A lot of pianists attended Teun's high school - so many that they inspired him to write a composition just for all these people who played the piano, and perform it at the annual Culture Festival. The goal for this piece was to be easy to play, yet catchy with a bit of jazz thrown in. Thirteen instrumentalists joined the "keyboard orchestra", which included brass and strings sections, a rhythm section, soloists, and Teun as the conductor.
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