Aaron Zigman
is an award winning composer who has developed over fifty film scores
for major Hollywood directors and studios. He combines his classical
background and training with strong knowledge of contemporary music.
Some of Zigman’s film scores include The Notebook, Bridge to Tarabithia, The Proposal, and most recently he worked on Mr. Right and I Saw The Light, the Hank Williams Story. Both movies were shown at the recent Toronto Film Festival.
A native of San Diego, Zigman began training as a classical pianist at age six. While in his third year at UCLA, Zigman signed a four year song writing contract with Almo- Irving. In the mid 1980’s he broke in as a studio musician working with producers, Don Was, Gary Katz, Steely Dan and Stewart Levine. From this experience he got a foot in the door and started to get a name for himself as a producer/writer and soon wrote the pop hit, Crush On You for a group called The Jets. In the 1990’s he entered the film industry, with his work being featured on film soundtracks for Mulan, What’s Love Got To Do With It, Bird Cage, License to Kill, Caddyshack and Pocahontas. It was inevitable that Zigman’s lifelong devotion to classical music would eventually lead him to the film scoring stage.
SZ: I was looking at your website and listening to some of your pieces this past week. Your music is just beautiful.
AZ: Thank you I just wrote a seventeen minute piece for cello and piano. It’s a serious concert work.
We had our first concert at the United Methodist Church in Palos Verdes. It was the finale and received a standing ovation. Cellist Andrew Shulman and pianist Robert Thies will be performing my work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) on Sunday, October 4th. The classical station KUSC will be broadcasting the performance live.
SZ: That’s exciting.
AZ: It’s very exciting. The cellist, Andrew Shulman was the principle for the London Philarmonia Orchestra at the age of twenty-one. He worked with that symphony orchestra for fifteen years then came to Los Angeles for the L.A. Philharmonic and then started working in the movie studios. Currently he’s the principle for the L.A. Chamber Orchestra. Andrew concertizes every two weeks and is an incredibly savant cellist. Robert Thies will perform on piano. Even though I’m a very accomplished pianist, it would have taken me six or seven hours a day of practicing to be able to play this piece. That’s why we have concert pianists who dedicate their life to performance art.
SZ: It’s nice for you that you’ve achieved recognition in your field so you have access to these artists that are at the top of their field. What a wonderful place to be.
AZ: I was commissioned to create this piece of work. When I write a piece of this magnitude it’s wonderful to work with musicians who are so experienced they can take the piece to a whole different level.
SZ: Once you’ve written a piece like the one you are describing…
AZ: The process is a collaboration with the artists. Once it’s written I send the material to them and they practice it. First they spend time with the material and work out their parts. Later we meet and start to rehearse.
SZ: Once you’ve written and performed this piece at a later time can you take the material and ….
AZ: Oh yeah, it can be programmed in any orchestra.
SZ: Few people probably know that you are an accomplished tennis player and could have played in college at the Division 1 level. What events happened along the way that shifted your athletic pursuit and talents to a full time music focus?
AZ: I was an accomplished junior tennis player up to around fourteen years old. At fourteen or fifteen I made the decision to venture off to make my life 100% music even though I kept playing through my first year in high school. My high school Point Loma High School had a good team. We had Kelly Jones who became a top professional doubles player. That year we got to the finals of C.I.F. . I think if I had been in really great tennis shape we would have won. I lost to a player who I’d beaten the year before in junior tournaments. I just stopped practicing tennis but I was still playing on the team for the first year and a half of high school. Then I quit because I could not put any more time into tennis.
SZ: What events happened along the way that shifted your athletic pursuits and talents to a full time music focus?
AZ: I’ll tell you exactly the defining moment. At fourteen years old I was at Yale University playing with the Yale tennis team because they were recruiting guys like me who were ranked top in Southern California. I was in my second year of the fourteen’s. I was invited to go on an Ivy League tour. I played with Princeton, Yale and Harvard. When I was visiting Yale one of the team members knew my interest in music and invited me to attend a piano recital. That night there was this amazing pianist who played a free form style of jazz. He played very much in the style of Keith Jarrett. Jarrett had a hugely successful album around that time in the 1970’s called the Köln Concert. It was his tour de force record. So this pianist was playing wild stuff and at that time my facility was almost that good but not quite. By the time I was sixteen I could rip something like that out. But it was during that Yale performance that I had my epiphany. It was so cool. I was very much into jazz at fourteen and fifteen years old. I was into Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, Art Tatum, and Keith Jarrett at that time. It was after that recital I said to myself “I am going to make music my life.”
