BY ANGELO VALDIVIA
There aren’t many composers who fluidly work between video games and Hollywood, but Penka Kouneva has firmly entrenched herself among both.
After leaving Bulgaria and moving to the United States to study music in 1990, Kouneva set her sights on scoring music for films by the end of the decade. In the mid-2000s, she would go on to work closely with Steve Jablonsky, and help create soundtracks to some of the biggest franchises across movies and games: Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Transformers, Prince of Persia, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Gears of War, among others. She’s also worked with Don Davis and Hans Zimmer on The Matrix Reloaded and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, respectively.
In 2018, Kouneva scored for Milko Lazarov’s Ága, which was elected by Bulgaria’s film body to be a contender in the 2020 Academy Awards for Best International Feature Film (ultimately awarded to Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite). One of her most recent projects, The CW’s Pandora, aired its first season in 2019, and reflects a core passion of her career: science fiction.
We had the opportunity to interview Penka about her incredible career, working between games and film, and why she is so drawn in by sci-fi.
You’ve crafted an incredible career composing and orchestrating music across various mediums — such as film, television, and video games. What are some things you would’ve loved to have known before starting out?
I always considered myself a collaborative and storytelling composer. My strengths are musical intuition, great sense for drama, and composing emotional music.
What I did not realise is, to be a Hollywood composer, you need to be a powerful entrepreneur, constantly building a robust network of friendships and relationships. I wish someone had told me, ‘cultivate thousands of friendships, not three’.
The recent TV series you co-scored with Joe Kraemer for The CW, Pandora, is a sci-fi drama set in 2199 that features a young woman dealing with the threat of galactic destruction. Much of your other work gravitates toward sci-fi, also. What is it about the genre that draws you in?
I love sci-fi with my whole heart.
Growing up in communist Bulgaria (Eastern Europe), sci-fi was a very important literary genre because it told stories of social criticism but packaged as interstellar adventures. The genres of sci-fi, horror, fantasy, and dystopia are very close to my heart.
Also, my father is a scientist, so I grew up with books about space, airplanes, rockets, and documentaries about WWI and WWII. I’m a gigantic fan of the Star Trek mythology; Pandora created by Mark A. Altman lives right in that space – college kids flying space ships and figuring out their worldviews and romantic relationships.
I was so happy to work on a story with a strong, self-determined female protagonist.
Science fiction has progressively become a much bigger and wider-reaching genre over recent decades. What other works have you find inspiration from?
My husband and I watch sci-fi all the time because I’m genuinely passionate about such stories. From violent action (Equillibrium) to subtle and metaphorical (Predestination) to dystopian (Elysium, V for Vendetta, Snowpiercer), the themes are endless. Black Mirror struck me as a lightning of cosmic proportions, and I also loved indie films (Upgrade), and studio blockbusters (The Martian).
I am proud to have scored an indie sci-fi drama Encounter directed by Paul Salamoff, about a group of friends who discover an alien pod. Check out the score released by Notefornote music.
How do you approach more dramatic projects, such as Ága?
Ága was about loss, forgiveness and the breakdown between generations. It was about the rift between parents and children, about the death of old way of living, and had strong environmentalist overtones.
The music was used very sparingly and its function was to heighten the emotions of irreversible loss, forgiveness, and redemption. The director Milko Lazarov had a distinct vision and together we found the tone’ of the music, which was minimalist expressive strings in the style of Arvo Pärt.
What are some ways you’ve managed to keep busy over this pandemic lockdown period? And have these restrictions affected the way you work?
One of the most exciting aspects of my career is the variety of stories I am brought in to score. Just this spring, during the COVID-19 lockdown, I scored a mobile game about fish with flowing orchestral music, a VR game titled SpellPunk with EDM score, another VR game with futuristic sci-fi hybrid textural score, and an orchestral cinematic (tragic horror) for Legends of Runeterra, the new game from Riot Games. This variety demands that I learn new styles continuously; it energises me and brings me joy.
The pandemic changed my schedule: I had to cook, clean, and take my daughter in nature for daily hikes, for better health. I am grateful for the opportunity to spend quality time of growth together with her.
This new schedule, however, decimated my time of solitude and focused creative work. Before, I was working from home all the time, but my husband was at his office all day, and my daughter was at school until 3PM. During the lockdown, we were cooped up in the house.
I will always work from home; I’m positive that many jobs will remain at-home for many industries, which is not a bad thing if you have a family.
Was working in films and games always part of your plan when you were younger?
After much soul-searching during my late-20s, I chose to become a film composer. It was my destiny. I was passionate about collaborating, my music was storytelling, and I was so much into film, theater, games. I would have absolutely devoted my life to a career as a collaborative composer in the visual media, and going to Hollywood made sense.
It took me a long time to understand how the business works. I’ve always been an idealist, driven by my intuition, passions, and honing in on opportunities that I felt energised about – for instance, scoring the Transformers video game in 2008, and making a conscious choice to re-invent myself as a game composer.
Having orchestrated for amazing Hollywood composers inspired me to create my own ‘soundtracks’ – the passion projects The Woman Astronaut and Rebirth of Id. These projects, in turn, lead to significant composing opportunities such as the NASA theme park at the Kennedy Space Center, and having my music performed by Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl in front of 18,000 people.
Bucket list question: what would be your absolute, all-time dream project to work on, of any medium?
A human-interest feature film, a sci-fi dystopian game that encapsulates the struggles of our times, and a major orchestral composition or oratorio for the concert stage.
Check out my soundtracks on iTunes or Spotify, I hope you enjoy them.
Images supplied.
