It is an aspiring composer’s fantasy ““ one day you’re holding jam sessions in the privacy of your tiny Westwood apartment, waving your finger around like Mozart, and the next, you’re in a recording studio working on your first album. This dream may not yet be a reality for Ethan Braun, a fourth-year ethnomusicology student with an emphasis on performance and composition, but it’s coming closer to fruition as Braun begins work on his first album.
Braun’s proficiency in classical music has matured from the young age of 3, when he first began learning to play the piano. Practicing off and on, it wasn’t until 17 that Braun began seriously focusing on his musical talent.
Now, the experimental pianist and vocalist considers himself a classical musician and jazz enthusiast. Braun finds inspiration in musicians such as Ben Monder (an experimental jazz player), Glenn Gould (a Canadian pianist), composer Gyorgy Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen (a modernist composer) and of course, Johannes Sebastian Bach.
Braun discovered he had a talent for musical composition during his freshman year at California State University, Northridge. At the time, Braun was not even a music major ““ he was undeclared, still searching for his niche. Braun believes his freshman-year roommate, a jazz musician named Chris Hardin, was the one who encouraged him to start composing.
“I would spend three or four hours a day improvising and I ended up getting really into jazz my freshman year, and it’s all starting to come together now,” Braun said. “I’ve realized it just feels right.”
This dedication, along with a fair amount of experimenting with his own sound, has been part of the music-making process leading up to Braun’s first album. Braun will collaborate on the project with friend Wyatt Putsch, a music student at California Institute of the Arts, whose creativeness as an electronic musician has meshed well with Braun’s own improvisational work.
“Basically what we are trying to do is arrange a classical piece and do a series of classical-esque compositions,” Braun said. “We’ve been working for a while on this free-improvisation thing where we take things that I’ll play or (Putsch) programs, and we react to each other.”
In addition to working with Putsch on the album, Braun has been busy performing around Los Angeles for over a year with a jazz fusion band called UmbrellaMan. So far, UmbrellaMan has made appearances at 2nd Street Jazz in Little Tokyo, Starbucks and CalArts. Now that he is attending UCLA, Braun looks forward to performing in campus events such as Kerckhoff Coffeehouse’s open-mic night.
As a classical musician, Braun is in an even more unique position in that he will perform a genre of music obscure to a mainstream audience. But Braun has typically gone against the grain, following his own musical expression rather than conforming to what popular culture dictates. Even as a child, Braun would improvise during classical piano lessons.
“I would play pieces for my teacher, like Piano Sonata or something, and I would change part of the piece because I didn’t like how it sounded, or I would add notes here and there,” Braun said. “My teacher would always yell at me, but I did it anyway.”
It isn’t that Braun is on a mission to become some sort of musical rebel. He is simply moving his music in a direction that he thinks is most personally gratifying.
“I have done a fair amount of the mainstream stuff, but the most satisfaction I get is when I am more experimental. It’s more for me,” Braun said. “That’s sort of my whole goal, the experimentation part of it.”
Acknowledging that listeners may not necessarily be accustomed to the kind of music he has chosen to perform, Braun hopes people will at least respond to his album in their own way. As someone who does not discriminate between musical genres, Braun thinks it is important to explore many different styles of music, each for its own merits.
“I’m not trying to say (music) should be a universally understood thing ““ I feel that music, like any form of art, should be interpretive,” Braun said. “I don’t care if people don’t like it or hate it, as long as people have a reaction; that’s what’s important.”
Although Braun has always looked to music as a valuable form of artistic expression, he wants to make it much more than just a hobby. This album is the first step to achieving that goal.
“The dream is to make my passion my profession,” Braun said. “I don’t want my passion becoming lackluster.”