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Liner Notes
Spanning fifteen years, from 2008 to 2023, the complete string quartets of Kenji Bunch reveal not a composer searching for an identity, but one continually discovering new ways of expressing it.
"It wasn't until this project that I ever really thought about whether there was any sort of continuous thread between the works," he reflects.
Album Artwork by Alex Sopp
For the Telegraph Quartet, however, that thread became immediately apparent. "I think the connective tissue is actually Bunch’s curiosity," violinist Joseph Maile observes. "All five of the quartets are so different from each other in so many ways—the emotional range is breathtaking—but underneath all of that is his fun, playful, exploratory style."
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Curiosity may indeed be the defining characteristic of Kenji Bunch's music. His compositions rarely remain within a single musical language for long. Instead, they move freely between traditions, drawing together classical forms, American vernacular music, jazz, folk traditions, Baroque dance, pop, and contemporary techniques with remarkable ease. Rather than treating these influences as opposites, Bunch allows them to coexist naturally.
Kenji says, "I've always admired writers or film directors who make a period piece, then a horror movie, then a superhero movie," he says with a smile. "When we travel somewhere new, we think we're discovering that place—but really we're discovering ourselves. I've always enjoyed trying new sound environments and finding my own vocabulary within them."
That openness—to different styles, different histories, different ways of listening—gives each quartet its own distinctive identity.
Kenji Bunch
Kenji Bunch writes music that looks for commonalities between musical styles, for understandings that transcend cultural or generational barriers, and for empathic connections with his listeners. Drawing on a love of vernacular musical traditions, interests in history, storytelling, and the natural world, combined with techniques from his classical training, Bunch creates music with a unique personal vocabulary that appeals to a diverse array of performers, audiences, and critics. With his work frequently performed worldwide and recorded numerous times, Bunch considers his current mission the search for and celebration of shared emotional truths about the human experience from the profound to the absurd, to help facilitate connection and healing through entertainment, vulnerability, humor, and joy.
As the first student to receive dual graduate degrees in viola and composition from The Juilliard School, Bunch has been widely recognized for his groundbreaking works for viola, and remains active as an innovative performer, comfortable in traditional, experimental, and improvisational musical contexts. He has worked with actors (George Takei, Sigorney Weaver), choreographers (Dave Parsons, Toni Pimble), musicians across different genres (Ornette Coleman, Lenny Kravitz, Stephen Sondheim) and has appeared in thousands of performances from the world’s greatest stages to Broadway pits, NBA arenas, dive bars, raves, preschools, retirement homes, and state prisons. After over two decades in New York City, Mr. Bunch returned to his hometown of Portland, Oregon, where he currently serves as Artistic Director of the new music group Fear No Music and is deeply committed to music education through a variety of teaching positions at the youth and college level.
He lives in a Pacific Northwest forest with his wife, pianist Monica Ohuchi, their two children, and two dogs.
The Telegraph Quartet
The Telegraph Quartet (Eric Chin and Joseph Maile, violins; Pei-Ling Lin, viola; Jeremiah Shaw, cello) formed in 2013 with an equal passion for standard and contemporary chamber music repertoire. Described by the San Francisco Chronicle as "an incredibly valuable addition to the cultural landscape” and “powerfully adept… with a combination of brilliance and subtlety,” the Quartet is a previous recipient of the prestigious Walter W. Naumburg Chamber Music Award and the Grand Prize at the Fischoff Chamber Music Competition, and is currently the Quartet-in-Residence at the University of Michigan. The Telegraph was the Quartet-in-Residence at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music from 2017-2024.
The Telegraph has performed in concert halls, music festivals, and academic institutions worldwide, including New York City’s Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and Town Hall, San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre, Philharmonie de Paris, and at festivals including the Chautauqua Institute, Music in the Vineyards in Napa Valley, and Interlochen Arts Festival, Kneisel Hall Chamber Music Festival, and the Emilia Romagna Festival. Notable collaborations include projects with pianists Leon Fleisher and Simone Dinnerstein, vocalist Theo Bleckmann, composer and pianist Stephen Prutsman, cellists Norman Fischer and Bonnie Hampton, violinist Ian Swensen, and the St. Lawrence Quartet and Henschel Quartett. A fervent champion of 20th- and 21st-century repertoire, the Telegraph Quartet has commissioned and premiered works by John Harbison, Osvaldo Golijov, Richard Festinger, and Robert Sirota.
