A Community of Musicians

Reflections on my Time in Grad School

by Richard Bruner

How to summarize the last two years? I don’t really know how to do them justice. It’s certainly been a wonderful period of learning and reflection, and a chance to reconnect with myself. But more importantly, I think, it’s been a time to (re)establish community. I’ve been working on my Master of Music in Composition degree at California State University, Northridge, and I finally reached the finish line - I graduated with distinction, and got to do that walk across the stage again 🙂 The last time I did that, I was finishing my undergrad at Berklee College of Music in 2012, 13 years ago.

The world was in a different place at that point. Barack Obama was campaigning for his second term, the technology world seemed full of hope and promise (at least to me). I came home for a week, then immediately dashed off to Los Angeles for a summer internship program and to start a new life for myself. This time the world has turned, things feel darker to me. I’m not planning on moving across the country in a week. But I want to be a light in this world, and to leave it better than I found it. 

Now that that metaphor has fallen to cliché 😉, I’ll talk about my experience over the past two years. I have some news at the end of this write-up about my actual next plans, but first, I did want to talk about what I got from my master’s degree program.

I have some other reflection posts for last school year (“Watchwords”, May 2024), and this past fall semester (“2024 in Review”, December 2024), so I won’t rehash all the classes I did throughout the program. In the Watchwords post, I focused on three “watchwords” I had been thinking about last year. As I reflect on my overall program, the watchword that strikes me this time is “Community”. 

I’ve been used to being somewhat on my own, even as I exist in a world of other musicians and play in large ensembles. I’ve worked at very small companies, and mostly from home by myself (particularly since shortly before COVID). What I found I had previously been missing before the past two years was something a little more intimate, but more connected. I’ve enjoyed somewhat less structured “hangout” time with people this time around, a little closer to hanging out with friends back when I was growing up and not everything needed a purpose and a project to work towards. As musicians, we often tend to start naturally talking about music when we gather in groups (especially if you are around me 🙂), but some of the chats we’ve had after-hours have been as valuable to me socially and musically as some of the classes have been (and I’ve spent a lot of time in the parking lot not quite saying bye to my friends, for sometimes multiple hours at a time!)

Even in the CSUN Symphony Orchestra, we had a fair amount of “sectional” time, where just the viola section (in my case) gets together during rehearsal and works on the tricky spots in our specific part, and also gets a chance to get to know each other as a section and a group of friends. As a violist in the orchestra, and as a composition major (a very small group at CSUN), those were my two closest groups of friends in the program the past two years.

Another aspect of my program that wasn’t related to classes was tutoring, my campus job. I was hired both years as a music theory and musicianship tutor for the undergrads at CSUN, and was given free-rein to run tutoring how I saw fit, so I mostly ran it as weekly private lessons for students who asked for help. Sometimes the students would come with a friend and we’d have two students working with me in a session, but in all cases I was able to get to know them pretty well. I’ve told some people over the course of this program that I was at an interesting age as I did it. I’m in my mid 30s now (having just turned 35 a week ago as I post this), and I thought that was going to make me feel old as a student, coming back to school after 10 years of working in the industry, but mostly I haven’t felt old. It turns out that at least at CSUN, most of the students whose ages I learned were in their mid-20s to early 30s, and I only worked with a handful of students who were out of high school when they started here (either as a tutor or as a classmate). But I was about 14 years older than the youngest undergrads, an age that felt at least to me right at the point where I could be either mentor-friend or peer-friend depending on the context I met someone in. If I’d come out of undergrad, tutoring would have felt a bit more like peer-mentoring, and if I was a few years older it would definitely have warped any sense of being peers of a sort with the younger students.

Since my career goal with my master’s degree is that I want to teach theory- and composition-type classes going forward, this was the perfect campus job for me to hold while I was in the program, and I put a lot of effort into it. This year in particular I had a lot of students, working somewhere around 13-15 hours per week at the peak of both of the last two semesters. I tutored 28 students at some point in the last 4 semesters, 21 of them roughly weekly once we started. Two of my students worked with me all four semesters. I tutored 22 classes at least once, ranging from all 6 musicianship classes, Harmony 1 and 2 (those were the classes they gave my name in), and then the bulk of the other theory classes offered in the past two years - 2 orchestration classes (and Advanced Media Orchestration), Music Analysis (form class), Counterpoint, Beginning Composition, etc. The full list is in my graduation post in the stats.

