Courier-Journal, Louisville "A far stronger profile was cut by Steve Rouse's Symphony No. 2, which received its world premiere performance. The movement subtitles by Rouse, a composition professor at the University of Louisville, were tersely apt. The first movement, "Fanfare-Polka," pitted two ideas against each other, one an aggressive brass fanfare, and the other a grotesque, humorous dance which brought an audible chuckle from at least a few listeners. The two ideas competed more and more overtly, working up to a savage climax. The movement as a whole displayed a muscular style immediately recognizable as Rousian, with no apologies necessary for the debt to Stravinsky. The second movement, "Clouds in Slow Water," was also typical of its composer, who excels at creating a feeling of suspension in slow movements. Here water and clouds were evoked, not with the fuzzy formulas of recycled Impressionism, but with shrewd reflection on the sheer weight of water vapor in immense clouds. Rouse is not afraid to emphasize the architecture of clouds, but this is not the rock-solid, static architecture familiar from the traditional literature of functional tonality, but architecture in motion, reflected in shifting water. There was something clean about this music, and impersonal, like forces of nature stripped of anthropomorphism. The last movement, "Radiant Edge," certainly had an edge to it, even to the point of violence. It rounded out the whole symphony to an arch." - Frank Richmond, Louisville Music News "...intense and fiercely original...Of all the evening's music, Rouse's Into the Light had the strongest profile. It is a passionate, visionary work with an opening movement that is an explosion of anger and pain. This anguish is then resolved in a mood of acceptance and peace toward the end of a concluding second movement. Into the Light reveals a sure command of orchestral texture, and approaches its ethereal conclusion with an impressively controlled dramatic power. The audience received it with pronounced enthusiasm, and the voice uttering the loudest shouts of approval was Corigliano's." - William Mootz, Louisville Courier-Journal "...Rouse is a master of orchestration; Into the Light was impressive for its effective use of timbres and the ability to sustain dream-like ambiance." - Janelle Gelfand, The Cincinnati Enquirer "...beautifully conceived...exciting music!" - Karel Husa, composer "...an ethereal work drenched in silvery percussion and suggestive of a near-death experience, sets the tone for the new (Cincinnati Symphony) Telarc CD, as well as supplying the title." - Mary Ellyn Hutton, The Cincinnati Post "...dreamlike and ethereal. Droplets of iridescent color fall on slow-moving expanses of sound, creating a mystic spell." - Mary Ellyn Hutton, The Cincinnati Post It has mystery and an ethereal sound that draws one away from the mundane world." - Donald R. Vroon, American Record Guide ...brilliantly colored and atmospheric..." - John Huxhold, St. Louis Post Dispatch Collisions of art and social realism are as old as humankind, but seldom do they produce a work of such emotional power as occurred last night at the University of Louisville School of Music. The occasion was the premiere of Waiting for Daylight, a piece for soprano and orchestra by composer Steve Rouse and writer/poet Anne Shelby that confronts one of the most explosive issues of our time. It tells the story, in surges of horrific imagery, of a woman suffering under an abusive husband. Pushed beyond her limits one night, she takes a gun and shoots him dead. If this sounds the stuff of yesterday's headlines, you're right. Rouse and Shelby drew from interviews with several Kentucky women who killed their abusers, acts which brought them prison sentences, and eventual pardons from former Gov. Brereton Jones. Many of their experiences would seem too terrible to recast in a musical score, but composer and poet haven't shrunk back, not for an instant. They fashioned a 25-minute monodrama for soprano and orchestra, calculating in the bold effects it draws from various instrumental choirs, yet successful in getting their points across. They occupy dangerous territory. Gunning down one's spouse, no matter how despicable, is not a solution everyone will approve. Even Rouse, whose sympathies sound unmistakable, cautions in a program note that he's not advocating wholesale taking up arms against abusive husbands. In their treatment, however, the unnamed woman is left with no other apparent choice. As a pedal point rumbles ominously in the orchestra, we learn of her wrenching dilemma. "The first time, he hit me just once, but hard, to show me who was in charge." Her despair multiplies, hurtling uncontrollably. "I grow numb, paralyzed, a climber trapped in snow." Every insult, whether physical or verbal, is echoed and elaborated on by the orchestra ...Rouse...accomplishes his ends with consummate skill. He has written subtler scores, but perhaps none as specifically crafted...it provokes as much as it evokes... ...Soprano Edith Davis...sang with terrifying honesty that compelled a listener's absolute attention... 