The Telegraph Quartet is releasing a three-album series of recordings titled 20th Century Vantage Points exploring string quartets of the 20th century – an era of music that the group feels especially called to perform.
Written in the aftermath of the pandemic, Songs for a Shared Space reflects Bunch's thoughts about multigenerational households, families sharing music across generations, and the simple but increasingly rare act of listening generously to one another.
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ALBUM INFORMATION
Album Title: Songs for a Shared Space
Composer: Kenji Bunch
Artists: Telegraph Quartet
Eric Chin and Joseph Maile, violins, Pei-Ling Lin, viola, Jeremiah Shaw, cello
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Disc 1
1. String Quartet No.1 (2008)
I. Almost in Flight 09:15
II. Almost in Time 03:49
III. Almost Still 07:40
IV. In Motion (Almost Perpetual) 03:31
Quartet No. 1 (2008)
After roughly fifteen years of composing and at least twenty performing inside a string quartet as a violist, I finally summoned up the nerve to write my first string quartet. Bernard Ferrari, a member of The Juilliard School’s Board of Trustees, wanted to celebrate his retirement with the commission and premiere of a new composition, and my name apparently came up in the conversation.The work adheres to the time-honored sequence of four movements. Within this familiar structure, I wanted to interject some unpredictable sonorities and textures. For example, I inverted the registers of the instruments in the opening movement, with the “lower” strings soaring high above the violins in the opening movement. The second and fourth movements incorporate subtle elements of the vernacular (lush, hyper-Romantic Hollywood scoring and perky video game-style riffs respectively). Overall, the work is perhaps my most conventional quartet of the set, but quirky enough to help me feel like I contributed something new to the canon, and more importantly, got that monkey off my back. Quartet No. 1 was commissioned by Dr. Bernie Ferrari and received its premiere by the Biava Quartet in 2008.
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2. String Quartet No. 2: Concussion Theory (2012)
I. No Man’s Land 03:59
II. Black Sunday 06:15
III. Concussion Theory 03:13
IV. A Gentle Rain 04:16
Quartet No. 2: Concussion Theory (2012)
During the ecological disaster of the 1930s "Dust Bowl," the US government funded desperate attempts to manipulate the rain to fall from the sky. While none of these were successful, a popular method was the launching of TNT into the sky, in hopes of creating moisture-filled clouds with their explosions. This idea was called "concussion theory," a term and procedure that I found intriguing, and became the inspiration for this work for string quartet. Written in four short movements, Concussion Theory explores several aspects of this historically unprecedented plight and unusual experiments to address it. The first movement, No Man's Land, presents a dire scene of the parched, barren earth of the Great Plains, with a scorching sun and only a rustling of tumbleweed to interrupt the desolate stillness. Black Sunday recalls a battered, downtrodden community church gathering in 1935 on day one of the worst dust storms of that era blacked out a region spanning five states. The third movement, Concussion Theory, depicts the blazing fireworks of explosives fired into the heavens above, followed by A Gentle Rain, a fantasy of cathartic rainfall; a bittersweet, would-be outcome of this experiment that, alas, in reality never actually occurred. This work was commissioned by the Hanson Institute for American Music of the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester and premiered by the Ying Quartet at the Eastman School of Music in 2012.
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3. String Quartet No. 3: Apocryphal Dances (2017)
I. Entrée grave 03:30
II. Rigaudon 01:33
III. Passacaille 03:30
IV. Musette 02:03
V. Tambourin 02:09
Quartet No. 3: Apocryphal Dances (2017)
Conceived as a love letter to the Baroque dance suite, Apocryphal Dances is a work of “historical fiction.” As the title suggests, my writing is not so much historically informed as it is historically inspired. Using conventions of 18th-century French dance rhythms and gestures as a point of departure, I added anachronistic contemporary touches (some more subtle than others), and my own personal vocabulary to create a suite of five short dances (Entrée grave, Rigaudon, Passacaille, Musette, and Tambourin) meant as nothing more than twelve minutes of good clean fun offered humbly for the amusement of the performers and their audience. This work was commissioned and premiered by 45th Parallel, May 2017, in Portland, Oregon.
