Jeff Elmassian

You can't accuse composer Jeff Elmassian of not taking chances in life.  This gifted clarinetist has used his belief in taking risks and gaining experience to go from winning orchestral competitions as a child to scoring feature films to co-forming a new sound house, Endless Noise Productions.

After years of competitions, Elmassian won the Los Angeles Philharmonic Student Stars Competition and debuted with the L.A. Philharmonic at age 12.  The 40 to 50 competitions he was doing every year cured any stage fright he had.  “It's very important for people to get experience and go after opportunities," he says, "rather than to sit back and wait."  Thanks to such grueling development, Elmassian now has "the confidence to throw myself out there and let someone else decide if I'm fine."

After studying with Mitchell Lurie at USC and while only a few years into his career, he decided to switch from performing to mostly composing.  "It was a hard transition because I'd entrenched myself as a session player, and I had to leave that behind to do things that were much less lucrative."  It eventually paid off as Elmassian got his first film break with "Inside Monkey Zetterland" and connected with soundtrack composer Thomas Newman.  He has since helped in scoring several Newman works, including "The Shawshank Redemption," "Fried Green Tomatoes" and "Scent of a Woman."

Elmassian joined the commercial jingle house Machinehead in 1993 and established a strong rapport with sound designer Ken Johnson.  They enjoyed the quick creative process of scoring commercials and also the sonic possibilities of marrying acoustic and electronic instruments.

They went on to form their own house, Endless Noise, with producer John Bashew in 1994.  Elmassian already sees Endless Noise becoming a more full-service company and moving beyond sound design to become a complete postproduction house with the ability to create film soundtracks and interactive multimedia CD-ROMs.  Of course, they're applying the same old lessons about risk taking to constantly expand the team's repertoire.  "You really have to be fearless about putting your abilities out there," Elmassian says.  "The more you know about what you're doing, the more you'll feel empowered to take a chance at doing any number of things."

John Colby

You might say John Colby has the sports world covered. Colby was music director of ESPN from 1984 to 1993, a period that allowed him to shape the network's identity.  From auto racing and the American Sports Awards (The ESPYs) to the well-known "DA-DA-DA" Sportscenter theme, he has been the sound of ESPN.

He has also composed for NBC's Olympics, football, Superbowl, and tennis coverage, and most notably Ken Burns’s PBS miniseries "Baseball" and "The Civil War", for which Colby won a Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album.  Noting the irony of being unrecognized by people who've heard his music, he says: "The top-rated PBS show was 'The Civil War', and the top-rated network program was the Superbowl. So I have this distinction of 'You don't know me but...'"

After early sink-or-swim experiences in the musical direction of stage shows, Colby spent hours studying with Adolph Sendoli, learning key transposition.  More jobs followed, but Colby was getting restless.

Burns's call led to scoring the 1982 documentary "The Brooklyn Bridge," and Colby lost interest in stage shows.  "I love the challenge of writing to picture," he says. "The project's under pressure, and then you're done and you move on to the next thing.  You're not spending eight months doing it."  The creativity involved in landing a job, he says, is as important as in performing a job. "The highs of my life," he says, "come when a guy calls and says, 'John, you've got it!'"

Frustrated with closed doors at the networks, Colby was watching the fledgling ESPN in 1984 and said to himself, "I could do this!"  A cold call to ESPN landed him the newly created position of music coordinator, "and by 1987 nearly every theme was mine," he says. "I defined the sound of the network. It was an amazing opportunity."

Colby, who just composed ESPN's "Great Voices of the Game" profile of baseball announcers, believes the most important qualification is clear communication with producers.  "They may be describing what they want in nonmusical terms," he says.  "My job is to put that into music.  There's nothing that comes out of my studio that I'm not proud of."

Jay Semko

Good things happen when you least expect them, and for Jay Semko, composing the music for the CBS show "Due South" was a happy accident.  After 10 years of playing in the band the Northern Pikes, Semko retreated to his hometown of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, to rethink career plans after their breakup in 1992.  "I was out on the windblown prairies," Semko says from his work base in Toronto, "and I got a call from an agent about 'Due South'.  Producer Paul Haggis told me he wanted a Northern Pikes sound for the theme song."

After an enthusiastic response to his demo, Semko found himself in his first scoring gig with musicians John McCartney and Jack Lenz.

Although his gut instincts guide the creative process of scoring "Due South", he insists it's a partnership and credits Haggis with being "willing to say, 'Let's go way out on a limb here.  Let's play against a scene.'  It gives you a lot of freedom."  He measures his result with a subjective yardstick.  "Try to be yourself within the music you create," he says.  "If you can leave a bit of your personality in the music, that will leave an impression with someone else."

A Canadian-America co-production, "Due South" tells of a Mountie on loan to detectives in a tough Chicago precinct.

Semko often relies on acoustic instruments to lend an airy Celtic feel to the score, an apt connection to Canada's large Scottish-English ancestry.  However, "because the Mountie is in Chicago, sometimes it needs a street vibe," he says.

