The one rule we would suggest for you to follow in order to carve a place for
yourself in the music world is not to follow any rules (except maybe this one).
If you are composing for yourself, you have only yourself to please. If your
music sounds like everyone else’s, you won’t leave much of an impression.
Nearly every composer who has earned the honor of being remembered did
something new when they were composing. We don’t remember the copies,
only the originals. If no one is commissioning your work, you have nothing to
lose by being genuinely original. On the other hand, remember that there is
really nothing new under the sun. You are working with the same twelve
tones that everyone else has had to work with. But that doesn’t mean you
can’t put things together in new ways.Composing Teams .......................................................................................
One good, tried-and-true way to get work in film, television, or video game
scoring is to apply to work with a composing team. Composing teams are com-
panies that are contacted directly by production companies to write and per-
form scores for their films, shows, and games. Many professional musiciansChapter 17: Composing Commercial Music and Songs 217
Mark Mothersbaugh, founder of Mutato Muzika
I got involved in scoring films because a friend
of mine, Paul Reubens, asked me if I would
score a TV show for him. And that’s kind of
where it started, with Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.
Since then, I’ve done music supervision, I’ve
done scoring, and I also write songs for films,
too. Sometimes I just come in for a couple of
days and write a song, depending on what the
movie is, or what the company needs. For some
of my projects, like Rugrats, for instance, I wrote
eight or nine songs that ended up being part of
the characters’ dialog — music that ended up
being integral to the movie, as opposed to writ-
ing songs that were added onto the storyline.
When people come to me for film scores, it’s
usually because they heard something I did that
made them interested. A while ago, I scored a
movie called Welcome to Collinwoodthat was
a very, very small film. It was kind of OscarPeterson/Django Reinhardt, very fast bebop
jazz, and immediately afterwards, people are
calling me up about that because they were
looking for someone who could do that type of
retro music.
There are people who have heard things I did in
Devo or like the projects I’ve done with Wes
Anderson, and they’re looking for that kind of
sound. I rarely get called to do horror films. I’ve
done television projects that were horror pro-
jects, but feature films — you know, people tend
to get categorized, and so they end up going to
a Marco Beltrami or a Chris Young for horror
soundtracks, since they’ve both done so many
of those types of scores. And then those guys,
too, they have the same dilemma where they
don’t want to be typecast horror-movie guys, so
they actively seek out projects where they can
break out of the genre.