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Composer ‘paints’ with music
NOVEMBER 2015
I N S I D E …
PHOTO BY CHRISTOPHER MYER
By Carol Sorgen Vivian Adelberg Rudow is an award-winning, internationally recognized composer who got a late start, professionally-speaking. As a young woman, she said, “I had no desire for a career whatsoever. Let’s get one thing totally clear. I got married to be married and to raise a family.” And that she certainly did. Married for almost 60 years to attorney David Rudow, the 79-year-old Roland Park resident is mother to three grown sons, and relishes her role as wife, mother and grandmother. But when her sons were young, Adelberg Rudow started writing children’s songs. The children’s magazine Humpty Dumpty paid her $25 for a song, and she thought, “I got paid for that? This is fun!”
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Excelling early It’s not that Adelberg Rudow’s musical talent sprang up out of the blue. Though she came from a family with no musical interest (“Zero!” she laughed, when asked), she began studying piano at the age of 6 at the Peabody Conservatory of Music. She was so talented that she was offered a full scholarship — not only to Peabody but to a prestigious private school so that she would have been able to arrange her schedule to practice more. Her father refused, however, wanting her to have a more traditional childhood. “It wasn’t my destiny,” she said of becoming a scholarship student. Nevertheless, Adelberg Rudow continued her piano lessons at Peabody (and also studied dance until the age of 16, when she had to choose between that and piano). There, in addition to performance, she learned music theory, the basis for composition, which she describes as “a language, just like English.” “By the time I graduated high school, my musical ‘vocabulary’ was complete,” said Adelberg Rudow. It would be more than 20 years, however, before she began to use that vocabulary. That’s when she returned to Peabody, at the age of 38, to earn her undergraduate and graduate degrees in music. From then on, Adelberg Rudow, who calls herself a “sound portrait painter” (“what artists see with their eyes, I see
Although she studied music in her youth, Vivian Adelberg Rudow didn’t begin composing until she was nearly 40. Now she is in demand internationally for her creative compositions and live performance art, some of which utilizes electronic elements such as synthesizers and remote-controlled tape decks. Adelberg Rudow’s “Earth Day Suite” will be performed at a free concert on November 1 at Har Sinai Congregation, together with works by Vivaldi and others.
through my music”), has earned one accolade after another. Among them, in 1982 she became the first Maryland composer to have a work performed by an orchestra in Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, with Sergiu Commisiona conducting the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Her career is still going strong, and she has recently been invited to compose music to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Chapter Four, for an upcoming international tour of Hong Kong pianist Stanley Wong.
Experimenting with electronic music Adelberg Rudow uses her music to express emotions, life experiences, hopes and dreams, using both traditional and
more contemporary idioms. For example, she believes that pop music rhythms and vocabulary are today’s folk music, and that they may be incorporated in classical music just as Brahms and Bartók used folk music in their compositions. One way she does this is through her fluency with not only classical acoustic instruments, but also the tools of electroacoustic music. The latter uses traditional instruments as well as electronic musical instruments, such as the electric guitar, and electronic technology, such as the sound synthesizer. “I love electronic music for the new sounds you can create,” she said. “And now See COMPOSER, page 28
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