SZ: Are there lessons that you learned playing competitive tennis that carry over into your work as a composer?
AZ: When you play competitive tennis you are competing against someone else and you have to win. Playing music at that age I didn’t have to win I had to become better within myself. When I lost a tennis match that made me upset or hurt emotionally I would find myself going to the piano and playing for hours. It was my place of refuge and solace. I realized at that time I wasn’t competing against anybody and it was much more doable for me in the sense of an emotional response. Now I am in a business where I am one of the go to guys for film composing. The thing I learned from playing tennis is that I know what competition is. I can handle rejection. You cannot do what I do for a living without having a thick skin. With that said it still does hurt when I lose a film to another composer when I believe I should have gotten the opportunity. So there is competition. It’s almost like I’m back in tennis competing in a way. There are usually about twenty composers vying for the number one spot for a big or medium film.
SZ: What a great place to be. I’d rather be in that spot than the guy in the twenty-first spot.
AZ: My gratitude is that I am almost always on the list of composers who are considered for a movie. I just completed a documentary piece for Antoine Fuqua for the Suge Knight documentary. You know I don’t do a lot of television but this was for Antoine Fuqua one of the greatest directors in the world. He directed South Paw, Training Day, The Equalizer and many more movie hits. Antoine Fuqua is a guy I couldn’t say, “No” to do a thirty-seven minute documentary on Suge Knight. I had to write and deliver the music within a week. It turned out really well. My hope is that I can work for him one day on a big feature.
SZ: Do you have techniques to quiet your mind or environment to access your creativity I would imagine there is some pressure to turn out creative work when there is a dead-line.
AZ: That’s a really good question and sometimes it’s very hard to turn off my brain especially when I have an eighteen hour day. I try to stop working by 10 or 11pm but you know sometimes there is nothing I can do about it. I just completed a five month run on two movies one called Mr. Right with Anna Kendrick, which will be released Nov. 27th and “I Saw The Light,” the Hank Williams story. Both movies were in the recent Toronto Film Festival. In fact Mr. Right closed the festival.
SZ: What do you do if anything to quiet your mind. There’s a lot of pressure when you have a week to deliver a large volume of work. How do you access that creativity?
AZ: Sometimes I just listen to classical pieces of music to take me away from my work. I’ll go on-line and type in Opus 69 #3 Beethoven with Glenn Gould and Lenard Rose playing a recording that was done in 1975. That’s what I kind of do to wash away the notes that I’ve been working on all day. As human beings we need to sleep so that’s kind of one of my little tricks. I have a huge record and cd collection of all kinds of great classical, jazz and all music but I find the internet very accessible and quick.
When I create I don’t think in technical or mathematical terms until the idea is formulated Musical composition is formulated in improvisation. Once a pianist like myself sits down and begins to play and start thinking about what I am writing all of a sudden a little tune will emerge, a little spot light and I’ll go, “That’s interesting.” Then I formulate and keep playing then all of a sudden I’ve created sixteen bars of music that I’m writing out. Then that improvisational experience is turned into a mathematical one. Before my little dots go on my score there’s a lot of thought, preparation and revisiting.
Film writing and concert writing are two very different things. In film writing I am serving the film and it tells you what to write. I have to stay within the parameters of the film. In writing concert music for the stage I can write anything I want and in this day and modern age rules can be broken. Composers can do things that weren’t allowed in the 17th century. Until we had composers like Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff to break the rules. As you well know there was a riot in Paris when The Rite of Spring was played. It was a piece of music people couldn’t handle. They were enraged by it and then somehow the piece became accepted. I like to adhere to form and symmetrical writing but it’s very…
SZ: There’s more flexibility within the art form.
