David Dunham graduated from Mount Allison University this past spring with a Bachelor of Music. Despite the program focusing primarily on classical music, David’s album Red (released just this January) is not a classical album:
“It’s a mixed pot, a lot of different stuff. There’s really psychedelic rock kind of stuff, there’s some more prog rock kind of stuff, this weird electronic track. I find it hard to talk about it and describe it concisely.”
Even if David is not composing classical music, university was still an important part of his growth as a musician:
“Honestly, one of the biggest things I’ve taken from university, [was not] a singular thing. It’s the mindset of how to practice. Like, yeah I’ve learned a bunch of cool pieces and played very cool stuff and that’s all fine, but the biggest takeaway for me from university is that I know how to learn music better. So that’s definitely had an impact on writing and recording my album because in terms of composition I’d say that there’s probably not really that much direct influence from the pieces that I played in university or all the classical music I had to listen to throughout my degree; that didn’t really influence the music. But I think honestly my composition courses definitely did help. It’s hard to pin down exactly what I would have learned that would have transferred over [but] I definitely feel like I feel more comfortable writing any kind of music now than I did four years ago.”
David studied percussion performance at Mount Allison, and while some may only see percussion as drums backing up a larger ensemble, percussion music is very versatile:
“There’s probably a lot I could say about playing in an ensemble because I personally think that ensemble playing is one of my strengths. . . I don’t know, it’s hard to describe any differences because I kind of approach playing in ensembles and playing my own music completely differently. In like [Mount Allison’s] jazz band, [there’s] a lot of conversation between the members of the ensemble; there’s a lot less focusing on the details on the page. But in my own music, that’s basically all I do. I write out parts and then I play them as perfectly as I can. And in terms of solo drum repertoire and solo percussion repertoire, I feel like drum set stuff and solo snare drum and multi-perc [multiple percussion instruments] kind of gets a little bit swept under the rug compared to just a solo marimba because [marimba is] melodic, it’s easier to listen to. But I find that at least in terms of in my music, I write music that is kind of soloistic for the drums. It’s not like the drums have the spotlight 100% of the time, but I write weirdly complex parts that are, I don’t want to say they’re hard for the sake of being hard because I don’t try to do that. . . but it makes sense as primarily a drummer that my drum parts are the more soloistic kind of parts in my music.”
You can listen to CHMA’s full interview with David Dunham here:
You can also listen to a brand new song by David Dunham here (to be played on Attic Transmissions August 12th, 2020).
As well as follow David’s music on Instagram ( @davespavid ) and bandcamp.