But my program overall is a composition program, and I didn’t skimp on that either! The program has several components, centering around 4 semesters of private lessons in composition, which I took with Dr. Patrick O’Malley. I wrote at least two and sometimes three pieces per semester, culminating in my capstone project this semester of a recital of my pieces with about 40 minutes of music. In my case that consisted of 8 pieces averaging about 5 minutes each. I then also had to write a short “thesis” paper analyzing one of my recital pieces in at least 5 pages (mine came out to 12 pages once I added in the research portion). I’ll talk more about the composition / recital project below, but there were a few other components to this program as well.

We had a variety of classes we had to take in addition to lessons. I’ve described most of them in prior reflections as mentioned above, so I won’t go into detail about them here. This semester, I took the last of the required classes, Seminar in Advanced Instrumental Conducting with Tomasz Golka, which was great! We had several weeks of lecture classes with limited practicing of conducting as a class, and then the second half of the semester we conducted a string quintet / piano ensemble of fellow CSUN students in a variety of excerpts from Beethoven and Brahms Symphonies, Copland’s Appalachian Spring, and we ended with a film score conducting session (“sight-conducting” a score we hadn’t seen before to a click track). We also watched videos every week of different professional conductors to explore different conducting styles.

Our topic for Composition Seminar this semester was famous French composers of the 20th century. We also presented student pieces for feedback like usual.

I also performed with the CSUN Symphony Orchestra again, as I have every semester I’ve been at CSUN. As a graduate composition student, I didn’t have to audition on an instrument and didn’t have to do any playing for this program. But anyone who knows me knows that I absolutely love playing in orchestra, and so I reached out to the conductor for the CSUN Symphony and auditioned into it as a violist, and I’ve performed with them for all of the last 4 semesters (9 concerts). We’ve had a strong section, and I’m happy to call them my friends! Our last concert a few weeks ago was certainly the concert to go out on if I had to go out on a concert - we performed Mahler’s first symphony, a piece I’ve been looking forward to playing for several years now, and while it wasn’t perfect, it was certainly epic! It’s a bittersweet moment for me though, as I’ve spent a lot of time with those people over the past couple of years and thoroughly enjoyed all of it, and now I won’t be playing with that specific section again. I know who I will turn to if we need more viola players in my other groups though!

I also got to play a few other pieces from my “bucket list” of pieces to play someday over the past four semesters, including Appalachian Spring by Copland (much harder than I thought it was going to be!), the full suite of The Planets by Holst, and on a smaller scale, both suites from Peer Gynt by Grieg. We also did Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture, and a few pieces I’d played previously but liked playing again, like Elgar’s Enigma Variations (complete), Glinka’s Overture to Ruslan and Ludmilla, and a few others.

So that’s an overview of my program over the past two years. I wanted to dive a bit deeper into the recital I put on this semester, and then I will return to the idea of community again to close out this reflection.

As I mentioned above, the capstone project for this degree, the actual “thesis project” itself, is a performance recital of my compositions held in the recital hall at the school this semester. The thesis paper just goes along with the recital, but that’s the major project for my degree. The department has a “recital handbook” that we were given that explained how this process works. One line stood out to me near the beginning of the handbook: “It is the hope of the department that students understand that the production of their recital is an important learning opportunity. Like everything in life, the more a student puts into the process the more they will learn”. I took that line to heart and really put everything I could into the process. It would have been easy enough to decide that this was “just” a student recital and the main point of it was to have a few of my pieces performed and leave it there, but I don’t like doing things by halves, so I was aiming for as close as I could get to “professional” quality, not “merely” student quality, especially as this is effectively a professional degree. You can judge for yourself how close I got (the videos are linked on my facebook profile, and on my website under the “Media-Video” page), but I think we pulled it off pretty well!

