Hello everyone, and congratulations to those of you who have been accepted into the MFA film scoring program here at Columbia! I am very excited to meet you and get a chance to know you all. For those of you who were not accepted, never stop trying. There is always a new year and a new chance for possibilities.

These past few weeks have been very exciting. Working with Eimear Noone and Craig Stuart Garfinkle (World of Warcraft composers) has been an absolute treat.Outside of working with Eimear and Craig, the first-year class has been studying The Planets and The Rite of Spring like crazy recently, along with a number of other film scores and classic scores. I personally bought The Rite of Spring on vinyl and plan on score reading with some tea every morning. Although I had studied the piece, as well as The Planets, in undergrad, I recently gained a much deeper love for them.

As first-years we are also currently taking a class called The Film Score; A Survey of the Craft, which is pretty similar to the Film History class we had to take last semester. Except instead of analyzing the different aspects of a film, we’re mainly only looking at the score and what it does for specific scenes.

Every week we watch a film and analyze the score, and sometimes we get music playlists to take notes on. We are currently attempting to compose in the style of Bernard Herrmann; more specifically, we have to compose in the style of Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho score.

Last but not least, an alum, Jesi Nelson, has recently posted some wonderful news on Facebook. Jesi graduated from the program last year. I recently spoke to her about how the industry is out in California. Although she said that it has been tough, she recently let us know that she is currently an additional composer for the Lego Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures TV series for Mike Kramer. She’s currently writing for an 86-piece orchestra!

We all have to pay our dues in order to get in the industry, but Jesi’s success story is inspiring. Congrats Jesi! And congrats to all the admitted MFA students, too!