The show often plays upon Canadians' reputation for being more polite than Americans.  Has Semko recognized this trait?  "I think that's probably true," he says, laughing at the notion.  "Canadians are quite polite -- maybe because we have the queen.  Maybe we say please and thank you more or something.  The differences are subtle, but they are there."  He's also proud of the good-guy image of the lead character.  "My uncle's a Mountie, and my cousin's a Mountie," he says.  "You grow up with great respect for them."

Laura Karpman

Most children wonder what they'll do when they grow up, but Laura Karpman didn't have a choice.  "It was pre-ordained," she says laughing.  "My mother decided before I was born that I was going to be a composer."  And compose she has – everything from creating music as a child for the "Huck Finn" stories she'd read to composing intricate soundtracks for miniseries.  Karpman says she "can't ever remember not thinking this was what I was going to do."

Grounded in classical composition, her dedication led her to Juilliard.  "The thing that comes in handy every moment of every day of my life," Karpman says, "is a fantastic education. I was fortunate to have gone to Juilliard."

Following her training, the Los Angeles native returned to California and got her first taste of technology's impact on music.  "I saw synthesizers and computers work together for the first time," she says, "and I flipped.  I thought it was the whole future of music."  Her work routine now revolves around digital manipulation of her scores.  "To have that technology here is a great advantage.  I'm constantly writing, then sequencing and then looking at something with picture."

Karpman cut her teeth on many telefilms and with documentaries on earthquakes, the Exxon Valdez oil spill and "The Los Angeles History Project" for KCET/PBS.  She says her most satisfying work has been two six-hour miniseries: "A Century of Women," directed by Oscar-winning documentarian Barbara Koppel; and "A Woman of Independent Means.

Speaking of women, she's aware of their paucity in her field. "Being a woman is always an issue," she laments. "It either works in your favor or works against you. But it has helped me more than it has ever hurt."

The last five years, she admits, have been a steady climb.  "Every year I've had more work and better projects," Karpman says, "but I think I'm coming toward a crossroad." Karpman wants to score movies, believing theaters are better for music than television because of TV sets' small speakers.  "Everything that I do is a challenge," she says, "but I'm constantly learning. I'm having a great time."

Cynthia Miller

Cynthia Miller certainly is passionate about what it takes to be a film composer.  "If you don't love the movies then forget it," she states flatly.  "It's almost more important to love movies than to love writing music because you've got to adore the process of film."  This enthusiasm engenders faith from directors, she says, "because a lot of work we do has to be taken on trust.  You therefore have to seem trustworthy."

Apparently, directors do find her trustworthy, because since her introduction to the Ondes Martenot, a peculiar electronic instrument fromt he 1920s, this English expatriate has become its preeminent authority and has earned more than 100 credits as a performer and composer, inclusing assisting every Elmer Bernstein production since 1981.

Raised as a piano soloist, Millar's love of literature bred her interest in opera and music writing while she studied English at Oxford.  Her initial forays in composition led her to a music festivla where she met Bernstein and Richard Rodney Bennett, who inspired Millar and Bernstein's interest in the Ondes.  Bernstein hired Millar to investigate using the Ondes in his animated film "Heavy Metal".

Her first film composition project was Martha Collidge's "Crazy in Love".  Subsequent composing credits have included "The Grifters", "Rambling Rose", and "The Field".

Having just completed a Celtic-influenced score for "The Run of the Country" with director Peter Yates, Millar is now finishing "Three Wishes" with Coolidge.  She'll then start the assignment about which she is most proud: composing the music for a Smithsonian museum video exhibit on the history of the First Ladies.

Robert Walsh

Some people hate the seemingly endless hours spent in studios, but composer Robert Walsh relishes the time.  In fact, he practically lives in the studio when a project is ongoing.  "I've been known to have directors sleep on the studio floor," he says.  "I go to the wall, man.  I go for weeks.  I'm used to it."

Walsh began his career creating ad jingles and then, pulling up his roots from the blues clubs on Chicago's South Side, he joined a touring company of "Jesus Christ Superstar" for three years before settling into Los Angeles.

"Explore every avenue and work really hard," he recommends to young composers.  There's no specific plan, he warns; "You'll just have to work like hell.  It's a combination of a lot of things: timing, hard work, talent, opportunity, luck.  I've had music in more than 2,000 titles, so I've been pretty fortunate to get that kind of exposure."

His varied experience led to a fruitful association with the legendary Friz Freleng as musical director of Warner Animation before a brief stop at Hanna-Barbera.  He then landed at Marvel Animation as musical director.  The pinnacle of his animation career was two Emmy nominations for "Muppet Babies" with Jim Henson.

Walsh has since gone on to scoring feature films, such as "Revenge of the Ninja", and here he feels most at home.  "I like good action movies with a story to tell," he says.

He's currently composing and producing the Hollywood Film Music Library, put out by Zomba Music, and for 1995 he will have 19 albums to write and produce for Zomba's production library, and will probably do three features.