Welcome!

This is the official blog series for the Music Composition for the Screen MFA program at Columbia College Chicago!

[flickr id=”6151878630″ thumbnail=”medium” overlay=”true” size=”original” group=”” align=”none”] I am your host, Mason Kaye.  I will be guiding you on your tour of a top-tier graduate program (there are only a handful in the country) at an amazing and vibrant school.  Chicago itself is a wonderful city, not too big and not too small.  

This blog series will navigate the day-to-day life of attending school at Columbia College Chicago, specifically in the Music Composition for the Screen program.  It’s a mouthful, I generally refer to it as “the film scoring program”.  I’ll also be detailing what it’s like living in a city like Chicago.

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The Folks

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I go to school with 20 awesome composers.  There are 11 in the class of 2012.   We come from all over.  I was born in San Francisco, raised in Oregon, and spent 6 years in LA for college and then work.  We have people from all over the United States, as well as Colombia and Taiwan.

The Tech

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We each have a workstation in our music lab.  We use 2 monitors, a MIDI keyboard, and an audio interface that gives us recording capability.  Most of us have our own gear at our home studios, but these work stations free us up to work at school if we need to, and are also great for people who don’t have their own gear.  There are 13 of these stations, plus a master control computer (not unlike the one in Tron).  We also have two large flat screens, some excellent speakers, and our own server.  All in all, that’s a lot of gear, and it sits behind a well locked door.  I’m not giving you my code, I’ll get in trouble.  

Things to Expect  

Besides detailing life attending Columbia College Chicago, I will be reviewing films and their scores (we see a lot of films in theaters in order to stay current), as well as uploading current projects I’m working on for school and in the professional world.  I hope to hear from any of you about all the aspects of the blog, or all of you about any aspects of the blog.  Both are good for me.  

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