The course is off to a strong start. Today we started with a talk by Tim Hayes, Senior Creative Manager at Wise Music.
The purpose of his talk was not to teach us music, but something very important that, as musicians, we often neglect and ignore because it is not something we are trained in: the art of business.
Tim was explaining to us about all the technical language they deal with at Wise, how they work and above all, what they expect from composers who apply to work with them. I have to confess that I am not an expert in this field (not even an intermediate hehe), so it has been a great help for me to get in touch with concepts I didn't know before. In addition, Tim suggested that we contact him to show our work. Wow! I'm starting to feel the nerves I had on the first day coming back!
Second session with Pete Anthony. Now is a time when we have to think about roles within the orchestra. The aim is not to repeat by rote what we learnt in an orchestration treatise, but to take that knowledge and synthesise it into a language, because Hollywood, ladies and gentlemen, has its own language! There are many things to keep in mind, from techniques to case studies, focusing on strings and brass. I hope to put all this into practice, as we already have homework. From tomorrow, Pete will be checking our scores.
The end of the day was brought to a close again with a lesson from Neil Brand. I have a special passion for what was covered in class today, and that is how the world of popular music came to film. It wasn't a lesson on how to instrument outside of symphonic music, but what to achieve with this kind of music, again, paying attention to very important elements of rhetoric and story-telling.
I must start my job now, there is a lot of hard labour ahead of me!
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