REVIEWS Jump to the following... Dense Pack Diamonds Into the Light Light Fantastic Piano Sonata Quicksilver Short Stories Symphony 2 Violin Sonata Waiting for Daylight Dense Pack by Jane Myers, Editorial Columnist, Ann Arbor News, March 11, 1984 It isn't very often that a person gets an invitation from a composer to attend the first performance of one of his works. So when I received a letter in January from Steve Rouse, who described himself as a "composer of contemporary art music," and invited me to the March 6 premiere of his choral piece, Dense Pack, in Hill Auditorium, I took the invitation seriously. Rouse had enclosed some of the music from Dense Pack with his letter, and it included an explanation of the work: "Dense Pack was created in response to the MX nuclear weapons system of the United States...Just as responses to the continued threat of nuclear holocaust vary from person to person, even from moment to moment, so Dense Pack is similarly mercurial, with moments ranging from the humorous to the grim, from vulgarity to exaltation..." The piece incorporated lines from The Star Spangled Banner, and seemed perhaps to be a gentle warning against the dangers of nationalism to world survival.... "What's that noise?" my father [who had accompanied me] asked as we waited to enter the auditorium. It was a strange and eerie sound, a combination sounding vaguely like faraway wailing women and shrill winds. A peek through the etched window of one of the closed doors leading into the auditorium indicated that the noise was coming from the practicing choir. Soon the [practicing] choir retired, the doors opened...Director Patrick Gardner, wearing tails and the intent expression of a good conductor...explained a little about Dense Pack, and they began. First, there was a sort of cacophonous chatter throughout the choir, and then the strange noises we had heard from the lobby of the auditorium were heard again up close. They were a part of Rouse's piece, it turned out. There were female yelps and murmuring and more chatter, and every now and then you could recognize a phrase from The Star Spangled Banner. Near the end of the work one male member of the choir went behind the risers, where the sound of a muffled gong was then heard. The work gave me a fearsome chill and caused a few tears to leave my eye in quite unexplained fashion--not weepy tears but perhaps tears of horror. Rouse's work, it seemed to me happily, was having exactly the effect he intended. Brahms' Warum ist das Licht gegeben seemed somehow anticlimactic and a bit dull after Dense Pack, and I left the auditorium lamenting the fate of all the young Steve Rouses of the world. With musical audiences, unlike those in the visual arts and dance, still genuflecting to the 18th and 19th centuries and not the 20th, I knew that, beyond the campus, his work would probably be as controversial as the MX...
"20th Century Series" by Andrew Adler, Louisville Courier-Journal, 12/10/89 One unfortunate reality of contemporary music is that Steve Rouse had to wait eight years for a performance of his brass quintet, Quicksilver. A much happier circumstance is that this piece, along with five of his other works presented last night at the University of Louisville School of Music, rewarded one's patience amply. The Recital Hall program was the second of four 20th Century Series concerts slated for this season. Rouse is organizing the series, and enjoyed the luxury of employing various ensembles and soloists on his behalf. But the result wasn't self-indulgent--not in the least. The evening proved an unpretentious delight, reflecting the recent evolution of an ingenious composer. Except for the 1983 Piano Sonata, every piece was getting its first unabridged performance. Each is the product of a discerning ear, and of a composer who understands how to make best advantage of whatever instruments he chooses... Rouse is not one to waste notes. He has pared the fat from these works without diluting their expressive basis. Quicksilver...is thoroughly proportioned and resourceful. It is shameful that so fluent a piece should languish for most of this decade. Both solo works [Diamonds for solo violin and Piano Sonata] got potent readings...Rouse savored the challenges of his Piano Sonata, pushing the piece forward in great bursts of color. Rouse revealed a theatrical bent in two pieces for unusual ensembles: SHOUT! (1981) and Bubba, he daid. (1983). The latter consisted of taped improvisations accompanying a quartet of modern dancers. The music engaged... SHOUT! - which filled the stage with percussionists, synthesizer players and members of the U of L Chorus--was a hoot. Intended as "a musical portrayal of an ecstatic tribal ritual," the piece fused Steve Reich and Tito Puente in a grand bit of raucous fun.
