Dean of the band

Dean Rouch converted his living room into a home recording studio that he uses to record albums by others and himself. Rouch's most recent project is the soundtrack for a locally produced movie, "Kill the Messenger." Tribune Photo/NELLIE WILLIAMS When he plays with the Where Art Thou Boys, Dean Rouch goes by the nickname "Fiddlin' Dean." Here, he plays on the dock outside his house on Riddle Lake in Lakeville. Tribune Photos/NELLIE WILLIAMS Screening "Kill the Messenger," a film by Tim Richardson with musical score by Dean Rouch, will be shown at 7 p.m. May 30 and 31 and June 6 and 7 and at 2 p.m. June 1 in Room 1001, Wiekamp Hall, Indiana University South Bend. Admission is $5. For more information on the film, visit www.killthemessengerfilm.com on the Web or call (574) 315-8044. For more information on Rouch's music, write to him at deanrouch@aol.com.

LAKEVILLE -- It's a story as old as pop music: Boy meets girl.

"I had a crush on a girl who was in (the school) band," Dean Rouch says. "I joined, and within two days, I forgot about the girl and became the first-chair drummer."

Nowadays, Rouch sits in all of the chairs -- for all of the instruments.

At area bars, Rouch is best known as a keyboard and fiddle player, but at home, he's a one-man orchestra, recording classical compositions that know no boundaries in either the styles they explore or the instrumentation Rouch uses.

"I love musical freedom," Rouch says, and his music bears out that comment. His classical works can be as brooding as Gustav Mahler or as experimental as Charles Ives, as melodic as Beethoven or as folk-inspired as Bartok.

"I'll Do the Water," for instance, opens with a section whose instrumentation consists of coffee and beer cans, drinking straws, PVC pipes, voices, fiddles and piano.

As its name suggests, the music for the three-part string quartet "Nature vs. Cello/Cello vs. Nature/The War Is Over" roils as a soundtrack for conflict until the middle section crescendos and cuts to the third section, where acoustic guitars, fiddle, drums and Rouch's voice take center stage. Brass is the only family of instruments Rouch hasn't mastered -- "tuned" PVC pipes stand in for French horns when he records.

A Middle Eastern theme supersedes the opening neoclassical motif of "Winter," and the album-long work "A Walk Through an Indiana Thunderstorm" uses passages of rain as part of its structure.

The feel for movie music

At the moment, Rouch plays with Beat 66, a rock band that focuses on '50s and '60s rock 'n' roll, and with the Where Art Thou Boys, an acoustic, roots music group. On the third Saturday of each month, he brings his fiddle to Jack's Bar & Grill for the open mike, where he sits in with anyone who wants his accompaniment.

Rouch's current recording projects are for soundtracks. So far, he's written and recorded 10 of them for independent films, radio programs and one literary reading, with Frances Sherwood.

"For a movie, I sit, I watch, and I get a feeling," he says. "I start to hear themes, and then it's just a matter of timing out the scenes."

Rouch's latest soundtrack is the score for "Kill the Messenger," a Civil War drama directed and co-written by Tim Richardson, a local filmmaker. Rouch also wrote and recorded the score for the movie's prequel, a short titled "Second Sight."

Richardson says Rouch's use of "real instruments" gives the soundtracks for the two movies a "full" sound that he hasn't had for his previous movies.

"The movies I've worked on before were mostly keyboards or guitar or bands, but his music is like what you would hear in a Hollywood picture," the director says. "It has more of an orchestral feel."

Richardson says "Kill the Messenger" is a spy-adventure film. Short scenes and plenty of action give it a quick pace that challenged Rouch to write short-short pieces that still had to communicate mood and character for the scenes and the characters.

"I have all these notes sitting around -- 19 seconds, 23 seconds, eight seconds," he says.

For "Kill the Messenger," Rouch wrote and recorded eight hours of music, some of it subtle variations on itself -- "The difference between this piece and the last one is that the first one was one fiddle and this is three fiddles," Rouch says while selections from the score play in the background on his CD player -- that he gave to Richardson to use as the director saw fit.

"He was never possessive about where things went," Richardson says. "He never said, 'I composed that to go here' when I wanted to move something to another place or not use it. He told me the other night, 'It's your treehouse. Put it where you think it should go.' "

Hard, lonely lessons

Born and raised in Lakeville, Rouch works in his family's water well drilling business and, with some of his eight siblings, runs a recording studio, Big Kinic's Music, out of his home on Riddle Lake.

"Mainly, I lose money," he says of the studio. "Musicians are broke. They tend to pay me in broken equipment."

Rouch has reasons for continuing to run the studio even though it doesn't turn a profit.

"Who would?" he says. "I love the music of Bela Bartok, but what I admire more about Bartok is that he traveled through the countryside with a wax-cone recorder on his back recording the folk music, recording music that would be forgotten if he hadn't. I remember when I couldn't afford it, so I record people who can't afford it."

After high school, Rouch moved to California to play music. From San Diego to San Francisco, he lived on the streets -- "that was my college education" -- and made his living as a street musician for four years in the mid-'70s.

"Sometimes you'd go three or four days without eating anything except condiments from a hot dog stand, but sometimes, you could make $250 in an hour on a Sunday," he says. "It was reality. There are some really lonely, wet, cold days, but you learn that there's nothing more important than friendship. Then you learn that you don't have any, so you go make some. It's a pretty good education."

He played his own songs, which people told him "sounded like a cross between Jethro Tull and Jefferson Airplane." The lyrics, he says focused their lyrics on environmental issues.

"I wasn't looking for rock stardom," he says. "I was playing the wrong kind of music in the wrong decade."

His experiences as a street musician, Rouch says, continue to influence his approach to music today.

"More than anything, it gave me an appreciation for the arrangement," he says. "I (played) alone for so long that I don't go to clubs now and just do my music. I yearn for the echoing arrangement."

He finds that "echoing arrangement" in his home studio.

"Being the 12 fiddles, I love that," he says. "Sometimes, I enjoy it so damn much, I'll do the fiddle part perfectly four times, and I'll do it a fifth time because I'm having so much fun."