Iwan Gunawan: Music as intercultural creativity
Watch my interview with Iwan Gunawan. He is a Bandung composer, musician, educator, and music director. He is among West Java’s leading composers and began playing Sundanese gamelan at the age of six. He has forged an unusual musical career that places value on both his own West Javanese roots as well as on composing and performing Western music at a professional level. In his compositions he uses contemporary structures, international instrumentation, and sometimes live electronics, engaging with a wide range of music made today from vernacular to hybrid experimental forms. His music has been performed in Australia, Austria, Belgium, China, Cyprus, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Singapore, Switzerland, the UK, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.
Questions:
1. What is your musical idea and signature?
2. What are your criteria for a good musical composition?
3. What is your process of composing?
4. What do you as a composer fear the most?
5. Why do you still compose?
6. Looking 10 years back, what are the changes in your musical idea? And how would you explain them?
7. How the development of technology has influenced your music?
8. What are the biggest changes in the new music landscape in the last 25 years?
9. How audience of new music has changed in the last 25 years?
10. What are the main future trends (or trajectories) in new music now? Who shapes them?
11. What is the role of new music in SouthEast Asia societies