Even the best-planned composition takes unexpected turns," says Bruno Louchouarn, graduate student in music. He is talking about how he writes music, but he interrupts himself to point out that the same could be said for his career. You see, the path that brought him to UCLA took a sharp turn one day in 1985.

Returned from university in his native France, Bruno was having breakfast with his parents in Mexico City when a powerful earthquake struck. While no one in Bruno's immediate family was injured, they quickly understood the extent of the devastation. Still a French citizen, Bruno worked with the French engineering teams that came to help in the rescue.

"I was sometimes interpreting between a person who was trapped and the people who were digging and the French engineers," Bruno remembers. Once, he stood between a Mexican doctor and a French engineer on a line passing to safety babies who'd been trapped in the rubble of a maternity ward for a week. "Those were very strong experiences," Bruno says. Seeing how unexpectedly short life can be, Bruno recognized that he "was not completely happy with what I was doing, and I was still young enough to change routes."

At the time, Bruno had degrees at a French university in mathematics, computer science, and artificial intelligence. Looking for new directions, he remembered the ensemble he had formed during high school in Mexico City, a quartet that played Latin American music in coffee houses. Bruno began composing again.

One day, he was working as a technician on the set of the movie Total Recall, a futuristic thriller starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, when the director asked for some music to play just to set the mood while they shot a Martian cantina scene. Bruno offered a cassette of his own songs.

Months later, Bruno got a call: "We want to use your music in the film, so have your agent call us." By that time, Bruno was in Los Angeles, and with this reassurance, he decided to make music his quest. After studies at Santa Monica College and UCLA, he was accepted into UCLA's graduate program in composition, which combines performance and theory.

For his dissertation, he will write a monograph on a subject related to the body of composition he submits. Bruno expects the subject will be focused on aspects of time and narrative in music, and their relation to rhythm, melody, harmony, form, and meaning. His body of work continues to grow.

Still writing for films and commercials, Bruno has also been writing concert music for percussionists, chamber ensembles, wind ensembles, and symphony orchestras. He likes to work with performers in creating a final piece. "I enjoy more the rehearsal process than the concert," says Bruno. "The rehearsal process is pure joy." One of those joys is feedback. "Part of the learning experience is humility, you know," he says. "People who are masters of their instruments can teach a thing or two. You see what works and what doesn't, and it becomes part of your language."

Bruno's mentors, especially Professor Ian Krouse, encourage music students to reach out into the arts community and seek opportunities to present their work. For example, Bruno wrote a piece for a USC student-percussionist. That student's mentor liked the work and asked Bruno to write for the USC percussion ensemble, which had been selected to play before the Percussive Arts Society's international conference. There, Bruno met a French percussionist, who is going to play a marimba concerto Bruno wrote.

Bruno and a fellow PhD student are arranging the next Naked Ear Sound Gallery concert at UCLA. Students do everything for these performances: "We seek funds and bring established ensembles on campus to perform new work that we write for them." Earlier this spring, the UCLA ensemble played Bruno's Memoires de l'Eau. In addition, UCLA's Music Department "thought so highly of him that it nominated him as the university's representative to the Los Angeles Philharmonic Ojai Festival," says mentor Ian Krouse.

Professor Krouse sees a range of talents in his protégé, from compositions that are "mature, original, and very strong" to a "wide-ranging knowledge and articulate mode of expression" that are the envy of his peers. Lately, Bruno has been teaching, both at UCLA and at Santa Monica College. "Based upon my firsthand observation of his classroom demeanor, I am sure that he will make an effective teacher," Professor Krouse says.

Bruno hopes to combine teaching and music composition in a lifetime career. "I think my best chance is if I somehow get noticed in my concert works," he says, "which is like publishing for us." But he acknowledges that serendipity also plays a role in career selection, that opportunity acts as a filter in deciding which talents we eventually use.

"During my graduate school tenure, I've been having the time of my life," Bruno says, and he's not expecting that to change. "This is the right place to be optimistic, Los Angeles and the United States."

Published in Spring 2001, Graduate Quarterly