Into the Light "...intense and fiercely original...Of all the evening's music, Rouse's Into the Light had the strongest profile. It is a passionate, visionary work with an opening movement that is an explosion of anger and pain. This anguish is then resolved in a mood of acceptance and peace toward the end of a concluding second movement. Into the Light reveals a sure command of orchestral texture, and approaches its ethereal conclusion with an impressively controlled dramatic power. The audience received it with pronounced enthusiasm, and the voice uttering the loudest shouts of approval was Corigliano's." - William Mootz, Senior Critic, Louisville Courier-Journal - 2/21/92 "His symphonic work Into the Light expresses a memorial not only in strong and vivid colors, but also in gentle, moving sounds of harmonics, harp, glockenspiel, and vibraphone." - The American Academy of Arts and Letters, in bestowing the 1995 Hinrichsen Award "Inspired by a dream and a personal tragedy, this is a serene work for large orchestra [second movement], with scintillating instrumental colors...Rouse is a master of orchestration; Into the Light was impressive for its effective use of timbres and the ability to sustain dream-like ambiance." - Janelle Gelfand, The Cincinnati Enquirer - 1/18/97 "Music director Jesus Lopez-Cobos introduced three of the pieces that will make up the Cincinnati Symphony's next recording at Friday morning's CSO concert at Music Hall. Into the Light (second movement) by Louisville composer Steven Rouse, an ethereal work drenched in silvery percussion and suggestive of a near-death experience, sets the tone for the new Telarc CD, as well as supplying the title." - Mary Ellyn Hutton, The Cincinnati Post - 1/18/97 "Rouse's work, prompted by a relative's death, is dreamlike and ethereal. Droplets of iridescent color fall on slow-moving expanses of sound, creating a mystic spell." - Mary Ellyn Hutton, The Cincinnati Post - 08-28-97 "It has mystery and an ethereal sound that draws one away from the mundane world." - Donald R. Vroon, American Record Guide - November 21, 1997 "...brilliantly colored and atmospheric..." - John Huxhold, St. Louis Post Dispatch - 9/18/94 "...beautifully conceived...exciting music!" - Karel Husa, composer
Light Fantastic "...impeccably crafted and great fun besides. Rouse is another of today's masterful orchestrators...a shimmering sustenance of dance-like figures." - Andrew Adler, Louisville Courier-Journal - 1/28/95 "...radiates with beautifully contrasting orchestration, mixing masterfully the strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion." - The American Academy of Arts and Letters, in bestowing the 1995 Hinrichsen Award Short Stories "...great arching melodies..." - Andrew Adler, Louisville Courier-Journal - 4/27/91 Symphony 2 "...this is an exciting piece. The first movement, Fanfare Polka, is full of rollicking carnival sounds and jazzy riffs. The second, Clouds in Slow Water, is, as the title implies, a reflective meditation, but one that billows downward to a blissful inverted peak of introspection. The final movement, Radiant Edge, is an intensely compressed gallop through sharp-edged textures. This ain't your great-great-great-grandad's approach to symphonic music; it's wild, wooly and raucous....great fun..." - Marty Rosen, Louisville Eccentric Observe "...appealing in its strutting confidence, teasing and playful while emphasizing the sheen of a modern symphonic ensemble....The symphony's central movement boasts some very fine, restrained string writing: This section's title, Clouds in Slow Water, is indeed an apt allusion." - Andrew Adler, Courier-Journal, Louisville The New Dimensions concert on the 28th of April offered a sampling of American works in a traditional form: the three-movement orchestra piece variously termed suite, triptych, or symphony. The three composers, Dan Welcher, Steve Rouse, and Richard Danielpour, all exhibited an interest in painting with musical colors and all included evocative descriptive phrases in their titles or movement headings. But despite those similarities, three distinct voices were heard. The Louisville Orchestra, led with vigorous precision by Robert Franz, played with accuracy, conviction, and clarity. Considering the importance of the New Dimensions concerts, the turnout at Margaret Comstock Concert Hall at University of Louisville ought to have been larger. The audience that did show, however, was rapt and appreciative. The program opened with Dan Welcher's Prairie Lights: Three Texas Watercolors of Georgia O'Keeffe. (Conductor Franz explained to the audience that the three watercolors which inspired the 1985 musical work, Light Coming on the Plain, Canyon with Crows, and Starlight Night, were not really by O'Keeffe). In Welcher's piece the three movements were run together into one, so the divisions were not perceptible to the audience. The most memorable part of his work was the last section, in which repeated chords on the piano represented the stylized stars in the night sky of the original watercolor. Near the very end, the composer created a confetti salad of glittery sound which was pretty but glib. Throughout, the musical materials tended to be bland, although the composer demonstrated an impressive transparency and