In February 2018, Teun along with eleven other students performed a completely original music-theatre production called Begrepen? Begrepen. (Understood? Understood.). It was a 1.5-hour show about a mental hospital where one of the patients suddenly disappears. Teun was in charge of nearly all the music in the show; he wrote most of the compositions and rehearsed them with his fellow students. Some highlights include: a spokenword (13:35), a dissonant dance by a hallucinating character (56:42), and a new choir arrangement for a song Teun had written when he was thirteen, Possessed (1:05:55).
Teun Buwalda (Utrecht, 2000) has been doing music for as long as he can remember. He shapes his ideas using piano, trombone and his own voice, but his favourite thing to do is writing arrangements and compositions. A sucker for music theory, Teun describes his own work as a middle ground between easy listening and complex jazz. Experimental musical concepts can be fun to explore, but everyone should be able to enjoy the sound.
Teun grew up in Culemborg and started on West African djembe as well as piano. Before middle school, he sung in multiple youth choirs and performed with bands. At O.R.S. Lek en Linge, he assembled a network of anyone he could find who could play an instrument, and often started small projects. Meanwhile he conducted musicals, arranged for his a capella group and dozens of bands, and participated in the composing contest set out each year by the Netherlands Wind Ensemble. During his final year at high school, he followed a preparatory year for Composition at the Amsterdam Conservatory.
Nowadays, Teun is an Artificial Intelligence Student at Utrecht University. However, music never left his side: Teun continues to start musical projects, travel around with world-renowned choir Dekoor Close Harmony and explores the borders between AI and music. In 2022, he followed the Music & Technology in Practice minor at HKU and in 2023, he wrote his bachelor’s thesis about tuning systems.
Teun can always be reached via e-mail: teuncb@gmail.com