AZ: The best way to get the best score out of me is that I watch the movie without music. A lot of times I walk in after the film has been shot and the music editor or director has already laid in the pieces of music that they like or think that works well with the film. So they say,”We kind of want this but in your own voice.” If I see a cut in its’ raw form I say, “If you temp this you’re going to spoil what could have happened. Just let me demarcate where you want the music.” We will have a music editor in the room and we all agree where the starting part for the music will be and no-one puts any temporary music in and they just let me write the score. That was how I worked on The Notebook. The only score that Nick Cassavetes, the director, temped was a scene which was one of the bigger moments in the film when Ryan Gosling is kissing Rachel McAdams in the boat during a deluge of rain. Cassavetes temped that piece from Out of Africa. It took me four or five drafts to get him to love what I was writing because he was so attached to that piece of music.
SZ: Do you go on set to watch the filming?
AZ: All the time. I’ve probably done this on fifteen or twenty films. I did it on The Notebook. The landscape in South Carolina is breathtaking in certain seasons. I wrote the opening piece before the movie was completed. The solo piano piece during the opening sequence was written before they were even half way done shooting. They edited the sequence to my music instead of the other way around.
SZ: I read where you said, “Visualize the future you want for yourself and one of the key ways to getting there is networking and creating relationships.” How did you know or develop what you wanted for the future?
AZ: You decide what relationships are going to be worth it. You look at a director and think this guy is innately a great director and he’s got a bright future. You try and nurture the relationship. This day and age we have to do a little more networking than we used to do. All that does is make sure you befriend the people you are working with on a project so you hopefully carry it over to the next one.
SZ: What is your advice to young composers trying to break into this business?
AZ: You have to be involved in student films. Work on gratis unless you’re going to a school like USC which has a very good film/music department. Berkeley and a few others are good as well. In my opinion USC is probably the strongest in the country so if a student goes through the USC program then they can work on shorts for composers. That way they can develop a reel to show people what they can do. Another suggestion for young people is to find some Indie film where the budget is 2mil and the film makers aren’t going to be able to afford someone with my experience. Although if the film is 2mil and I think it’s going to be the next Oscar contender I will probably do it. If it has great content I will do it.
SZ: Aaron thank you for taking time out of your very busy schedule to speak with me.
*Featured guests are not current nor former clients of Susan Zaro
*This article can also be read @ Examiner
A native of San Diego, Zigman began training as a classical pianist at age six. While in his third year at UCLA, Zigman signed a four year song writing contract with Almo- Irving. In the mid 1980’s he broke in as a studio musician working with producers, Don Was, Gary Katz, Steely Dan and Stewart Levine. From this experience he got a foot in the door and started to get a name for himself as a producer/writer and soon wrote the pop hit, Crush On You for a group called The Jets. In the 1990’s he entered the film industry, with his work being featured on film soundtracks for Mulan, What’s Love Got To Do With It, Bird Cage, License to Kill, Caddyshack and Pocahontas. It was inevitable that Zigman’s lifelong devotion to classical music would eventually lead him to the film scoring stage.
SZ: I was looking at your website and listening to some of your pieces this past week. Your music is just beautiful.
AZ: Thank you I just wrote a seventeen minute piece for cello and piano. It’s a serious concert work.
We had our first concert at the United Methodist Church in Palos Verdes. It was the finale and received a standing ovation. Cellist Andrew Shulman and pianist Robert Thies will be performing my work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) on Sunday, October 4th. The classical station KUSC will be broadcasting the performance live.
SZ: That’s exciting.
AZ: It’s very exciting. The cellist, Andrew Shulman was the principle for the London Philarmonia Orchestra at the age of twenty-one. He worked with that symphony orchestra for fifteen years then came to Los Angeles for the L.A. Philharmonic and then started working in the movie studios. Currently he’s the principle for the L.A. Chamber Orchestra. Andrew concertizes every two weeks and is an incredibly savant cellist. Robert Thies will perform on piano. Even though I’m a very accomplished pianist, it would have taken me six or seven hours a day of practicing to be able to play this piece. That’s why we have concert pianists who dedicate their life to performance art.
SZ: It’s nice for you that you’ve achieved recognition in your field so you have access to these artists that are at the top of their field. What a wonderful place to be.
