Pedro Samuel Rodríguez, who signs his music P. S. Rodz, is a Dominican composer and singer whose work consists almost entirely of setting poems to music. He is also an essayist, and the two trades turn out to be the same habit applied twice.

Poems with tunes

The method is straightforward and the results are not. He takes a published poem, writes music for it, sings it, and puts it out. What makes it unusual is the range of what he picks up.

A large part of it is Dominican verse — poems by Joaquín Balaguer, among them A un Niño Inválido and La Belleza de las Mujeres Feas, and work by Virgilio Díaz Ordóñez, Elisa Reyes and Carmen Sánchez. Then it leaves the country entirely: he has set a poem by the Austrian writer Angélica Becker, and a Shakespeare sonnet, which he issued with Spanish subtitles.

Setting verse that was never written to be sung is an old European practice and a nearly extinct Caribbean one. Doing it to a Shakespeare sonnet and to a Cibao poet in the same catalogue is a particular kind of stubbornness.

Romanticismo

One of these settings became a hit, and it is the reason his name appears in commercial rights records at all. Fernando Villalona recorded Romanticismo in 1996 for the album Soy Un Hombre Feliz, and the credits list two composers: Joaquín Balaguer for the words and Rodríguez for the music.

He also sang two of the settings himself — Melancolía Otoñal and Alma de Mujer — and those came out of named collections rather than off a lyric sheet, which is the distinction his whole catalogue rests on.

The other trade

He writes prose as well, and it is the kind that explains the music. He submitted to the Dominican language academy a study arguing for a possible Portuguese origin of the Cibao i — the vowel that makes northern Dominican speech instantly identifiable — and he kept his own journals online for years, on language, culture and history.

Someone who will spend that long chasing the ancestry of a single vowel is recognisably the same person who will spend an afternoon fitting a melody to a sonnet. His music is a philologist’s hobby carried out at professional standard, and the archive of it is his own channel, where the songs sit beside historical documentaries he assembled himself.

Very little else about him is on the record. There is no published birth date, no province, no label and no press campaign. What exists is the work and the credits, which in his case is a reasonable summary of the man.