A CONVERSATION WITH KENJI BUNCH

I recently sat down with my composing assistant-in-residence and office manager, a three year old chocolate Labrador/ bull terrier mix named Coffee. Although normally quite stoic and reserved, on the occasion of this interview she found herself feeling very inquisitive and downright verbose. What follows is an excerpted transcript from our musings on the creative process, concert music, and our next meal:

Coffee: At the risk of sounding banal, I think I should begin with the rather obvious yet supremely relevant question: what does your music sound like?

KB: You know, no matter how many times I’m asked this, I never feel like I give an adequate answer. Sometimes I think maybe I’m not the best person to answer this question, because I can’t possibly have the same aural experience that someone who didn’t write my music has, and I don’t necessarily want to impose my version on anyone else because it could be incredibly distracting. Having said that, I always try to keep in mind the experience of listening to a work for the first time- I think that’s really important.

I can tell you what I hope my music sounds like. From work to work, a listener may hear very different musical dialects, but I write all of it with the goal of invigorating the listener- connecting with drama, humor, exuberance, sadness, or emotional expression of some other sort. For whatever reason, entertainment has become something of a dirty word among the classical crowd. Even so, I have a great deal of respect for it as a goal, and I would be honored to know I entertained a listener with my music. I think it’s a generous act to strive for.

I draw upon the music circling in my head; echoes of the music from the classical canon that I grew up listening to and playing, as well as with the contemporary sounds of my surroundings- meaning the rich fabric of popular music we have access to these days. Therefore the musical languages I use are generally in the realm of the accessible and traditionally tonal, although I like to keep my options open and veer off the straight and narrow occasionally. That’s why I enjoy writing in the concert music world. It gives me the freedom to be as unpredictable as I want to be.

Lastly, sometimes I like to say that I don’t know what my music sounds like because I haven’t written most of it yet. As composers go these days I seem to be on the more prolific end, but I hopefully have a lot of life ahead of me, and I look forward to seeing where my musical journey will take me. One thing I’m sure of is that I’m not interested in ever writing the same work twice, and I get squirmy when I feel like I’m being pigeon-holed as someone who has only one particular “sound.”

Coffee: You touched on an issue I want to discuss further. I’ve often wondered about the tremendous disparity in style among your compositions. How do you reconcile the notion of developing a distinct creative voice with works that are stylistically all over the map in this way?

KB: Funny you should ask. You know, I’ve often wondered exactly what people mean when they talk about “finding one’s voice” as a composer. It’s important to make a distinction between style and artistic voice. I believe it’s entirely possible to write two works in musical languages that are worlds apart but have a common aesthetic motivation. After all, the restrictions of any one musical genre are really just a certain vocabulary with which we can express universal concepts and emotions.

Coffee: That may be the case, but you seem particularly drawn to projects that allow you to explore different styles. Would that be fair to say?

KB: Well, I suppose so. Nabokov wrote beautifully in Russian, French, and English. He didn’t necessarily need to do this; I think rather that he enjoyed the different subtleties of each language and wanted to find his “voice” in each of them. Another example is the great film director Ang Lee. Mr. Lee’s films include a western, a martial arts film, a classic comic superhero story, and a Jane Austen period piece. These are all very different but equally rigorous genres in terms of stylizing. Why would he seek out this type of eclecticism? Let me try to answer that by offering another comparison. When you travel to a foreign country, you may like to do some research in advance, but you still become a fish out of water when you go there. You’ll learn plenty about the culture and tradition of the place you’re visiting, but most significantly you’ll learn about yourself. You discover the constants of who you are in the variable contexts of where you are. It’s a classic wilderness experience- you lose yourself in order to find yourself. This paradox really gets me going creatively- I want to lose myself in the restrictions of a certain musical vocabulary in order to find my voice in that context.

Coffee: Who are your heroes, musical and otherwise?

KB: Okay, how about music first? My first experience of obsessively listening to and seeking out one composer’s works, and still never hearing enough of them was with the music of Dmitri Shoshtakovich. Something about the expressiveness of his very clear, direct style really resonated with me more than any other music, and I couldn’t get it out of my head all throughout high school. Except for when I would listen to Metallica, although they are in a lot of ways kind of similar. I still feel close to his work, although I may go months without hearing any of it these days. I would say that I’ve never heard anything by Ravel that I didn’t love (yes, that includes Bolero). That’s something I don’t think I could say that about any other composer. Since my Shostakovich years, I’ve gone through other phases of torridly listening through a composer’s catalogue- among these are Kurt Weill, Jerome Kern, Morton Gould, Stravinsky, Bernstein, Bartok, Sondheim, Prokofiev- the usual suspects.

In no particular order, I would include the following composers as inspirations in more recent years: John Adams, György Ligeti, Johnny Cash, Morton Feldman, Stevie Wonder, Steve Reich, Osvaldo Golijov, George Clinton, Michael Daugherty, and Arvo Pärt.

As for heroes outside of music, other than Brett Favre and John Elway, I think of my family and my teachers. Above all the countless things my parents did for me, the most valuable was that they raised me to have an open mind and to think for myself. I can’t think of anything I’m more grateful to anyone for. My brother was and continues to be a chief resource for the popular music I know. Basically anything I listened to growing up that wasn’t tangentially related to Shostakovich was my brother’s influence., and I always trust his musical instincts. My first viola teacher, Pierre d’Archambeau, taught me once and for all how to practice, and his approach has influenced everything I’ve worked at since. My next teacher, Toby Appel, taught me how to be a thinking musician, and continues to be a kind of “artistic dad” and dear friend. I wouldn’t be a composer if it wasn’t for my theory teacher Eric Ewazen, who took the time to encourage me to write. My composing teachers Stanley Wolfe and especially Robert Beaser kept me from taking the easy way out in my work, and their words still echo in my head when I work.

Coffee: You seem to go out of your way to appreciate different kinds of music. There must be some kind of music you just don’t care for, right?

KB: Well, I like to live by the wise words of Louis Armstrong, who said essentially that the only two types of music are good and not so good. Maybe it’s naïeve, but I like to think that every genre has a real artist who cares for and respects the craft while propelling the style forward with creativity. Granted, there are some trends in pop music that seem to have hit some lean years. There’s a lot of dreadful modern R&B that isn’t worthy of that classification; much of the current rock scene has become an interchangeable collection of soulless and corporate whiners; country music is too often jingoistic, sanctimonious garbage, and new age tends to equate a kind of musical particle board. However, I still believe in the purity, the integrity, and the beauty of working within the subtleties of a genre’s restrictions, and while they may be few and far between, there are artists with integrity and genius everywhere.

Coffee: As they say in the corporate world, where do you see yourself in ten years?

KB: I’d love to try working in film, if the right project came along and I was lucky enough to have a shot at it. Same goes for a musical or an opera- that’s the music I grew up on and had dreams about writing as a kid. I plan on continuing to work in different musical neighborhoods- the concert world, bluegrass, pop, etc. Lately, I’ve been enjoying performing my own music- I’d like to develop that further and I hope to eventually put together a concerto that I can play with orchestras. Likewise, I hope I’m still active in teaching. What I love the most about this line of work is that I continually learn on the job and it’s never something I would need to retire from. I love what I do and I hope I have the good fortune to keep doing it.

Can I ask you a question?

Coffee: Sure. What is it?

KB: Do you realize you’re drooling on my music?

Coffee: Oh, sorry about that. What’s for dinner?

KB: Your favorite... dog food!

Coffee: Woof!