Composer Paul Dresher has made a career of making music out of unlikely material.
Growing up in Los Angeles in a "conventional middle class family" he was "dragged" to
all manner of performances. At 5 it was the opera "Aida."
"That was torture," he said in a talk Thursday at Bowling Green State University. "I vowed
I would hate opera for the rest of my life." The saving grace was the production used live
elephants on stage.
That proved not to be the case. In fact Dresher, 63, went on to work with opera singers, and create
large-scale theatrical productions.
Dresher is the featured guest composer at the 35th annual Bowling Green New Music Festival this weekend.
A full schedule of events can be found at festival.bgsu.edu.
Part of that middle class upbringing, Dresher said, was the obligatory piano lessons starting at 7. His
teacher introduced music theory to the lessons. "That I enjoyed music theory as a young person was
the first inclination that … I would be a composer," he said. "I loved to play with the
system."
As soon as he was allowed to quit piano lesson at 12, he did, and promptly took up the electric guitar as
so many teens did in the 1960s.
"I’m a product of a lot of forces in American culture," he told the audience in his composer
talk, the festival version of a keynote address.
Rock ‘n’ roll was one of those forces. Dresher went on to work as a rock musician well into his 20s, all
the while wanting to be a composer.
Still other signs of his future direction popped up in his youth.
In high school he had to take the required metal shop and wood shop courses. He expected to hate them.
When he found out that he loved metal shop, he didn’t want to move on to wood shop. But when he did, he
found he loved working with wood even more.
"Most important thing is I learned to love working with my hands, taking raw material and turning it
into something," Dresher said.
A few years later when he asked for a 12-string guitar, his parents instead gave him a kit to make a box
guitar.
In those days of psychedelic rock, a box guitar was not cool, so he set about turning the kit to his own
designs. He produced an instrument that looked cool, but he admitted it wasn’t quite in tune, so playing
chords was painful to the ear.
That forced him to find the music he could play on the instrument which he described as "a childish
imitation of northern Indian music."
Those musical experiments sparked an interest in Indian music and other sounds from around the world
including the Armenian and Mexican tunes he heard on the radio growing up.
Dresher has spun all these elements into a kaleidoscopic body of music.
A sampling of it will be performed over the weekend by students and faculty and by his own touring
ensemble Double Duo.
The quartet featuring Dresher with pianist Lisa Moore, percussionist Joel Davel and violinist Karen
Bentley Pollick will perform tonight at 8 in Kobacker Hall in the Moore Musical Arts Center on campus.
Dresher has continued to invent instruments. He’ll play Quadrachord, a 14-foot-long guitar like string
instrument tonight. Davel will also perform on a newly invented instrument the Marimba Lumina.
Dresher said that the musical appeal of rock wore off. He wanted to explore new sounds and new ways of
making them, and he found that in contemporary music. Still, he said, he wanted to make music with the
style and energy of rock, and he wanted to tour as he did with a rock band and do it on guitar.
Before digital technology, he invented a system using tape that allowed him to activate looping musical
fragments so he could "build up many layers of sound" during a live performances.
With opera singer Rinde Eckert he developed an 85-minute, two act performance piece "Slow
Fire." A antic monologue by a "paranoid materialist" set over a funk beat.
Dresher played a section of the piece during the talk, one of three excerpts from his work. Another,
"Double Ikat, Part II" which will be performed tonight, showed the influence of northern
Indian and Indonesian music.
As with most of his music, the beat is discernible. "Music is something that isn’t just in the
head," Dresher said, "it’s in the body, and rhythm is a really key element in how music
connects to the body. It moves your body, it moves you emotionally as well."
Dresher closed with an excerpts from his piece "Schick Machine" written for percussionist
Steven Schick in collaboration with Eckert. It’s the kind of massive, theatrical piece he couldn’t stage
at the festival. A piece he said had to be experienced live to get the full visually, dramatic and aural
impact.
"Schick Machine" is 70-minute fantasy in which he lets the percussionist loose like a mad
scientist in a laboratory of instruments, none of them conventional. There are boxes with ball bearings
in them, a telephone bell in a basin, cow bell found in Nepal, a large rotating wheel, a giant
hurdy-gurdy built by the composer attached to the pipes from a pipe organ. The piece does not
involve, however, a live elephant.
