Andrew Edwards: Professor

Andrew Edwards (Drew) is one of the professors here in the Music Composition for the Screen program. In my opinion, he’s one of the best we got. He teaches first- and second-year graduate students in Film & Film Music History and Game Scoring. He knows more than anyone I have ever met about the topic of Film, and he is an active composer with some exciting projects. He is an excellent composer and a good friend. It was great to be able to ask him some questions and I hope this gives you more insight into the quality professors we have here.

Tell us a little bit about yourself (background, education, what you were doing before coming to Columbia, etc.)

I was born and raised in Urbana, Illinois (downstate), where I received my BA in Music Composition/Theory from the U of I at Urbana-Champaign. After graduation, I moved to Chicago and began teaching music and theatre for the Chicago Park District. In 2000, I left Chicago for Connecticut, where I taught music and theatre at the Hyde School (a college prep boarding school) in Woodstock. Two years later, I left Hyde, played some gigs in England with singer/songwriter John Carlin, and relocated to Brooklyn. I spent the next 5 years there scoring indie films, writing musicals, putting out pop albums, playing with bands, and doing live audio engineering around the city (including a couple of Off-Broadway shows and the TriBeCa Film Festival). In 2007, I came back to Chicago to be a part of the second class of the MFA Screen Music program at Columbia. After graduating in 2009, I came back from LA to start my own studio (Blue Police Box Music), and in 2011 I began teaching in the MFA program.