command of color. A far stronger profile was cut by Steve Rouse's Symphony No. 2, which received its world premiere performance. The movement subtitles by Rouse, a composition professor at the University of Louisville, were tersely apt. The first movement, "Fanfare-Polka," pitted two ideas against each other, one an aggressive brass fanfare, and the other a grotesque, humorous dance which brought an audible chuckle from at least a few listeners. The two ideas competed more and more overtly, working up to a savage climax. The movement as a whole displayed a muscular style immediately recognizable as Rousian, with no apologies necessary for the debt to Stravinsky. The second movement, "Clouds in Slow Water," was also typical of its composer, who excels at creating a feeling of suspension in slow movements. Here water and clouds were evoked, not with the fuzzy formulas of recycled Impressionism, but with shrewd reflection on the sheer weight of water vapor in immense clouds. Rouse is not afraid to emphasize the architecture of clouds, but this is not the rock-solid, static architecture familiar from the traditional literature of functional tonality, but architecture in motion, reflected in shifting water. There was something clean about this music, and impersonal, like forces of nature stripped of anthropomorphism. The last movement, "Radiant Edge," certainly had an edge to it, even to the point of violence. It rounded out the whole symphony to an arch. The last work, The Awakened Heart, by Richard Danielpour, was the most traditional of the evening. Danielpour demonstrates a commitment to humanist values, and his music affirms the value of the individual personality. Accordingly, his music suggested narrative. Themes were transformed in an almost Lisztian manner without losing their identity. The style, which included enough polyrhythmic chromatic gestures and colorful textures to furnish the work with contemporary credentials, was nonetheless romantic in its basic impulse. The first movement, "Into the World's Night," featured a theme that appeared in a fully fleshed-out diatonic guise; the composer risked a nostalgic lyricism that lodged the theme in the memory like a popular song "hook." The theme returned in various guises throughout the first movement and in the last as well. The second movement, "Epiphany," threaded a chorale through musical adventures, some of them harrowing. The chorale returned in the last movement, "My Hero Bares His Nerves," which rapidly ranged through permutations of previous themes, including festive, folk-like ostinatos, and lurched to an end on a surprising E-flat major chord.
Violin Sonata "...a virtuosic display for two players, richly embellished by a sure knowledge of the wonderful sonorities of the violin and piano." - The American Academy of Arts and Letters, in bestowing the 1995 Hinrichsen Award Waiting for Daylight "A work of horror, hope, powerfully rendered" by Andrew Adler, The Courier-Journal, Louisville, Kentucky, April 5, 1997 Collisions of art and social realism are as old as humankind, but seldom do they produce a work of such emotional power as occurred last night at the University of Louisville School of Music. The occasion was the premiere of Waiting for Daylight, a piece for soprano and orchestra by composer Steve Rouse and writer/poet Anne Shelby that confronts one of the most explosive issues of our time. It tells the story, in surges of horrific imagery, of a woman suffering under an abusive husband. Pushed beyond her limits one night, she takes a gun and shoots him dead. If this sounds the stuff of yesterday's headlines, you're right. Rouse and Shelby drew from interviews with several Kentucky women who killed their abusers, acts which brought them prison sentences, and eventual pardons from former Gov. Brereton Jones. Many of their experiences would seem too terrible to recast in a musical score, but composer and poet haven't shrunk back, not for an instant. They fashioned a 25-minute monodrama for soprano and orchestra, calculating in the bold effects it draws from various instrumental choirs, yet successful in getting their points across. They occupy dangerous territory. Gunning down one's spouse, no matter how despicable, is not a solution everyone will approve. Even Rouse, whose sympathies sound unmistakable, cautions in a program note that he's not advocating wholesale taking up arms against abusive husbands. In their treatment, however, the unnamed woman is left with no other apparent choice. As a pedal point rumbles ominously in the orchestra, we learn of her wrenching dilemma. "The first time, he hit me just once, but hard, to show me who was in charge." Her despair multiplies, hurtling uncontrollably. "I grow numb, paralyzed, a climber trapped in snow." Every insult, whether physical or verbal, is echoed and elaborated on by the orchestra... Rouse...accomplishes his ends with consummate skill. He has written subtler scores, but perhaps none as specifically crafted...it provokes as much as it evokes... ...Soprano Edith Davis...sang with terrifying honesty that compelled a listener's absolute attention... "Women's stories of abuse and death transformed into music" by Kim Wessel - The Courier-Journal, Louisville, Kentucky, April 5, 1997 As she listened to the Louisville