Amy Rubin (b.1952) is a composer of many guises, many stylistic venues, many seemingly opposed idioms – but it’s simpler than that. She lets all those traditions filter through her personality – like we all filter everything everyday that our senses of perception let in – and the result is manifold and varied… but with a distinct Rubin feel to it. So be it!

Amy Rubin has been improvising since her early years, but she has also studied the classical European piano literature. She has – simultaneously – written music for theatre plays, while also studying jazz. This all fits in well with her diversity, her crisscrossing in and out of styles, while styles and their offspring fashions and trends mean very little to her. She just keeps on keeping on, like Bob Dylan put it… (in “Tangled Up in Blue”) and sure enough she’s been to Africa too, in Ghana, studying African drumming!

Rubin’s first piece – “Hallelujah Games” (1995) (the title work) – has a strong rhythmical structure, and the combination piano/marimba is pleasant, reminding me quite a bit of earlier so called minimalist (I’m tired of that term!) compositions by, say, Steve Reich. Reich is definitely not one of my priorities in life, since I think his music is static and soulless, compared with many other ventures into rhythmic, repetitive music, but the reference to Reich here is only technical, to make the reader sense in what kind of venue the piece “Hallelujah Games” is moving. Reich has made a few pieces that are extremely good, too, like the first issued version of “Drumming” on Deutsche Grammophon, plus early phase experiment “Come Out” on Elektra Nonesuch and beautiful “Tehillim” on ECM New Series. Am I contradicting myself? Good! Life is loaded with contradictions, and if you expect logic you’re in the wrong world…

“Whose America?” (1998) is a different story. This is Christine Schadeberg [soprano] and Amy Rubin [piano] in a small song cycle of a distinct (modern) lieder character, somewhat melodramatic, with spoken – almost… - insertions. The three-song cycle has to do with social (un)justice, which is plainly revealed through the titles: “The Farewell of a Virginia Slave Mother to her Daughters Sold into Southern Bondage” and “Brothers of the Ku Klux Klan”. The third song portrays a grandmother who had to work the mine, run an alehouse and earn extras as a hooker to raise a sufficient income for herself and her daughter.

“Trifocals” (1996) is a chamber piece in five movements with the lucid, transparent setting of flute, clarinet and bassoon. It has the subtitle “Snapshots of a Tropical Island”, but to me that sort of blurs my own visions inside this music, which has nothing to do with south or islands. To me this can be absolute music too, touching your intellectual and emotional strings in whatever circumstances you find yourself. This music makes me think of people I’ve known and walks I’ve taken and hidden meadows out in a northern Scandinavia forest… you see? The music is delicate, dancing, fairytale-like, with little dolls and tin soldiers moving cautiously but curiously across a wooden stage in just the bleak daylight falling in through a window on high.

“Cry of the Mothers” (1991) is a piano seul piece played by Amy Rubin herself. It moves through many stylistic changes, from easy laid-back postures to Prokofievan rhythms, from early America reminiscences to Latin twirls. Rubin wrote it during the Gulf War, and she says it “traces a life progression from devastation and its aftermath to rebirth and continuation”.

“Journey” (1987) is a flute-piano duo, which gives it an impressionistic luster, with beautiful displays of overtones, in a prismic splendor. According to Rubin this three-movement piece is influenced by traditions from Turkey as well as Ghana. I’d say that influence is mostly active on the atmospheric level, not actually directly copying any musical characteristics of the countries mentioned, and I suppose that is the best kind of influence, rendering the music a personal sophistication inside an encoded environment, so to speak. The music is like glass at times, so clear, transparent, cool. It would be interesting to hear more of this particular duo – Amy Rubin and Kathleen Nester – in longer pieces. Let’s convey this wish to Amy!

Then what follows is a selection of shorter piano pieces by Rubin, performed by her: “Chant” (1992), “Obsession” (1990), “Two Train Toccata” (1992/1998), “Aftermath” (1991) and “Windows” (1992). These seem like private thoughts in a private setting; Rubin at the desk or at the piano in a subdued lighting, like a child letting her fingers fondle the keyboard of the piano in gentle movements. She also gets into sudden rushes, like when unexpected thoughts appear rapidly in your mind, and she lingers on those thoughts for a while, letting her inner visions or remembrances or intents reflect all the way down through her fingers into the strings of the piano, translating into audible vibrations of herself.

The concluding entry is “Mallet Cycles” (1987), sporting two marimba players at one single marimba. One player keeps up a three-note ostinato, while the other adds hypnotically repeated cross-rhythms.
A piece like this is too short in he way it is presented here – much too short. The “Mallet Cycles” kind of music should be allowed a whole CD. It is seriously hampered by being cut so short. It is valuable enough to extend, so if the finances are ample; produce a full length CD with “Mallet Cycles”!