GUEST POST Featuring Peter Calandra
- unlimiteddanceshoe
- Dec 6, 2014
- 3 min read
Featured Guest Post: Peter Calandra
At Got Your Head in the Clouds, we like to get inside of an artist's mind. These formative questions help bring insight to an artist's music and often adds an element of surprise. In today's Featured Guest post we have ambient Jazz artist and Broadway well-known, Peter Calandra.
Throughout your lengthy history and experience in different areas of the music industry, from writing for Broadway and Film, to making your own solo records, to teaching, what would you say is the most important lesson you have learned?
Peter Calandra:
Just as it is difficult to say that one aspect of my career has been more or less important than another, it is difficult to say that one of the lessons learned throughout my career is the ‘most important lesson’. Different lessons are more or less important at different times and with different projects. One should focus their energies on having a vision for where they would like to be, and should then stay open to learning something new no matter what stage they are at in their careers. A career is a journey and there are always new things to be learned along the way.
Playing in the orchestra for Broadway performances has offered me many invaluable insights. Part of being successful in an orchestra pit for a Broadway show is learning how to take direction, and give the people above you in the food chain what they want while still staying true to yourself and your own ideas. Other things one learns is how their part fits into the whole of the piece. If you pay attention to the music and what is happening onstage you can learn how to use music to unfold a dramatic line over the course of a story.
The years spent playing in orchestras taught me exactly how orchestral instrumentalists sound when they play live. This is a very valuable skill when doing midi orchestrations. Accompanying singers and arranging piano parts to fit in with the vocals contributed to my understanding of how to create an underscore during spoken moments without getting in the way of the dialog. More specifically, years spent playing piano and conducting the original off Broadway production of Little Shop Of Horrors taught me about the timing and the pacing of a piece and how it affects the overall quality of a performance.
It is then important to realize that the skills one learns in a situation are not necessarily contained to that experience. All of these skills learned in live performance situations have been helpful in my work as a film composer. For example taking direction from the creative staff of a film and turning that direction into sounds that will work with the film’s storyline is something that I took away from my experience crafting piano parts for Miss Saigon.
Harnessing technology has helped me grow as an artist and is absolutely essential to my work in composing music for films and television. Technology has a vital role in granting one control when creating music. Early on learning how to program synthesizers and learning about MIDI was crucial. Working with four track reel to reel and then four track cassette decks to record and mix music and, a little later, hardware sequencers greatly helped my creativity. My first computer and sequencing program (a Mac LCII and Opcode Vision Sequencer) enabled me to port over many of the techniques learned by using the hardware units. All of this has helped me tremendously to advance myself.
When it comes to my own personal projects the ability to write, arrange, engineer, and mix my own music is possible by bringing all of these previously learned skills together. But one cannot discount real world experience. As a university professor, I certainly don’t anyway. The lessons that I have taken away from personal experience has given me a unique perspective when teaching that cannot be learned in the classroom. Sharing as many of these as possible with my students is always a priority.
Kommentare