They say that people who are unable to see have greater sensitivity in their other senses. That is certainly the case for mezzo-soprano Laurie Rubin, whose blindness has given her nuanced sensations of color and feeling. Every color has a character to it, a flavor, she says, pointing out that “the darker chocolate is, the darker it tastes,” and describing how she can follow a conductor by sensing his movements and hearing his breath. In the same way that Rubin’s four senses work together to give her a personal experience of sight, her unexpected combination of abilities support the numerous artistic endeavors that comprise her career.
Rubin’s range of talents is perhaps best exemplified in her current multimedia project, entitled “Do You Dream in Color?” Rubin worked with composer Bruce Adolphe, who invited her to write a poem about her experiences as a blind person, which he set as the text to an extended song. The work provides the title and focal point of Rubin’s album of art songs released in February on Bridge Records—which includes selections by Rodrigo, who was also blind, and songs by Fauré, Verlaine, and Israeli composer Noam Sivan.
Do You Dream in Color?—a question that Rubin hears with some frequency—is also the title of her new memoir, which will appear in October. In case there is any doubt of her unique visual sense, Rubin also designs and sells her original jewelry creations.
How does a blind girl cultivate abilities in tasks that would seem to be best suited to the sight enabled? Rubin grew up surrounded by books and music. Saint Paul Sundays, the Baroque program on National Public Radio, played regularly in her home and gave her a lasting love of early music. Her grandparents often played opera for her, and she imitated the sound from a young age. One memorable music teacher introduced students to orchestral instruments by letting them touch, play, and listen to them individually. They then studied Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, learning about the different character of each instrument.
Rubin started voice lessons when she was 11, “because I wasn’t as interested in playing the piano anymore,” she jokes. She was the first blind student to attend her middle and high schools, offering some rough lessons in living in the sighted world. Rubin contended with teachers who didn’t think to explain what they were writing on the chalkboard, as well as a social environment that encouraged students to hide and be ashamed of their disabilities.
She attended Oberlin College, where she studied with the renowned Richard Miller. “He was very warm,” she says, and “a repository of knowledge about repertoire.” Miller insisted on respect within his studio and “he always managed to get people to see that I could do things,” she says. With his advocacy, Rubin performed the title role in La Cenerentola as an undergraduate.
Undertaking the study of music without the ability to see may sound like an impossible task. But, after all, the human voice is not an instrument that is readily visible to anyone, and it perhaps best lends itself to studies involving all the senses. Rubin developed a kinesthetic understanding of the imagery used in vocal pedagogy. “If a teacher says, ‘imagine you’re floating on top of a note,’ that’s something you can feel,” she explains. She has cultivated a spatial awareness by listening for sound waves as they bounce off nearby objects. “Anytime anything is taken away,” she says, “you focus on everything else better.”
Rubin uses her heightened sense of hearing to learn music by ear, even repertoire that hasn’t been recorded commercially. Although Braille can be used for notation, Rubin finds its expressiveness somewhat limited and prefers to study music from live or MIDI recordings. While the creepy timbre of MIDI “does drive me crazy,” Rubin prefers it to acoustic recordings because it is a “totally objective” learning tool. Studying music in a way that requires deep internalization no doubt contributes to Rubin’s expressive performances, which have been praised as “charismatic [and] multi-textured” (Los Angeles Times) and “compelling” (New York Times). In fact, the Los Angeles Times review went as far to say that “Rubin seems to have an especially acute intuition about the power and subtleties of sound.”
During her time at Oberlin, Rubin had several opportunities to work with musical luminaries. She was accepted into the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme in Aldeburgh, England, where she performed in masterclasses with Richard Bonynge and Dame Joan Sutherland. When the Oberlin orchestra made a trip to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles to perform under the baton of John Williams, he invited Rubin to sing Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915. When Frederica von Stade heard a recording of one of Rubin’s recitals, she invited her to perform with her on a benefit concert for an organization that researches degenerative eye diseases.
After Oberlin, Rubin was accepted into Yale’s prestigious opera program as one of only a handful of singers undertaking a curriculum designed for rigorous professional training. The intent of the small class size is to enable all students in the program to perform at least one role during their studies. But Rubin was not cast in a single opera.
“People were fearful of having me onstage,” she says. “No one hid it” from her that her blindness was a factor in reasons she did not perform roles. While she praises the many opportunities she did enjoy at Yale, including performing opera scenes and receiving thorough training as an actor, singer, and musician, she hopes the program has become more enlightened. After all, she was able to safely perform opera as an undergraduate. “At Oberlin, I knew where the orchestra pit was and I just didn’t go there,” she says.
