Sound and silence are allies in the minimal yet intricate music of Lou Bunk. In both his acoustic and electro-acoustic music, timbre unfolds alongside harmony, while extended instrumental techniques, microtones, and a rejection of the virtuosic paints an alien and sometimes barren soundscape.
A native of the Connecticut suburbs, Lou’s earliest compositions were noise improvisations, and four-track collage experiments. Educated at Washington University (MA Composition) and Brandeis University (completing a PhD in Composition and Theory), he has studied music composition with such diverse composers as Eric Chasalow, Michael Tenzer, David Rakowski, Ladislav Kubik, Marty Boykan, and Yehudi Wyner. At Brandeis, he was Assistant Director of the Brandeis Electro-Acoustic Music Studio (2001-2003), and Director of the New Music Brandeis concert series for the 2002-2003 concert season. This year Lou is teaching electronic music and running the studio at Franklin Pierce College in New Hampshire. He is also teaching ear training at Boston Conservatory.
Lou’s music is the recipient of several awards (SEAMUS Student Commission Competition, finalist, Irving Fine Fellowship for Music Composition, ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composers Award, finalist), and has been performed in dozens of venues, in the US and Europe; CCRMA, SEAMUS, June in Buffalo, The Computer Arts Festival in Padova, Italy, an American Composers series in Trossingen, Germany, and the Zeitgeist Gallery. This fall, “Being and Becoming”, for bass clarinet, will be performed in New York and Boston. Some current projects include a new piece for solo piano, Sound design for the American Repertory Theatre, a dissertation on the music of Morton Feldman, teaching electronic music, and a rock and roll band called Shana's Mango!.
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Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Let's get on with it.
Dear blog, it has been several weeks since I have written anything in you, but it seems that there is not too much to report. I guess I will start preparing for the classes I am teaching in the fall, and once again put off working on my dissertation. Damn dissertation! It is not that I am not interested in the material I will be writing about, that is Feldmans’ really really really long music, but I just do not consider myself a writer. Maybe that’s why I have a blog? Maybe that is why I am a composer, and not a theorist. Brandeis makes us write these 50 page papers as part of our dissertation. Some folks write hundreds of pages. Man, like the world needs more composer theorists! Geeze… When I signed up for the program, I knew it was a composition/theory program, and that there was a writing requirement for the dissertation, but now that it is here, I wish I could just forget about the paper and get on with being a composer. Is this the lifestyle of a composer? Academic; thinking about just the right words to describe a better left undescribed musical moment. Where are the dancing girls and the all night adventures where you end up in the morning sleeping in some rock stars' hotel tub.
posted by Lou Bunk
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