River Music: An Atchafalaya Story

Chapter 5: Outsider Artist

c h a P t e r 5 Outsider Artist F acedwithachoicebetweenbecoming a mud engineer and anything else, Earl Robicheaux embarked on a twenty-year odyssey that took him away from home and back, twice. Like his biology teacher Randy Dooley’s two sojourns, one of Earl’s trips to “the outside” was short, the other long, and both grew out of the desire for education and a more cosmopolitan experience. In 1978, after hearing his big-band outsider artist 71 piece premiered at the Jazz and Heritage Festival, Earl upped and drove five hundred miles from Berwick to Denton, Texas, attracted by North Texas State University’s large music school, known for its world-class jazz program. I had begun studying there during the summers toward a doctorate in clarinet performance,beginning in 1976,and remember well my own reaction, pulling into Denton for the first time, fresh from New Orleans: “There’s a great music school here?” Compared to Louisiana, north-central Texas was abysmally bereft of greenery, and its sky unsettlingly high and wide.The campus itself,a grid of rectangular buildings all stacked of dust-yellow brick, did not promise a rich world of art making. But inside those plain halls I found a lot to like, and in 1979, left New Orleans permanently to study in Denton, carving a niche in my two years there playing contemporary music. Although Earl and I overlapped a few months in Denton, we never met, partly because the school is so big, and Earl was somewhat adrift there, anyway. “Denton was one of those blind moves,” he said. “It was just time to move. And though I went to North Texas because I’d heard of the jazz program, it was not the kind of school I wanted—I was looking for something more academic.” At North Texas, Earl met Kathy Huisman, a pianist from Falls Church, Virginia, and the pair married and moved close to her family in the Washington, D.C., area. Earl and Kathy found office jobs, but a year later, Earl came across C. C. Lockwood’s National Geographic spread on the Atchafalaya and convinced his new bride to move to Morgan City. Earl speaks fondly of his time in D.C.’s museums as a crash course in contemporary visual art that would inform his music, and ultimately, his approach to recording sounds in the Atchafalaya. The New York School abstract expressionists, and Robert Rauschenberg in particular, caught his attention. “I could relate to Rauschenberg through my own experience,” he said, “because he was from Port Arthur. But more than that was the work—the idea that you could make meaning out of nonmeaning . Rauschenberg would give himself a rule—like, any object he found within, say, one block, could be part of a work. There was a sense 72 chapter 5 for the moment—it had a Buddhist aspect to it.” It also mirrored the Cageian aesthetic, and the freedom of the unconscious mind prized by all disciples of the New York School—writers, musicians, dancers, visual artists. The abstract expressionists particularly suggested to Earl,as they had for many other composers, the idea of writing pieces for the sake of pure color or for groups or nests or planes of sounds. These concepts became more interesting to Earl than conventional relationships between pitch and harmony. He also began thinking about synthesizing traditional music and “found” objects (or to put it musically, in random or captured sounds). “And that led to an interest in the natural world,” Earl said, “because in nature, there is no square or rectangle. Yet man bases all of his architecture and common practices of music on the rectangle or square. In music, Varèse had broken through that.” Looking to Marcel Duchamp also provided food for thought. “He showed that here could be poetry in the relationships between objects, and so did Joseph Cornell. What I’m trying to do now is the equivalent in sound—where everyday sounds are put into a context from which a kind of poetry can emerge.” •฀ •฀ • Earl’s first full year back in Louisiana, 1981, was marked by a personal tragedy that would shape and shadow the rest of his life. Adam Robicheaux, who had suffered a stroke in 1975, died of another, at home. That winter, Earl and his wife were living in a garage apartment attached to the...