"And I do think that the world, and film and media, really needs women’s musical voices and their sensibilities, because we are different. We feel things differently, so we come at them differently. There’s a whole other world out there—the other half, so to speak—and in the same way that women writers reveal that world, women composers bring it into the film. It’s an incredibly important perspective."

Just when you’d finally figured out how to pronounce Guðnadóttir, here comes another Icelandic aurora. Herdís Stefánsdóttir, born in Reykjavik but beaming regularly into L.A., where she is ably represented by Patty Macmillan.

I interviewed Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans via Zoom for an audience of twenty-three aspiring film composers attending the Film Scoring Academy of Europe’s summer program on the Black Sea in Varna, Bulgaria.

I’m corresponding today with composer-songwriter Keefus Ciancia, who is a man of many talents and who has, I am guessing, a very interesting interior life.

After seeing David Lowery’s A Ghost Story and while still under the spell of its score, I was eager to speak with composer Daniel Hart (who also scored Lowery’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints), about how he finds the right path for music in these deeply personal and transcendently beautiful films.

My first encounter with Amie Doherty was--as might be expected--by way of her music. It was in the late spring of 2012 and I was in Valencia, Spain, the first American hire for Berklee's new (and still very much unfinished) international campus.

Putting aside Craigslist and LinkedIn (and I do), there are no "want ads" for film composers. Nor are there employment agencies, headhunters, or professional talent scouts.

For an aspiring screen composer, scrolling through IMDb credit listings for any number of the high-profile longforms broadcast on HBO, Showtime, FX, Amazon, etc. can be dispiriting.

While eager young graduates of scoring programs at Berklee, USC, Columbia College, Royal College of Music and a dozen other institutions of less renown fight it out for a small piece of sod in the brutally Darwinian media music market--angling for brand recognition and the attention of agents and music supervisors.

Twenty-eight year-old actor-turned-director Brady Corbet's debut film, THE CHILDHOOD OF A LEADER, is that rarest of things to appear on the screen since the passing of artists like Stanley Kubrick: a film of ideas that's also a wonder to look at and to listen to.

JORDAN GAGNE, one of my former Berklee Valencia scoring students (and a wicked-good composer himself), steered my attention to HBO's new series, THE NIGHT OF, and its music. Jordan is working as a studio assistant to the show's composer, Jeff Russo.

It's not the name of a Century City law firm, but as a group, they are powerful advocates for the art that is, along with jazz and rock 'n' roll, one of the three most important musical forms of the last hundred years.

Good read, Andy. It's an interesting point you make - I recently had a debate with a fellow composer over the importance of having a presentable website and overall representation of yourself. It's reasons why Giacchino (who doesn't have a website), J. Williams (website not updated) and Zimmer (mad site as if it was designed when the internet first came out) are getting the gigs - they focus on the music and not their presentation.

Earlier this evening, I posted the following reply on Deniz Hughes' "For Film Composers Only" Facebook page to agent Richard Kraft's assertion that the majority of students enrolled in college and university scoring programs were "wasting their time" because they lacked "the right stuff," i.e., the entrepreneurial grit and commercial drive to succeed in the marketplace.

For anyone who happens to have wandered by, whether out of curiosity or as the result of a misdirected Google search, this will be, in the coming year, the blog associated with SCORING THE SCREEN: The Secret Language of Film Music.