Jake Bruner

in the genre. From my idea, I spent no more than a week creating my melodic ideas and mixing the track. I was pretty satisfied with the result and decided to publish it to Spotify. Its success took me by surprise; a lot of the streams came from it briefly popping up on a Spotify-curated playlist.

How long have you been writing music, and what instruments do you play?

I have been playing piano for about nine years, and loosely speaking, I have been composing for about as long as I've played piano. My music education journey was unique, as I was self-taught on the piano for around six years after a brief period of hating piano lessons when I was young. I learned through playing my favorite pieces from video games and movies. Even when I was starting out, I would sit down for hours and just play whatever came out. As my ability improved and I taught myself more formal music-theory concepts, my loose compositions and improvisations became more complex and intricate. In the past few years, I've been trying to write down more of my ideas and formalize them, and this song is certainly an example of that. 

What was the last song you heard that you wished you’d written?

The last song that I wished I had written would either be Ravel's "Gaspard de la nuit: I. Ondine" or "Ma Mere l'oye: III. Laideronnette." I like both of these for different reasons. I really cannot get past the delicate evocative melodies within Laideronnette and I wish I had the creative ear to be able to leverage dissonance to my advantage within my compositions. In Ondine, I envy Ravel's ability to compose with phenomenal, almost non-functional harmonies in such a beautiful and emotional way. I cannot understate how much I love the descending right-hand figures leading up to the climax. Something about how they remain somewhat diatonic until bursting into a chaotic and powerful chromatic phrase almost like a shiver descending from your head to your toes really moves me.

Who are three artists you recommend for everyone to listen to?

As I hinted at there, if you haven't been exposed to the works of Ravel, you are missing out. It does not take a classical musical enthusiast to appreciate how colorful his pieces are. Aside from classical music, I recommend Disasterpiece. He is a little known composer for a number of indie video games and his works are absolutely amazing at capturing the ambience and mood of an environment. I believe the genre of video game music is criminally overlooked and under-appreciated. Following that line, Toby Fox, Yasunori Nishiki, and Koji Kondo are more well-known composers of amazing music I highly recommend.