A Chat with Performer-Composer Brian KM
Brian KM
As part of our series of world premieres, we are performing Brian KM’s piece ‘Rayn’ with Brian KM as a featured soloist at our second concert of 2024 – Atmospheric Shifts. Ahead of our concert, we spoke to Brian about his music. Transcripts from our conversation were generated with Otter.ai and then amended for accuracy.
Interviewer:
Tell me a little bit about yourself as a composer or an artist.
Brian KM:
My name is Brian KM and I play French horn and make sounds with my computer. Everything I do has been about combining things. I originally started with combining French horn and live electronics, and once I learned how to do that, I started combining horn and live electronics with photography. Then I added spoken word. Then I added more and more and more and more, and this is just the latest adding that I've done. My first professional gig, I was the principal horn for the United States Pacific Fleet Band in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. And before that I did a bunch of French horn playing. That's where I've come from.
Interviewer:
Tell me a little bit about your inspiration for Rayn.
Brian KM:
So the original brief is atmosphere. Yeah, and I think there's a stereotype about atmospheric music where it's just very ethereal and very spacious and I started going in that direction. I took a lot of frozen reverb and I took the horn, which is a calling instrument, and really tried to create some expansiveness. But as I added the orchestra, I started writing these repetitive Sturm und Drang type lines and I was thinking about Sturm und Drang, which translates directly to in part storm, which is atmospheric. And as that kept going and going and going, I ended up with not so much an ethereal, spatial tune, but more of a pretty intense banger. And as I worked with that, it just formed and formed and formed until it was pretty clear that I had sort of a horn with its reverb and its spatial with a more turbulent orchestra. And adding them together and finding ways that they interact ended up being the piece, which is why the piece is called Rayn. It's a combination of rain and the sun ray.
Interviewer:
Was there anything different from your typical process when writing specifically for the VYSO?
Brian KM:
Yes! So I write mostly for solo horn and live electronics, so it's a very personal process. It's just me. I don't have to communicate with anyone, but the future me and everything happens in the computer, and then I write a horn part for it. When I have to communicate with 15 or so players, you have to end up being much more clear about your intention after you've already done it. A lot of times when I'm writing for myself, I'll just drum something in or play something in, and then that's what I've got, and I don't really have to understand the notation, just how I'm going to reflect with it. In the live performance, working for the orchestra created a bunch of new challenges that in addition to the idea that I can make any sound I want with the computer, and now I have this set of sounds in front of me that's pretty well defined and I could make them myself, but now they're here. So how do you showcase the real versus the virtual in what I'm doing? And that created a lot of difference from how I normally work.
Interviewer:
Most of the composers that we work with, they write us a piece and then we just go ahead and perform it. But this is kind of different. You're going ahead and you're performing it along with us. You're kind of collaborating even more with us. Can you just talk a little bit about that process?
Brian KM:
I've always been a player. I was playing for the Navy band and I did orchestra stuff before that, and I did band stuff before that. When I was premiering pieces, I've always been a player first. And my compositional process, is very player based. I'm always improvising at home, and the music that you hear is generally always stuff I've improvised and then said, I like that, and then write it down. What's weird is that when I'm improvising at home in my pajamas with my feet up, it's a much more relaxed process. I'm very calm, there's no anxiety, and I'm a much better horn player in that environment! So then I end up writing things that are really quite difficult to do when you mean to do them. So I always have to sort of show up when I show up and do the rehearsal.
I have to have the mindset of, “okay, now I'm a player, doing something really difficult,” and then try to let the composer gently inform that as opposed to the other way around, which is a difficult balancing act that I'm not sure I've a hundred percent figure it out yet. But the relationship, it's very difficult to separate them. But I have to try to make things work at certain points. So today was a really great example of, I really, really, I showed up as a good horn player in rehearsal today, but I didn't have very much patience to care about what was written in the parts or something like that. I guess I left the composer at home. So it's a difficult working relationship with myself in that case.
Interviewer:
So this concert is all about how music connects with atmosphere. Some of the pieces, it's quite literal, others it's more metaphorical. How do you see your piece fitting into that?
Brian KM:
So I think it's in the relationships. The piece turned into a character piece with the sort of a sun bursting through a storm cloud. And the vision that I have in my head is more where you have this orchestra that is forming this turbulence and then a horn that's trying to burst through that all kind of melded together with these more ethereal sounds. So in a sense, I've taken it in terms of a character study, not so much in terms of music iteration in that way. There's some, in the beginning of the piece, there's some of more stereotypical texture type music. And then I said earlier the Sturm und Drang is a more stormy type sound, but I think the way I was thinking about it was characters mostly.
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Join VYSO at Atmospheric Shifts, featuring Brian KM’s piece - ‘Rayn’.