A Story of Floating Weeds

Conductor, composer, pianist, and violinist Guenter Buchwald is a pioneer of the renaissance in silent film music. He has accompanied silent films for thirty-eight years with a repertoire of more than three thousand titles and has conducted orchestras worldwide from Iceland to Romania, Tokyo to Zurich. In great demand as a composer, he has scored silent films as varied as Suzuki and Ota’s What Made Her Do It?, René Clair`s Paris qui dort, Chaplin´s Pawn Shop, and Murnau’s Nosferatu. A soloist known for his virtuoso improvisation, he has appeared regularly at film festivals in Berlin, Bonn, Bologna, Zurich, Pordenone, and Seattle. He is a lecturer at the Film Science Institute at the University of Zurich and resident conductor of the Freiburg Philharmonic Orchestra for Silent Film in Concert. He is cofounder of the Silent Movie Music Company and is musical director of Bristol’s Slapstick Silent Film Festival in England.

New York based multi-instrumentalist Mas Koga developed his worldview at an early age.  Soon after his birth in Chiba Japan, his family relocated to the US due to his father’s work, and he spent this adolescent years moving around multiple times. By the time he graduated high school, he had lived in three countries and nine different cities. Mas took an interest in music as a young child, especially in jazz. At 11 years old he started learning the trumpet and joined the school band. After another move to Munich, he had a chance to borrow an alto saxophone—and that changed his life. At 15, he began teaching himself with a magazine cutout of a fingering chart and CDs and cassettes of his favorite music. With an international upbringing, it was fitting that he found himself at San Jose State University in the Improvised Music Studies department, where he intensively studied and explored musical tradition from around the world. Fueled with a passion for cross-cultural experience, Mas started to incorporate the Japanese shakuhachi into his music, and began his apprenticeship with master shakuhachi artist Masayuki Koga. Mas’s sound encompasses the many cultural traditions he’s been touched by, and the worldview developed though diverse life experiences. He aims to create music that respects traditions and goes beyond styles and idioms to ultimately help diminish all forms of social boundaries.