AZ: I was commissioned to create this piece of work. When I write a piece of this magnitude it’s wonderful to work with musicians who are so experienced they can take the piece to a whole different level.
SZ: Once you’ve written a piece like the one you are describing…
AZ: The process is a collaboration with the artists. Once it’s written I send the material to them and they practice it. First they spend time with the material and work out their parts. Later we meet and start to rehearse.
SZ: Once you’ve written and performed this piece at a later time can you take the material and ….
AZ: Oh yeah, it can be programmed in any orchestra.
SZ: Few people probably know that you are an accomplished tennis player and could have played in college at the Division 1 level. What events happened along the way that shifted your athletic pursuit and talents to a full time music focus?
AZ: I was an accomplished junior tennis player up to around fourteen years old. At fourteen or fifteen I made the decision to venture off to make my life 100% music even though I kept playing through my first year in high school. My high school Point Loma High School had a good team. We had Kelly Jones who became a top professional doubles player. That year we got to the finals of C.I.F. . I think if I had been in really great tennis shape we would have won. I lost to a player who I’d beaten the year before in junior tournaments. I just stopped practicing tennis but I was still playing on the team for the first year and a half of high school. Then I quit because I could not put any more time into tennis.
SZ: What events happened along the way that shifted your athletic pursuits and talents to a full time music focus?
AZ: I’ll tell you exactly the defining moment. At fourteen years old I was at Yale University playing with the Yale tennis team because they were recruiting guys like me who were ranked top in Southern California. I was in my second year of the fourteen’s. I was invited to go on an Ivy League tour. I played with Princeton, Yale and Harvard. When I was visiting Yale one of the team members knew my interest in music and invited me to attend a piano recital. That night there was this amazing pianist who played a free form style of jazz. He played very much in the style of Keith Jarrett. Jarrett had a hugely successful album around that time in the 1970’s called the Köln Concert. It was his tour de force record. So this pianist was playing wild stuff and at that time my facility was almost that good but not quite. By the time I was sixteen I could rip something like that out. But it was during that Yale performance that I had my epiphany. It was so cool. I was very much into jazz at fourteen and fifteen years old. I was into Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, Art Tatum, and Keith Jarrett at that time. It was after that recital I said to myself “I am going to make music my life.”
SZ: Are there lessons that you learned playing competitive tennis that carry over into your work as a composer?
AZ: When you play competitive tennis you are competing against someone else and you have to win. Playing music at that age I didn’t have to win I had to become better within myself. When I lost a tennis match that made me upset or hurt emotionally I would find myself going to the piano and playing for hours. It was my place of refuge and solace. I realized at that time I wasn’t competing against anybody and it was much more doable for me in the sense of an emotional response. Now I am in a business where I am one of the go to guys for film composing. The thing I learned from playing tennis is that I know what competition is. I can handle rejection. You cannot do what I do for a living without having a thick skin. With that said it still does hurt when I lose a film to another composer when I believe I should have gotten the opportunity. So there is competition. It’s almost like I’m back in tennis competing in a way. There are usually about twenty composers vying for the number one spot for a big or medium film.
SZ: What a great place to be. I’d rather be in that spot than the guy in the twenty-first spot.
AZ: My gratitude is that I am almost always on the list of composers who are considered for a movie. I just completed a documentary piece for Antoine Fuqua for the Suge Knight documentary. You know I don’t do a lot of television but this was for Antoine Fuqua one of the greatest directors in the world. He directed South Paw, Training Day, The Equalizer and many more movie hits. Antoine Fuqua is a guy I couldn’t say, “No” to do a thirty-seven minute documentary on Suge Knight. I had to write and deliver the music within a week. It turned out really well. My hope is that I can work for him one day on a big feature.
SZ: Do you have techniques to quiet your mind or environment to access your creativity I would imagine there is some pressure to turn out creative work when there is a dead-line.
AZ: That’s a really good question and sometimes it’s very hard to turn off my brain especially when I have an eighteen hour day. I try to stop working by 10 or 11pm but you know sometimes there is nothing I can do about it. I just completed a five month run on two movies one called Mr. Right with Anna Kendrick, which will be released Nov. 27th and “I Saw The Light,” the Hank Williams story. Both movies were in the recent Toronto Film Festival. In fact Mr. Right closed the festival.