During her studies, Rubin had another factor to contend with that posed its own challenges. “I wasn’t sure which felt worse,” she writes of her time at Yale, “weirding people out once again as the only blind person in the School of Music or as the only lesbian.” Rubin is comfortably up-front about her personal life, starting off her memoir with a kiss to her partner, Jenny Taira. Coming out seems to have been an instinctive process—“my brother paved the way”—and something that “hasn’t affected my career more than blindness did,” Rubin says.
The couple doesn’t experience discrimination so much as misinterpretation. Surprisingly, in social situations Taira is often thought to be Rubin’s personal assistant, a phenomenon that Rubin thinks might happen because Taira is Asian. Waiters in restaurants would ask Taira what Rubin wanted, and after one recital, wealthy patrons assumed Taira was a servant and asked her to fetch glasses of water. “People say, ‘Oh you’re so lucky to have a friend to take care of you,’ when actually we’re independent and we both take care of each other,” Rubin says.
After college, Rubin auditioned for some Young Artist Programs but knew that she was unlikely to be successful—most companies were looking for singers to understudy roles by watching rehearsals. Instead, she gravitated toward contemporary works and chamber music, moving to New York and becoming part of the freelance scene. Rubin has gone on to perform operas, ranging from her “touchingly vulnerable” Penelope (Opera News) in Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria with the Greenwich Music Festival to The Rat Land by Gordon Beeferman, which Rubin premiered in 2007 with New York City Opera’s VOX program for contemporary opera. As Penelope, under the direction of Rubin’s friend Ted Huffman, her blindness was integrated into the role. For a staged fight, Penelope’s lady-in-waiting was by her side to protect her.
Along the way, Rubin developed an interest in jewelry making that has become another component of her career. She always loved jewelry, and was inspired to try making it herself when a jewelry-making friend told her that she doesn’t work by sight but by feel. Rubin started out with private lessons at her local Jewish Community Center, entranced by the different textures of the beads, the sounds the materials make when they clink against each other, and the vivid descriptions she heard from her instructors about their colors. The result is the LR Look, a line of necklaces and earrings that Rubin sells from her website (Laurie-Rubin.com) and in specialty boutiques.
When not travelling to promote her book or touring the “Do You Dream in Color?” recital program, Rubin is focused on developing Ohana Arts (OhanaArts.org), the music school and festival she founded with Taira in Hawaii, where they live. Now in its second year, the school brings acting, singing, and dance training to young performers in the area—but Rubin and Taira hope it will eventually serve students from farther afield, similar to the Interlochen and Tanglewood summer programs. For now, Taira teaches choral classes (she is an accomplished pianist and composer), Rubin teaches voice, and collaborators from the mainland come to teach dance, composition, and direct performances. Summer 2012 saw a fully staged and costumed production of The Wizard of Oz.
The aim of the school is to provide students with varying levels of experience and skill levels a nurturing yet disciplined environment in which they can hone their skills and, in many cases, discover their talents. A tuition-free program serves local youth who would otherwise be unable to attend, and Rubin says that the last group of participants “set the talent and spirit level for everyone else.” Professional performances are an important component to Ohana Arts; in 2011, Rubin performed in La voix humaine in a production that had originated with Greenwich Music Festival earlier in the year.
“There is a lot of great, appreciative talent here,” says Rubin though, at the same time, “the opportunities for music have dwindled a lot” since the Honolulu Symphony—a 110-year-old institution and the oldest orchestra west of the Rocky Mountains—folded. While the orchestra is trying to regroup under a new name and management, a silver lining is that local musicians, donors, and audience members are more available to new enterprises like Ohana Arts.
Rubin is now working on a novel and is also writing lyrics and composing music with Taira for an album of “crossover songs with a modern edge,” which they hope to self-produce. Her experience with starting a school—and her numerous other self-motivated projects—make her convinced of the importance of being entrepreneurial. “I’d love to see kids believing in themselves as a business,” she says. It’s better to “create opportunities to have their own concerts and not wait to win auditions.”
She also encourages young musicians to determine their strengths and reach out to others, trusting that success will find them if they do. Rubin’s focus as a recitalist, for example, might not be appealing to some managers, but she recently joined the roster of Cadenza Artists in Los Angeles. “They asked me what my dreams are,” she says, “and I knew that they really believed in me.”