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Disc 2
4. String Quartet No. 4: after, life (2021) 09:52
Quartet No. 4: after, life (2021)
As part of a covert operation violating the 1962 Geneva Accords, the United States military dropped more than two million tons of explosive ordnance on the tiny country of Laos between 1964 and 1973, making it the most bombed country, per capita, in the history of the world. In perspective, the U.S. dropped an average of one bomb every eight minutes around the clock for nine years, resulting in over 200,000 Lao civilian deaths, with another 20,000 and counting of mostly curious children since then, who continue to discover and accidentally detonate the millions of UXO (unexploded ordnance) still contaminating, or in Lao terms, “haunting” the countryside. After the war, Laotians embarked on a difficult journey to recover from these years of dehumanizing violence and callous neglect. after, life is a meditation on this process of healing and restoration; both of the land itself and for the people who remain its stewards. Written as a response in homage to George Crumb’s groundbreaking Black Angels, my quartet regards Crumb’s amplification, extended techniques, and non-traditional notation as curious artifacts left behind for quiet exploration centering Asian civilians rather than American soldiers. Out of an eerie texture of ghost-like effects depicting the haunting of Laos, rhythms and melodic contours emerge to resemble a lam phi fa, or ritual dance of healing meant to exorcise evil spirits from the body. Commissioned by 45th Parallel Universe, premiered by the Pixis Quartet in 2021.
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5. Quartet No. 5: Songs for a Shared Space (2023)
I. Spacious, meditative 05:30
II. Moderate Afrobeat, with unwavering groove 03:44
III. Tenderly, with apologies to Mozart 05:01
IV. Finale 08:59
Quartet No. 5: Songs for a Shared Space (2023)
My 5th quartet was commissioned by my friends in the Boston-based Sheffield Chamber Players, a string quartet that performs mainly house concerts in a network of private homes. This practice of intimate performance in space without a stage separating the performers from the audience gave me the idea to play with spatial aspects in this work. The first movement begins with only the cello on “stage,” with the other three instruments surrounding the audience. Over the course of the next two short movements, the other three musicians gradually join the cello, so that only the last movement begins with the complete quartet seated together. I conceived of the piece as a metaphor for a multigenerational household in which its different members all have their own cultural identities and musical interests, yet they find a way to coexist with respect and a shared familial bond. Musically, the piece is wildly eclectic, with influences including imitative 16th-century counterpoint, John Cage, Afrobeat, newgrass, Mozart, R&B, and more all living peacefully under the same roof.
-
Disc 1
Quartet No. 1 (2008)
After roughly fifteen years of composing and at least twenty performing inside a string quartet as a violist, I finally summoned up the nerve to write my first string quartet. Bernard Ferrari, a member of The Juilliard School’s Board of Trustees, wanted to celebrate his retirement with the commission and premiere of a new composition, and my name apparently came up in the conversation.The work adheres to the time-honored sequence of four movements. Within this familiar structure, I wanted to interject some unpredictable sonorities and textures. For example, I inverted the registers of the instruments in the opening movement, with the “lower” strings soaring high above the violins in the opening movement. The second and fourth movements incorporate subtle elements of the vernacular (lush, hyper-Romantic Hollywood scoring and perky video game-style riffs respectively). Overall, the work is perhaps my most conventional quartet of the set, but quirky enough to help me feel like I contributed something new to the canon, and more importantly, got that monkey off my back. Quartet No. 1 was commissioned by Dr. Bernie Ferrari and received its premiere by the Biava Quartet in 2008.
—
Quartet No. 2: Concussion Theory (2012)
During the ecological disaster of the 1930s "Dust Bowl," the US government funded desperate attempts to manipulate the rain to fall from the sky. While none of these were successful, a popular method was the launching of TNT into the sky, in hopes of creating moisture-filled clouds with their explosions. This idea was called "concussion theory," a term and procedure that I found intriguing, and became the inspiration for this work for string quartet. Written in four short movements, Concussion Theory explores several aspects of this historically unprecedented plight and unusual experiments to address it. The first movement, No Man's Land, presents a dire scene of the parched, barren earth of the Great Plains, with a scorching sun and only a rustling of tumbleweed to interrupt the desolate stillness. Black Sunday recalls a battered, downtrodden community church gathering in 1935 on day one of the worst dust storms of that era blacked out a region spanning five states. The third movement, Concussion Theory, depicts the blazing fireworks of explosives fired into the heavens above, followed by A Gentle Rain, a fantasy of cathartic rainfall; a bittersweet, would-be outcome of this experiment that, alas, in reality never actually occurred. This work was commissioned by the Hanson Institute for American Music of the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester and premiered by the Ying Quartet at the Eastman School of Music in 2012.
