Rodrigo Ruiz is a Mexican-American composer who writes vocal, chamber, and orchestral music that has been described as “unabashedly tonal.” His music sounds by turns like Beethoven, Bach, Schubert, and Brahms. But Ruiz isn’t trying to mimic the styles of these composers, as a fledgling painter might mimic the work of earlier artists to master a technique. He is just writing what comes naturally to him—this isn’t model composition; it’s composition, pure and simple. Ruiz grew up in Tijuana, Mexico, listening to his father’s records of Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms, and he internalized their music to such a degree that once he began improvising at the piano, and writing down those improvisations, he produced music that breathed with the same spirit; he learned their style the way a child learns a native language.
Yet, as with any native speaker, Ruiz also speaks with his own voice. That voice is especially indelible in his many vocal works, the most recent of which is Venus & Adonis, a cycle of seventeen songs based on William Shakespeare’s narrative poem of the same title, about the unrequited love that a goddess feels for a mortal man. A recording of the cycle, performed by soprano Grace Davidson and pianist George Herbert, is scheduled to be released in late September by Signum Records and will be available via various streaming platforms. (In 2021, Signum also released an album of his chamber music, Behold the Stars, which topped the Billboard classical charts.) Ruiz’s other vocal works can be heard on the 2017 album An Everlasting Dawn.
In the forward to Venus & Adonis Ruiz mentions his fondness for “madrigalisms,” referring to the kind of word painting characteristic of Renaissance madrigals. In word painting, what is “painted” is often something you see or hear—a storm, a bird call, a cry of pain, etc. His music contains many of these sight-and-sound madrigalisms, such as the horn call that appears throughout the cycle, evoking Adonis’s love of hunting. But even more striking is the way he “paints” the slightest fluctuations of emotion. Consider the beginning of song 9 (“In earth or heaven?”), which you can hear below. Venus awakes after fainting, not knowing where she is. Ruiz evokes a range of feelings—drowsiness, uncertainty, momentary blissfulness—with the simplest of musical means. The piano introduction, starting tentatively with eighth notes that alternate between the right and left hands and then blossoming into rolling thirty-second notes, sounds almost improvised, and the true key of the song only becomes clear after the voice enters. This is music coming into being, finding its orientation just as Venus does—and it is a prime example of one of Ruiz’s greatest gifts: his ability to register moment-to-moment feelings, using music like a finely tuned emotional barometer.
For more information about Rodrigo Ruiz, you can find him on Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and LinkTree.
(These comments are adapted from my liner notes to Ruiz’s forthcoming album, Venus & Adonis.)
Additional Resources
- Rodrigo Ruiz’s personal website.
- An hourlong interview with Rodrigo Ruiz (Interviurile, with Matei Georgescu).
- My podcast episode about Ruiz’s song “Sag, wo ist dein schönes Liebchen” (Tell Me, Where is Your Beautiful Sweetheart).
