Finding your Yellow Brick Road
by Ivo Witteveen
Ask composers how they started their career and you will gather a cornucopia of anecdotes essentially describing ‘getting their first break’. It seems we all had that one project, those unique circumstances or that chance meeting propelling us from aspiration to profession.
But how do you progress after you have been a professional composer for a few years? You have grown older, as have your clients. The ‘new kid on the block’ freshness that helped you get started, is starting to wear a little thin. People you work with have moved on to more senior positions, often less directly involved with commissioning music - and thus becoming less valuable prospects. At some point, your freelance career might take a downward turn, simply because your clients are moving towards retirement. Or maybe you start noticing how that mid-life angst has slowly crept up on you. You could very well be the type of person who likes to plan ahead instead of waiting for things to happen to them. Regardless of the situation, you will ask yourself ’what do I do next?’
Fortunately, you are not the only one facing this issue. And as composers, we look for inspiration elsewhere: What have other composers done and what is common in the creative industry? Perhaps you will decide to grow your business and take on younger composers and staff. You might follow Hans Zimmer’s example and fashion your business after his Remote Control Productions. Maybe even liken yourself to architects and designers who typically grow via a partnership to running a design company. The Dutch creative landscape offers various interesting examples, especially in the advertising industry, of music production houses that have grown to employ many composers and deliver work to international acclaim.
Yet, striving for continuous growth of your business is not the only way forward. After all, music composition is a highly personal thing. As one of my earliest mentors used to say: “There are jobs that only you can do, and jobs that anyone can do.” Instead of broadening towards doing more work with more people, why not focus on the work ‘only you can do’? For each Hans Zimmer branching out, there is an Alexandre Desplat building a career project-to-project. In fact, some of the most successful independent film composers in the current Dutch scene started to flourish after having left the music companies they started out with. Also, be aware that many of the music production houses mentioned earlier were established by sales people — not composers. Passionate about music, for sure - and very good at their work, which is managing a music company. Not composing music. In your career you might be doing a bit of both, of course - but these are different things…
So how do you determine what direction suits you best? My advice would be to ask yourself this admittedly blunt question: ‘Do I want to be in the business of creating music, or in the business of selling music?’ May wisdom be the spark that lights your fire.