—
Quartet No. 3: Apocryphal Dances (2017)
Conceived as a love letter to the Baroque dance suite, Apocryphal Dances is a work of “historical fiction.” As the title suggests, my writing is not so much historically informed as it is historically inspired. Using conventions of 18th-century French dance rhythms and gestures as a point of departure, I added anachronistic contemporary touches (some more subtle than others), and my own personal vocabulary to create a suite of five short dances (Entrée grave, Rigaudon, Passacaille, Musette, and Tambourin) meant as nothing more than twelve minutes of good clean fun offered humbly for the amusement of the performers and their audience. This work was commissioned and premiered by 45th Parallel, May 2017, in Portland, Oregon.
—
Disc 2
Quartet No. 4: after, life (2021)
As part of a covert operation violating the 1962 Geneva Accords, the United States military dropped more than two million tons of explosive ordnance on the tiny country of Laos between 1964 and 1973, making it the most bombed country, per capita, in the history of the world. In perspective, the U.S. dropped an average of one bomb every eight minutes around the clock for nine years, resulting in over 200,000 Lao civilian deaths, with another 20,000 and counting of mostly curious children since then, who continue to discover and accidentally detonate the millions of UXO (unexploded ordnance) still contaminating, or in Lao terms, “haunting” the countryside. After the war, Laotians embarked on a difficult journey to recover from these years of dehumanizing violence and callous neglect. after, life is a meditation on this process of healing and restoration; both of the land itself and for the people who remain its stewards. Written as a response in homage to George Crumb’s groundbreaking Black Angels, my quartet regards Crumb’s amplification, extended techniques, and non-traditional notation as curious artifacts left behind for quiet exploration centering Asian civilians rather than American soldiers. Out of an eerie texture of ghost-like effects depicting the haunting of Laos, rhythms and melodic contours emerge to resemble a lam phi fa, or ritual dance of healing meant to exorcise evil spirits from the body. Commissioned by 45th Parallel Universe, premiered by the Pixis Quartet in 2021.
—
Quartet No. 5: Songs for a Shared Space (2023)
My 5th quartet was commissioned by my friends in the Boston-based Sheffield Chamber Players, a string quartet that performs mainly house concerts in a network of private homes. This practice of intimate performance in space without a stage separating the performers from the audience gave me the idea to play with spatial aspects in this work. The first movement begins with only the cello on “stage,” with the other three instruments surrounding the audience. Over the course of the next two short movements, the other three musicians gradually join the cello, so that only the last movement begins with the complete quartet seated together. I conceived of the piece as a metaphor for a multigenerational household in which its different members all have their own cultural identities and musical interests, yet they find a way to coexist with respect and a shared familial bond. Musically, the piece is wildly eclectic, with influences including imitative 16th-century counterpoint, John Cage, Afrobeat, newgrass, Mozart, R&B, and more all living peacefully under the same roof.
Recording and Production Credits
Producer: Stephen Prutsman
Executive Producer: Michael Hostetler
Recording Engineer: Leslie Ann Jones
Assistant Engineer: Dann Thompson
Editing: Stephen Prutsman
Mixing Engineer: Alejandro Venguer
Mastering: Oscar Zambrano
Artwork: Alex Sopp
Art Direction & Graphic Design: Christopher Kornmann for Spit + Image
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Justin J. Holden ~ Copy Editor
ARTIST NOTES ON SONGS FOR A SHARED SPACE STRING QUARTETS
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Every composer's first string quartet represents both a beginning and a leap of faith. Although Kenji Bunch had spent years performing quartet repertoire as a violist, writing one of his own proved unexpectedly daunting.
Rather than imitating the established tradition, Bunch quietly reshaped it from within. Drawing on his perspective as an inner voice of the ensemble, he frequently allows the viola and cello to occupy unusually lyrical, soaring registers while the violins provide harmonic support, subtly reversing familiar roles.
