Staff Spotlight: Tech Guru by Day, Drummer, Artist by Night

01/01/2018

During the workday, Ted Rubright can be found working in the new Academic Technology Commons in Saint Louis University’s Pius XII Memorial Library. There’s another side to the tech-savvy Rubright, however. 

What the SLU users he helps daily may not know is that Rubright is a Juilliard-trained percussionist who has performed with the St. Louis Symphony and is now a budding artist whose work has been featured in the popular Urban Wanderers exhibit that benefits Stray Rescue of St. Louis.

The Kirkwood native developed his passion for percussion early. Rubright cited a love of the Beatles and Ringo Starr with sparking his interest in laying down musical beats. He began playing the drums at age seven and later began branching out to explore learning other types of percussion instruments.

“I really got into it after I realized it was more exciting than playing the triangle,” Rubright recalled. “It’s like a whole new world opened to me.”

Ed Erschen, a drum teacher who taught up the street from Rubright’s childhood home and who worked at the well-known Mel Bay Music store, was his first teacher. Rubright went on to work with Tom Stubbs, a percussionist with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) who also taught at SLU. Rubright followed his friend Mark Sparks, now the principal flutist at SLSO, into classical music, playing with both the St. Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra and as part of his high school marching band and orchestra.

After two years in the St. Louis Conservatory of Music and two auditions, Rubright entered the famed Juilliard School in New York. After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in percussion performance, he joined the Evansville Philharmonic Orchestra in Indiana, and taught as an adjunct instructor at the University of Evansville for four years.

Moving back to St. Louis following his Indiana years, he said, put his playing on a collision course with the technology he’s come to love.

Rubright returned to the River City initially “without much of a plan.” But, reuniting with his brother, Dan, a guitarist and jazz composer interested in using computers in his musical work, led to a new direction for Rubright professionally and musically.

“I found out that I could make the computer do what I wanted to do,” Rubright said. “I could bend the tech to my will.” The two worked producing commercial music as Rubright also pursued his interest in technology, earning a master’s degree in communications and interactive media from Webster University. After years of freelance Web work, he arrived at SLU in 2003, working in Information Technology Services, the College for Public Health and Social Justice and eventually in the Instructional Media Center and Academic Tech Commons.

While Rubright carved out a space professionally in the tech world, he also continued playing. He has been a guest percussionist with SLSO and Opera Theatre of St. Louis.  He is the timpanist for the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra of St. Louis. In his own band, The WirePilots, a jazz/world/fusion trio, he plays an electro-acoustic drum kit he designed himself. Computers and technology add another “instrument” to his repertoire.

“Electronic percussion is the spice,” he explained.

While his love of technology has been comfortably married to his musical career for years, Rubright has found new ways to combine the digital with the artistic. Painting for several years, Rubright has recently become interested in digital art, using his computer and an iPad. He also paints with traditional acrylic paints.

“I started drawing as a small child and kept it up until high school when I spent more and more time studying music,” Rubright noted. His wife, Gina, also shares his passion for music and art, further inspiring him. “For years I thought that I would get back to visual art but I didn’t know which direction to go in. One night my wife, a friend and I rented a movie about Picasso … Seeing his process was a revelation to me; I would have to be fearless before the blank paper and not afraid to make mistakes or throw things away. It freed me up to experiment without fear of failure.” 

His early experiments with watercolor and ink quickly morphed into working with mixed media and incorporating computer programs to create his work. In 2017, Rubright’s art was part of the Urban Wanderers exhibit at the Saint Louis University Museum of Art. Rubright drew Champ, one of Stray Rescue of St. Louis’s “celebrity” adoptees, who has thousands of Facebook followers. As the year ended, the SLU staffer was busy producing similar digital drawings of beloved pets as holiday gifts. 

SLU, he said, gave him a place where he could pursue his passions while being part of a rewarding mission. Now the father of a Billiken undergraduate, Rubright credited SLU as the place where “it all came together.”

“Life-long learning is something I’m very, very into and that’s why I’m comfortable here,” Rubright said. And he’s always ready for the next software program, artistic medium or piece of sheet music that comes his way.

Staff Spotlight is a new, occasional series dedicated to revealing the stories behind the name badges of SLU's staff members. To suggest a staff member to shine a light on, contact Newslink or call 314-977-2519.