For my recital project at CSUN, I decided to use a medium chamber ensemble setting, not as big as an orchestra but not just a quartet either. I was looking for what speaks to me in music, and what I might bring that your average classical art music composer might not. I’ve never been a huge fan of much of the less tonal or outright atonal music that people have been writing for most of the last 100 years in the art music world. Some of it is interesting and fun to play (and I like more of it than many of my performer friends, since I am a composer and can appreciate the theory behind those pieces more than some of them can), but a lot of it doesn’t seem all that interesting sonically. I think this is important in music, since music is sound-based, and shouldn’t just be theory-driven. Since I didn’t want to write that kind of music, I needed something else that got away from purely copying existing music from more than 100 years ago. I decided that my multi-genre background would be my entry-point, playing classical music, Celtic fiddle music, and even other genres over the years, though those two are my primary genres. I wrote a one-page proposal for a quasi-theatrical lightly plotted show where I would play the main character, someone who was caught between two feuding tribes of musicians (the “art music” tribe and the “fiddle” tribe), not quite fitting in with either group despite trying desperately to be accepted by both. Not quite an autobiographical story, but not exactly not! I codenamed the show “Between Worlds”, and started working with that theme in mind. As I wrote my pieces over the past three semesters, the plot elements went away, but the multi-genre aspect of the show did not, and by the end, “Between Worlds” still seemed like a good title for the body of work I had created, so that became the actual name of the show.

Once I knew the theme I was aiming for, I was able to plan who I’d want to play on the show so I could write with them in mind. I settled on an eclectic ensemble of 7 players based on the small pieces I wanted. I knew I wanted a string quartet - 2 violins, 1 viola, 1 cello; I wanted a viola trio, so 3 violas (this was down from a “viola choir” piece for 12 violas, which I wrote in Spring 2024 - not practical for my recital!); and a solo viola+piano piece, so that set the group: 2 violins, 3 violas, 1 cello and piano. Not the most conventional chamber ensemble! I wrote those pieces, and then I figured it would be fun to write a couple for the full group since I had such an unusual collection. Two of the pieces were written as lead sheet arrangements, so I just wrote out the tunes and chords and we put it together like a fiddle set in the Scottish Fiddlers at the rehearsals, and those involved the full group as well. That left me one piece shy of my eight pieces, so I decided to write a piece for my hammered dulcimer so I could play that in public again, and chose a quartet of the viola trio + cello (but then I played dulcimer, so it became dulcimer, 2 violas, and cello). This also gave me a chance to act on another of my traits, which is that I’m a multi-instrumentalist. I played viola on most of the pieces since that has become my primary instrument over the past several years in LA, but I also played fiddle on one, tin whistle on another, and then dulcimer on that last one.

My dad had a comment that stood out to me after the recital. Both of my parents used to work in TV engineering when I was growing up in the Chicago area. My dad mentioned that if they had been trying to do something like this project in a TV production, it would have taken at least 30 people to do what I more or less did with one person. I certainly wore a lot of hats for this project, but the interesting thing to me is that I was enjoying the fact that this was such a group effort compared to many of my music projects over the years, and that leads me back to the idea of “community”.

I’ve been an ensemble musician for pretty much my entire life. I started violin lessons as a three year old, and one of the reasons I made it through the first few years without quitting was because even with the solo violin lessons I had, my teacher would play piano with me when I learned a piece well enough to do that. The magic moment for me as a kid was my first orchestra rehearsal in the beginner string “Reading Orchestra” at the Music Institute of Chicago when I was eight years old, and ever since that point I’ve never seriously thought about quitting (nor have I missed playing in orchestra in any single calendar year since then - 28 years in a row at this point!). I also started learning fiddle that year, and I did some ensemble fiddling at Berklee with the Berklee Contemporary Fiddle Club and for the past several years in LA I’ve been a rising member of the Scottish Fiddlers of Los Angeles.

One of the things I like most in music is playing music with other people, and several years ago, in some of the darker times for me of the first Trump administration, I thought of the line “If more of us made music together, the world would be a better place”. When I’m playing music with others, any other differences between us seem to drop away and only the music matters. It’s difficult to hate someone you play music with, and I really do believe that it would make a difference if more people played music with others. It wouldn’t solve all the world’s problems, but it might make this one better. That’s one reason I’m a big advocate of community music, and why I participate in it so much. It’s nice to play for an audience, and people have told me about the difference that hearing us play makes in their lives, but I do it as much for the social connection with other players (and composers) as for any other reason.

