Daily Inspiration: Meet Michael Künstle

Today we’d like to introduce you to Michael Künstle

Hi Michael, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
2024 was my biggest year so far with scoring one of the official Super Bowl commercials. We’ve had an audience of 123.4 million viewers which is absolutely mind-boggling when I think of how I got into music.

I started to play the drums when I was very young and played in a rock band with my father soon after. Apparently I was hitting the kitchen pans with drum sticks before I could walk, but that doesn’t really count as making music, does it?

One day, my father got me a Yamaha keyboard. I was about eleven years old and it was then when I realised: I can write music myself!
The keyboard allowed me to record tracks on floppy disks (who remembers them?) which was incredible at the time. I couldn’t wait to come home after school and would lock myself away for hours. I filled around 20 floppy disks and each of them had space for around 600 pieces of music. Imagine that!
I thought creativity would never stop and luckily, it still seems to be this way.

Having played in many rock bands as a teenager I eventually fell in love with jazz and with film music. I absolutely adore the music of Nan Schwartz, Claus Ogerman, John Williams and Ennio Morricone. “Once Upon A Time In America” still is the music where – in my head – my dreams come true.

I enrolled at the film music composition programme in Zurich in 2011. A year later I won the Golden Eye Award for “Best International Filmmusic” at the Zurich Film Festival. It was my first composition for full orchestra.
Ever since then I wanted to work in as many different musical fields as possible. I wrote arrangements for jazz ensembles, crossover concerts bringing pop artists and orchestras together on stage and all kinds of movies and series. In the last few years I was able to write music for movies in very different genres. From family-drama to corporate-thriller to crime-comedy. I love how I can learn more about my music from every new project. I find it exciting to start a project not knowing how the music has to sound.
My idea of a good score is to find a musical voice so unique for the movie that it feels like a fingerprint: you are immediately immersed into the story.

Day by day, I work hard to get a little better at my craft and to foster my creativity. My ambition is to write music for a US produced movie or series.
I’m always so happy when I can bring my different influences into play.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I don’t think an artists road can or should be smooth. Every day’s struggles are the potential to be a better artist and a better person.

I try to see something good in everything bad that happens to me. I think it’s life’s way to tell me that this isn’t the right road for me. Sometimes I need a while to mentally switch gears, but other times it seems like a no-brainer.
When COVID-19 hit, I was pumped out from an extremely intense writing phase for my biggest recording session to-date with an 80-piece orchestra. Ten days before the session, everything locked down and all future projects were cancelled.
I immediately went back to my side job I did during university and soon I realised how much time I suddenly had. It was then that I forged a work relationship with Matteo Pagamici with whom I write all music for media by now.
The Super Bowl commercial is our mutual success story and it probably wouldn’t have happened if COVID-19 didn’t cancel all my then-projects.

By now, I’m a person who doesn’t focus very much on the struggles that occur on my journey. I know that everything will turn out just fine. Maybe it’s simplistic thinking, but it helps tremendously. I think you learn almost everything from failure and almost nothing from success. Once I realised that I stopped worrying about the outcome and started focusing on the journey.

The only thing I learned from success is: Life goes on the next day exactly as it did the day before. In the moment of huge success you’d wish someone tells you: “From now on you will feel like this for the rest of your life”. But you don’t.

Finding more joy in the process of writing music helps you balance out moments of huge success, which – after all – we still strive for.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I write music for film/TV and commercials as well as orchestral concert music. Recently, I’ve recorded some of my most ambitious music at Abbey Road Studios with a 92-piece orchestra (the cancelled session finally took place with even more musicians!). One of the pieces is an orchestral arrangement of the Ed Sheeran track “Take Me Back To London”.
Also, with Matteo we’ve recorded our debut album with the same setup and a second 25-piece chamber orchestra. We’ve recorded music that blends traditional, avant-garde and electronic composition techniques and that takes you on a cinematic journey.

We produced the title track for SISI & I, a historical drama starring Academy Award Nominee Sandra Hüller. She also sings on our track. We wrote the music for NEW HEIGHTS the first Swiss TV series sold to Netflix in 192 countries. We also scored the crime series OFF SEASON for French National Television with more than 2.5 million viewers per episode.

OFF SEASON was a really great project, because it allowed us to go crazy within our sonic landscape. The series plays in the Alps. A serial killer kidnaps his victims and let them freeze to death.
So we decided to bring half a forest into our studio. We “performed” on stones and trees for a week and sampled the most interesting sounds. We even sampled the sound of melting ice! With this toolset of customised sounds we scored the entire series with the desired outcome: The music gave you the impression of lying somewhere in the Alps freezing to death.

I think that’s our niche. We really love coming up with unique sounds that are connected to the story and compose something highly customised for every project.

Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
I believe risk-taking is essential for creativity. Whether it’s artistic risk or financial risk, it always benefits you as an artist as long as you have a vision behind taking those risks.

The recording sessions at Abbey Road were a huge financial risk. I’ve invested so much of my own money to make it happen and I have no guarantee that the revenue of the music will ever cover the expenses.
Artistically, it is already the most valuable investment I have ever made in my life. Somehow my writing got ten times better overnight. Suddenly I understood everything. To know what it takes to pull of such a huge session artistically, financially and organizationally gives you invaluable confidence.

And it makes you want to work even harder on your craft and career to make such moments happen as often as possible.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.michaelkuenstle.ch/
• Instagram: @michaelkuenstle

Image Credits
Sandeep Abraham
Benno Hunziger