SZ: What do you do if anything to quiet your mind. There’s a lot of pressure when you have a week to deliver a large volume of work. How do you access that creativity?
AZ: Sometimes I just listen to classical pieces of music to take me away from my work. I’ll go on-line and type in Opus 69 #3 Beethoven with Glenn Gould and Lenard Rose playing a recording that was done in 1975. That’s what I kind of do to wash away the notes that I’ve been working on all day. As human beings we need to sleep so that’s kind of one of my little tricks. I have a huge record and cd collection of all kinds of great classical, jazz and all music but I find the internet very accessible and quick.
When I create I don’t think in technical or mathematical terms until the idea is formulated Musical composition is formulated in improvisation. Once a pianist like myself sits down and begins to play and start thinking about what I am writing all of a sudden a little tune will emerge, a little spot light and I’ll go, “That’s interesting.” Then I formulate and keep playing then all of a sudden I’ve created sixteen bars of music that I’m writing out. Then that improvisational experience is turned into a mathematical one. Before my little dots go on my score there’s a lot of thought, preparation and revisiting.
Film writing and concert writing are two very different things. In film writing I am serving the film and it tells you what to write. I have to stay within the parameters of the film. In writing concert music for the stage I can write anything I want and in this day and modern age rules can be broken. Composers can do things that weren’t allowed in the 17th century. Until we had composers like Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff to break the rules. As you well know there was a riot in Paris when The Rite of Spring was played. It was a piece of music people couldn’t handle. They were enraged by it and then somehow the piece became accepted. I like to adhere to form and symmetrical writing but it’s very…
SZ: There’s more flexibility within the art form.
AZ: The best way to get the best score out of me is that I watch the movie without music. A lot of times I walk in after the film has been shot and the music editor or director has already laid in the pieces of music that they like or think that works well with the film. So they say,”We kind of want this but in your own voice.” If I see a cut in its’ raw form I say, “If you temp this you’re going to spoil what could have happened. Just let me demarcate where you want the music.” We will have a music editor in the room and we all agree where the starting part for the music will be and no-one puts any temporary music in and they just let me write the score. That was how I worked on The Notebook. The only score that Nick Cassavetes, the director, temped was a scene which was one of the bigger moments in the film when Ryan Gosling is kissing Rachel McAdams in the boat during a deluge of rain. Cassavetes temped that piece from Out of Africa. It took me four or five drafts to get him to love what I was writing because he was so attached to that piece of music.
SZ: Do you go on set to watch the filming?
AZ: All the time. I’ve probably done this on fifteen or twenty films. I did it on The Notebook. The landscape in South Carolina is breathtaking in certain seasons. I wrote the opening piece before the movie was completed. The solo piano piece during the opening sequence was written before they were even half way done shooting. They edited the sequence to my music instead of the other way around.
SZ: I read where you said, “Visualize the future you want for yourself and one of the key ways to getting there is networking and creating relationships.” How did you know or develop what you wanted for the future?
AZ: You decide what relationships are going to be worth it. You look at a director and think this guy is innately a great director and he’s got a bright future. You try and nurture the relationship. This day and age we have to do a little more networking than we used to do. All that does is make sure you befriend the people you are working with on a project so you hopefully carry it over to the next one.
SZ: What is your advice to young composers trying to break into this business?
AZ: You have to be involved in student films. Work on gratis unless you’re going to a school like USC which has a very good film/music department. Berkeley and a few others are good as well. In my opinion USC is probably the strongest in the country so if a student goes through the USC program then they can work on shorts for composers. That way they can develop a reel to show people what they can do. Another suggestion for young people is to find some Indie film where the budget is 2mil and the film makers aren’t going to be able to afford someone with my experience. Although if the film is 2mil and I think it’s going to be the next Oscar contender I will probably do it. If it has great content I will do it.
SZ: Aaron thank you for taking time out of your very busy schedule to speak with me.
*Featured guests are not current nor former clients of Susan Zaro
*This article can also be read @ Examiner
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