Mainstreet Radio's Stephanie Hemphill profiles Ryan Rapsys, a young composer who has turned Duluth-Superior harbor sounds into music. While most people who visit Duluth spend some time sight-seeing on the waterfront, for Rapsys, sounds of the harbor can be just as inspiring as the sights.
Rapsys's work is titled "Sounds of the Harbor." He studied composition at the University of Minnesota Duluth and his orchestral work has been performed by the Duluth-Superior Symphony Orchestra.
STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Duluth's harbor is a noisy place. Ships blow their horns. Trains rumble through. And the aerial lift bridge rings an alarm when it goes up and down. Ryan Rapsis hears music in all of this. Rapsis studied composition at the University of Minnesota Duluth. He graduated just last spring. His orchestral work has been performed by the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra. He loves to write electronic music, and he also likes to play with sounds he's recorded.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Every sound in this piece started as noise in the harbor. Rapsis recorded more than 100 sounds and brought them back to his computer and mixed them.
RYAN RAPSIS: I like to think of it as-- instead of instruments, music can be made out of any sound sources, and music is the art of sound and time. So it's all fair game, in my opinion.
STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Here's one most people will recognize-- the warning horn, the aerial lift bridge makes when it's rising for a boat coming through the canal.
[HORN BLARING]
RYAN RAPSIS: It's a repeated melody. The impact of it is more so in the fact that it just changes pitch. So I didn't do anything real crazy with it. It becomes more intricate later on. I could play it back with all the other sounds going on here because there's a lot of other rhythmic activity.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So that's how they all come together.
STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Rapsis loves rhythm, and he likes to work with the texture or timbre of his found sounds. He hears music, even in the sound of gravel falling off a shovel.
RYAN RAPSIS: Every single sound has some sort of timbral quality because you have the rocks, how they cling off of each other, based on their volume and what velocity they're hitting. I mean, it's what's happening with a lot of those, is you're hearing overtones.
STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: This music isn't for everyone, but Lisa McCann loves it. She's the one who commissioned the work. She's a dancer and choreographer. She moved to Duluth six years ago, and her backyard is on the harbor. To go with Rapsis's music, she designed a dance that suggests a clash between human and machine.
LISA MCCANN: He's got incredible rhythms built into it and real complexity. So to me, it brought to mind just the workings of machines.
STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: The dance is part of a program called Sounding Duluth. Tonight and tomorrow night, 30 artists will blend dance, music, spoken word, and painting on the stage of the Weber Music Hall. Sounds of the Harbor by Ryan Rapsis is the centerpiece of the program. It's the first time he's written music for dance. He says it's a perfect combination.
Rapsis admits his compositions sometimes don't work well in a concert setting because the music is being played back from a computer. The dance will give the audience something to look at, and Ryan Rapsis says, it'll help them respond to the music. Stephanie Hemphill, Minnesota Public Radio, Duluth.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Digitization made possible by the State of Minnesota Legacy Amendment’s Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, approved by voters in 2008.
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