Hollywood Producer Andy Hill to Head New Music Composition for the Screen
Graduate Degree
'The Screen' does not merely refer to the big and silver one anymore, but includes television, videos, websites and digital games. 'Composition' moves in a trajectory from traditional orchestration to sound design utilizing a dizzying array of electronic, digital and ambient elements. An artist in today's society must integrate the business aspects of their craft along with creativity and technical prowess to succeed and endure.
Columbia College Chicago's Music Department chairman Dick Dunscomb took all of these trends and imperatives into account when developing the curriculum for the college's new Master of Fine Arts in Music Composition for the Screen degree.
'The program taps into the combined knowledge and technical resources of our production oriented programs ' Music; Film and Video; Television; Audio Arts and Acoustics; Theater; Arts, Entertainment and Media Management and our new Video Game Design major,' explains Dunscomb. 'It will offer the complete interdisciplinary education students need to be successful in the multi-faceted music scoring industry.'
In development for two years, Dunscomb and Provost Steven Kapelke worked with an interdisciplinary team of educators: Leonard Lehrer, dean of Columbia's school of fine and performing arts; Keith Cleveland, dean of graduate administration; Michael Niederman, chair of the Columbia television department; Bruce Sheridan, chair of the film and video department; Douglas Jones, chair of the Audio Arts and Acoustics department; Gustavo Leone, coordinator of Columbia's undergraduate music composition program; and Chicago composer Cliff Colnot. The team surveyed other composing programs across the country as well as industry needs and expectations. What they found is that only one other school offers a comparable graduate program. 'We wanted to ensure that students coming out of our program are at the top of their form and have the theoretical, critical and creative education, plus the technical training necessary to work in their chosen field,' says Dunscomb.
The highly selective admissions process is open to candidates who hold undergraduate degrees in music, sound design, music composition and a range of other artistic disciplines. In part because Columbia boasts the largest film and video school in the world, Dunscomb and Kapelke feel strongly that this focused MFA will prove very popular. In fact, the composition program's culminating experience is participation in the college's nationally recognized Semester in LA in which students spend a term working with industry professionals in Columbia's facility on the CBS Studio lot.
'Semester in LA has proven to be the key point-of-entry for many of our film, television and screenwriting graduates,' explains Kapelke. 'We are the only school with a facility on a studio lot. This is where so many of our students land the internships and establish the networks that translate into jobs. We have hundreds of alumni and other Columbia stakeholders working in the arts and entertainment industry in Los Angeles who are available to mentor their next generation of colleagues.'
To this end, the college has recently named Andrew Warren Hill as Director of the Music Composition for the Screen program. Hill comes to Columbia with a wealth of experience as a music producer, composer, writer and teacher.
Hill is best known among his Hollywood peers for his association with Disney's many Academy Award winning musicals, beginning in 1989 with The Little Mermaid and continuing uninterrupted through Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Dick Tracy, Pocahontas and The Lion King.
'It was a wonderful time to be there,' says Hill, 'a superb team under [head of Music] Chris Montan, and a great string of films, and the peak experience for me was brokering the marriage of Elton John's original songs for The Lion King to the pop African sensibilities of Hans Zimmer and Lebo Morake and helping to deliver Disney's biggest and first truly global hit.'
After his departure from Disney Studios in 1996, Hill continued to work for Disney as an independent music supervisor and producer on such projects as James and the Giant Peach, Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella, Annie (with Chicago director Rob Marshall) and the current Disneytoons series Princess Stories. He also supervised music for Fox, MGM, Warner Brothers and Sony. In 2000, he won a Grammy for Producer/Best Musical Album for Children for his work on Sony's Elmo in Grouchland.
At Columbia College Chicago, Hill will develop and guide curriculum, establish and maintain industry contacts and teach classes. Hill comes to the college equipped with a significant level of 'institutional knowledge'. Since 1999 he has been teaching music composition for film in the college's Semester in L.A. program and, back in the early 1980s, he even put in a stint for Columbia's Department of Film and Video as Production Manager and instructor of Music for Filmmakers. Hill will come to the windy city in March.
Hill holds a BFA in Film/Music from the Tisch School of the Arts and has done graduate studies in orchestration and composition at UCLA. Following graduation from Tisch, Hill spent seven years on the road as a touring musician with a series of bands including Chicago's TigerTiger. Hill's musicianship led to requests from a number of Columbia College filmmakers for original scores. This in turn sent him to LA to 'seek his fortune' in the field of film music.
A true Columbia College-style renaissance man, Hill is also a writer. He is the author of Enoch's Portal (Champion Press 2002), a spiritual thriller and winner of a best new sci-fi award from the Independent Publishers Association. Portal was optioned by Paramount Pictures for film development under director Alex Proyas (I, Robot). He assisted Dr. Mani Bhaumik, co-inventor of the excimer laser, in the preparation of his spiritual memoir, Code Name God (Crossroads 2005). Hill's feature screenplay, Telsa, is under option to In The Bedroom producer Brad Yonover.
'I'd like for this program to be a model,' says Hill of the new MFA, 'and I know that Dick Dunscomb and Dr. Carter [Columbia's president] share that goal. Filmmakers and other creators of visual media are desperate for composers who understand drama, and I believe we can develop them at Columbia. In fact, I'm not sure there's another school in the country that could to this as well. I'm tremendously grateful for the support that people like Bruce Sheridan, Mike Niederman and Doug Jones have lent this vision.'
Department Chair Dick Dunscomb notes that 'Andy is eminently qualified for this position. He has the energy, enthusiasm, professionalism, talent and industry connections that we need for our program. In many ways Andy's course (in the Semester in LA program) was the pilot for the entire MFA Music Composition for the Screen degree. He is a master of both the arts and business side of the program and entirely comprehends the need for deep learning on both the theory and practice side of the equation. We are not about training starving artists at Columbia, our intent is always to educate working and successful artists.'
To obtain additional information about Columbia's MFA in Music Composition for the Screen call 312-344-6149.