Crazy stories - Composer Video Transcripts
Video 1 Transcript
I actually only started writing about 10 or 12 years ago and before that I was just a full-time mom, which I loved. Now that there are things like YouTube, anybody can have an audience and sometimes that's a good thing and sometimes it's not a great thing, but it's a blessing to be able to write songs for me and put them out there and know that they will possibly go all over the place. One crazy story is that my son said to me recently, Mom, how many countries have your songs been sung in? And I said, I don't know. So he went and looked up all through all of my orders that I had received and the answer is that my songs have been sung in 116 countries. And I'm telling you that because you can have a wide reach.
Video 2 Transcript
I was writing music for a Native American film and the screenplay asked for the actor, the main actor, to take a love flute and play it and play this beautiful melody for his wife-to-be. So I had to score, pre-score this scene with some sort of a flute melody that would create that feeling and ambiance that we wanted for the film. And the actor, I taught him this little song with the flute he was going to play, but then at the time we shot the film, he was freaked out and just played anything. And so his fingers moved and it looked like he was playing, but he wasn't playing. And I had to make music fit that scene. That was crazy. So I had to revise my melody to fit the action of his fingers and create something that was unique. So when the camera moved away from his fingers, I could write anything, but if the camera moved and saw the actor playing, I had to fit my melody to the finger movements. It was crazy. And I'm happy to say that I wrote a beautiful theme that I ended up using in the orchestra and so on to enhance the film from the movements of his fingers while they were shooting him.
Video 3 Transcript
I think a crazy story would be one where the director would ask me to write music for a specific cue, and he would give me a temp track or something that had been pre-recorded that had originally gone on another movie. And he'd taken that piece and played it for me and said, I want your music to sound exactly like this. And I would listen to it, and in my mind, the music would not connect to that scene at all. And so I remember I wrote what I thought would be the right thing, and I played it for him. And he said, no, I want that other thing. He said, if I had the money, I would buy the rights to it and insert it in. Oh, brother. So I'd have to sit and try to figure out how to work my themes that didn't match, how to work the instrumentation that I hadn't written. Those are terrible times where you have to sort of copy something without a copyright infringement. And you'd never be satisfied. I wasn't, because the music that had been pre-recorded worked so well on that scene, but it didn't work well on the scene he wanted me to write music for. And it would be tough. I'm happy to say, at the end of the day, in all those situations, not many, but some, I would end up writing something that worked and we were both satisfied. And it took a lot of work, but I did it.
Video 4 Transcript
So here's a crazy story. I have a lot of music that I've created and composed, but I had a student, a former student of mine, who took piano lessons from me, that years after she had taken piano lessons from me, she asked if she could perform my instrumental piano piece of, it's titled Triumphant, and it's fully orchestrated, and I had a minus track that I said I could let her perform with the minus track, but it was so interesting because she called me and said, hey, I have an opportunity to perform at the White House for Barack Obama. Is it okay if I perform Triumphant with the minus track? And I responded and said, sure, that's great. I mean, something completely unheard of, and I thought, okay, so they're going to play my composition, Triumphant, with the minus track, the full orchestration at the White House. Kind of a crazy story, but pretty fun.