Orchestra perform last night, Tracie English could feel the pain all over again. "And the fear," she said. "I could still feel the fear. At one point, I wanted to get under my chair and hide." The piece the orchestra was playing, Waiting for Daylight, is a musical story portraying the cycle of domestic violence. The music was composed by Steve Rouse and the lyrics were written by Anne Shelby. ...English said she was touched by the fact that people like Rouse and Shelby wanted to do something to help--not just her but every woman who's ever been abused. "I think it's wonderful that these types of people with this type of talent would do something like this," she said. Rouse, a faculty member at the U of L's School of Music, said he had wanted to put together a piece like this for several years. He got his chance with a grant from Meet The Composer, a national organization that tries to integrate music into the day-to-day life of people. "I found this particularly rewarding," Rouse said. "It was intense, very intense, but rewarding. To be able to use my music, my art, to speak to this issue." Shelby, a Clay County, Kentucky, author and playwright, said she thought she and Rouse worked well together and had many of the same ideas about the piece. But it was hard, she said. "There were days I didn't want to work on it anymore," Shelby said. "Ultimately, though, I think it's an encouraging story. These are women who have gone through some of the most horrible things you can go through--the abuse, the torture, the loss, prison -- but they made it through." "Daylight' addresses violence" by Mike Smith, Staff Writer - Inside U of L - June 6, 1997 The horror of domestic violence and abuse are fully captured in Waiting for Daylight, an original composition by Steve Rouse of the [University of Louisville] School of Music. Premiered on campus April 4 as part of the Louisville Orchestra's New Dimensions series, the 25-minute piece is a work for soprano and orchestra. Sung by faculty member Edith Davis, it portrays an abused woman who murders her husband/abuser. The author of the text is Anne Shelby, a poet and playwright from Oneida in eastern Kentucky. Pat Gagne of sociology was an early adviser, based on her research of incarcerated women who had defended themselves against domestic violence. Waiting for Daylight is the story of such a woman and her abusive husband. It begins with the woman's dreams of hope, of a kind husband and of children. But early in her marriage, her husband begins using physical force. "You are mine now, you belong to me," he shouts. The violence is heard in the music with the repeated return of an aggressive melody, with agitated strings, sinister woodwinds and brass and angry percussion writing. "'Tonight,' he whispers, 'Tonight you die.' He goes to wake the children. He wants them to watch their mother die." At the peak of the drama, she manages to get his gun. Now she is faced with the dilemma of either shooting her husband or watching him abuse her children. In a moment of terror, she fatally shoots him. In the final scene she sings from prison, where she "waits for daylight" and longs to be safely with her children again. "I listen for music. I wait for daylight, and dream of a house on a wide, green lot, my children with me, singing, safe, Ah...ah...some sweet day." The piece was composed by Rouse and commissioned by the Meet The Composer partnership in Louisville...and...was written to focus attention on domestic violence...See the related story that follows. "Women's clemency researched as movement" by Judy Hughes, Staff Writer - Inside U of L, June 6, 1997 Nationally, 103 women imprisoned for killing their abusers have received clemency. The work to attain the commuting or pardoning doesn't happen in a vacuum, and a U of L sociologist is examining what it takes to free such women. Assistant Professor Patricia Gagne studies the national clemency effort for battered women as a social movement. As the intersection of personal, academic and political interest, it first became her dissertation topic. Now the research is evolving into a book she hopes will be published this year. The data she's been compiling for years--including interviews with imprisoned women charged with killing their abusers--came to public light in a remarkable way this year after U of L composer Steve Rouse relied on her work as a basis for his Waiting for Daylight piece for soprano and orchestra. Rouse contacted her, remembering a chance conversation they had three years ago about their respective academic interests. "He wanted to use information that showed the women talking," Gagne said. She let him use her data, with the women's identities masked; Rouse worked with poet Anne Shelby to create a composition Gagne termed "overwhelming." "He got it cold. He got the motivation, he got the cycle, he got how the women got trapped...," she said. Gagne said she marveled at the way Rouse captured the women's stories in words and music. "It really came through." She has been documenting the women's struggle in seven states where there have been organized efforts for mass clemencies. Although the efforts vary, as do the success rates, the movements involve some of the same elements... |
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