Looking back at the work nearly two decades later, the composer hears something he couldn't recognize at the time, "I now understand what I was doing. The quartet holds together and makes musical sense."
For the Telegraph Quartet, the score already reveals the hallmarks of Bunch's mature voice.
"There's something so wondrous about that first movement," says violinist Maile. "The beauty is breathtaking. Then you have this playful second movement, another moment of extraordinary lyricism in the third movement, and finally this incredibly exciting finale. Even in the first quartet, you hear someone who's already curious about so many different musical worlds."
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Inspired by Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time, Concussion Theory grew from one of the strangest episodes of the Dust Bowl. During the devastating drought of the 1930s, scientists proposed detonating explosives in the atmosphere in the hope that the resulting shockwaves would produce rain.
"Somebody had the idea to explode a bunch of TNT in the sky and maybe it would create enough of a concussion to trigger rainfall," Bunch explains. "It didn't work."
Rather than documenting history, the quartet imagines an alternate ending, "the final movement imagines what would have happened if it had."
That imagined rainfall has taken on deeper meaning for the composer over time. Reflecting on his family's experiences of war, Bunch came to recognize that many of his compositions seek not simply to depict suffering, but to imagine restoration. In Concussion Theory’s final movement, A Gentle Rain becomes less a historical event than an act of compassion.
Maile hears precisely that emotional release in performance, "after everything that comes before it, that final movement feels incredibly cathartic. It's the rain everyone has been waiting for."
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Originally written for Baroque instruments, Apocryphal Dances celebrates history while refusing to be constrained by it. "It's not meant to be accurate history," Bunch says. "It's historical fiction."
Rather than recreating eighteenth-century dance forms, the quartet invents its own imagined past, borrowing gestures, rhythms, and conventions from Baroque music while freely mixing them with contemporary harmonies and rhythms.
Bunch compares the process to cooking, "you're using ingredients that have existed forever, but you combine them differently and suddenly you have a new dish."
The result is music that is affectionate without being nostalgic and playful without becoming parody. Echoes of Handel, Bach, and Telemann drift through the score, but they are constantly interrupted by unmistakably modern turns of phrase.
For the Telegraph Quartet, the work captures one of the qualities they admire most in Bunch's writing, "you never know where he's going next. There's always this sense of discovery and play."
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Commissioned in response to George Crumb's iconic Black Angels, after, life responds to war from a different perspective. Rather than revisiting Vietnam through an American lens, Bunch looked toward Laos and Cambodia, exploring cultures whose experiences are often overlooked.
His research led him down an unexpected path. "I started watching videos of Cambodian folk musicians on YouTube, and suddenly I heard things that reminded me of old-time American fiddle music."
Rather than emphasizing difference, the discovery revealed surprising connections across cultures. "Maybe we're not as different as we think," reflected Bunch.
The quartet imagines instruments and sonic artifacts left behind after conflict, transforming them into objects of memory and renewal rather than destruction. Extended techniques and unusual timbres become voices carrying stories across generations.
For Maile, the work occupies a unique place within the cycle, "it's probably the most sonically adventurous piece on the album, but underneath all of those sounds is an extraordinary amount of humanity."
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The title work grew from an intensely personal reflection on community following the isolation of the pandemic. Conceived for house concerts, the quartet begins with the musicians physically separated around the room before gradually coming together.
"It was really about people sharing music in the same room again," Bunch explains. "I kept thinking about multigenerational households and how different generations bring different music into the same space."
Those ideas shape every aspect of the work. Renaissance counterpoint, classical lyricism, contemporary grooves, and improvisatory gestures coexist naturally, each voice maintaining its individuality while contributing to a larger whole.
One movement emerged from an unexpected moment of inspiration. "I was sitting in my driveway listening to NPR, and Mozart came on. I just thought, that's exactly what this piece needs," explained Bunch.
The resulting dialogue between Mozart and an R&B-inspired viola solo becomes one of the quartet's most memorable passages. The emotional impact extends well beyond its technical brilliance. "We've had audience members come up to us in tears after performances," Maile recalls.
The title ultimately comes to describe not only this quartet but the entire album—a collection of works that invites listeners into a musical world where different voices, histories, and traditions find common ground without ever surrendering their individuality.