As a composer, a lot of my acoustic music is written to be performed by me and my friends. But I also have an active electronic music side, both with acoustic music that is “performed” in mock-up or even the final recording by my computer software (by me on a keyboard or other midi controller in a sequencer program like Logic or Cubase, or by my notation playback from Dorico or Sibelius and simply exported from the score), and with synthesizer patches that aren’t intended to sound particularly acoustic. I have been proud of the fact that I can make fully-produced tracks of music on my own, to such a degree that I listed that on my website “Music” page as a characteristic of all the tracks on there (and I think it’s still true that none of the tracks on that page had anyone else involved in actually creating the tracks - some of them had feedback from others, but I made all of the actual audio).

In terms of my recital, I did have several roles: I conceived the project, wrote the pieces (and prepared scores and parts), hired the other players (all of whom are good friends of mine over the past few years), ran (and played in) the rehearsals, applied for and won a grant to cover a portion of my expenses, made the marketing posters, emails, and posts, and then performed several instruments in the show itself. It’s true that that’s a lot of jobs for one person, but I also had a whole team working with me on this project.

The most obvious other members of my team were the other players. I can multi-track a recording, but not a concert (at least not of this nature), so I clearly needed others for the other instruments. I also got to pick people who play instruments I don’t, like cello, or who play them better than I do, like piano (and the other violinists and violists are at least as good as me, if not better). I’m lucky that I know many people who are at that level, and who are good enough friends to do this with me (yes, I paid them, but it’s still nice that they agreed in the first place). I’m even luckier that everyone I asked was able to say yes, because on top of being friends with them, I wrote for these players specifically because all of them are strong classical players but also do at least a little bit of music that already lies outside the world of classical music, so I didn’t have to train them in other styles for the most part. Half of the group came from the Scottish Fiddlers, convenient since half of my pieces featured elements of Scottish fiddle music, and the others at least do some other styles. It would have been difficult to find suitable people to cover those parts if they hadn’t been able to do it.

In addition to my players, I had the guidance of Dr. O’Malley in particular, and Dr. Liviu Marinescu in the comp class, feedback from other students in the comp class, my engineer who recorded my recital and produced the audio/videos for the final release on my youtube channel and website (himself a graduate of the MM Composition program at CSUN just before I started here), the stage crew and Shawn Kolb who manages the facilities at the CSUN Music department, and even the technician who maintains the pianos for the recital hall to ensure that we had a good instrument for that. If I thought about it longer I could probably list more people tangentially involved in this, but it wasn’t a solo effort in the way that the tracks on my website were, and that’s one of the aspects I most enjoyed about this process.

Being at CSUN has been an eye-opening experience in reminding me what it means to be part of a community of musicians, and why we shouldn’t try to go alone in this world even if we can technologically do that now. I’m hoping to take that idea and run with it going forward, staying active in the community that I have around me now, and continuing to get out of my personal cave that is my studio, not just for my orchestras but for other aspects of music as well. 

I look forward to teaching music to anyone who wants to study with me, and hopefully at some point in a college environment again. I’m planning on applying for doctoral programs later this year, to start in Fall 2026. In the meantime, I’m opening a private teaching studio, including composition lessons, tutoring for theory / musicianship, and music production (software training for DAWs, notation software, and synthesizers / sample libraries). If you would like lessons, or know anyone who would, please send them my way! I can do zoom lessons anywhere or in person in the San Fernando Valley.

I’m also interested in giving workshops in the community in various aspects of these areas of music. There’s talk about having me come back to CSUN next fall to give at least a workshop in Dorico notation software as a guest lecturer. Several people in the past few weeks have asked me for lessons in ForScore, the iPad/Mac sheet music app, so I might give a workshop or two on that. I know several people have gotten iPads for orchestra at least in part because of me!

This is not the end of my journey, just the next step into a wider world with more possibilities than I’ve ever had before, and I look forward to continuing down this road in a lifetime of music-making with all of you going forward!