Date/Time
Date(s) - 05/19/2015
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Location
Foothill College
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Venue: Foothill College Recording Studio Building 1500
Many people give up their dreams of becoming professional musicians or artists, particularly in the arenas of fine art and musical styles that are not mainstream commodities. Robert Rich has created a rewarding and successful career as an Ambient musician, a style that emphasizes atmospheric musical textures over traditional song structures. His award-winning music has been featured in films, documentaries, and in the numerous CDs that have been released featuring him as a solo artist or in collaborations with others.
How has Robert managed to sustain his unlikely career for three decades while maintaining his fundamental artistic vision and style? Find out when Robert discusses:
- How to get started on the creative path
- Challenges and compromises that artists face
- The multiple revenue sources that lead to a successful career as an artist
- An overview of opportunities within the music, film, and media production industries
Short Biography
Across three decades and over 30 albums, Robert Rich has helped define the genres of ambient music, dark-ambient, tribal and trance, yet his music remains hard to categorize. Part of his unique sound comes from using home-made acoustic and electronic instruments, microtonal harmonies, computer-based signal processing, chaotic systems and feedback networks. Rich began building his own analog synthesizers in 1976, when he was 13 years old, and later studied for a year at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).
Rich has designed sounds for television and film scores, including the films Pitch Black, Crazy Beautiful, Behind Enemy Lines and others. His musical scores grace films by Yahia Mehamdi (Thank you for your Patience, 2003) and Daniel Colvin (Atlas Dei, 2007, with 90 minutes of Rich’s music in surround); and a video installation by Michael Somoroff (Illumination, 2007). Rich works closely with electronic instrument manufacturers, and his sound design has filled preset libraries of Emu’s Proteus 3 and Morpheus, Seer Systems’ Reality, sampling disks Things that Go Bump in the Night, ACID Loop Library Liquid Planet, WayOutWare’s TimewARP2600, and synths by Camel Audio. Rich has written software for composers who work in just intonation, and he helped develop the MIDI microtuning specification. As mastering engineer and mixer, he has applied his ear to albums in all styles, and his studio was featured twice in Keyboard Magazine, and elsewhere worldwide.
Notes from Robert Rich about this class at Foothill
With a gap between rehearsals, I wrote these lines. Feel free to use them in discussions about the series. I suspect this is REALLY what I want to talk about in May. It’s what I think about as a full-time artist, a lot:
- Would you like to try something dangerous?
- Do you like to gamble?
- Do you want to save the world?
- Do you think that life is short?
- What if you did exactly what you want to do and try to make a living from it?
- What if you try to change the world, into a model of your own personal paradise?
- Can you handle the stress of carrying your dream?
- Oh, wait, how long are you going to live?
- Maybe you plan to implode like Jim Morrison or John Belushi.
- A few years of stardom might be enough.
- Then, you die of an accidental overdose and everyone makes eulogies.
- What if you live?
- How do you make a living doing what you love, without destroying yourself?
- Let’s Talk.