Meet Ethan Algazi

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ethan Algazi.

Ethan, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I’ve always wanted to write music for film. When I was little, I would play around with GarageBand and notation software and eventually found a love for instrumental music, writing, and arranging for school ensembles. I briefly thought I would go into concert and contemporary music but quickly discovered that the appeal of writing music was tied pretty inseparably with storytelling and supporting the narrative of a larger work.

I got my undergraduate degree in film scoring at CalState Northridge and had the opportunity to collaborate with some really inspiring filmmakers and composers. During the pandemic, I decided that the seemingly indomitable challenge of breaking into the industry would be less daunting as a team. So, along with a group of fellow CSUN graduates, I founded Atemporal Productions, a film composer collective with the purpose of creating projects that showcase orchestral music. During the next three years we released seven albums and a multimedia collaboration with a number of well-known artists and an 80-piece orchestra at Budapest Scoring.

This year, I finished my master’s in Screen Scoring from USC and have a number of exciting collaborations to be announced in the coming months.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
For the most part, it’s been a fairly smooth road. I’ve been fortunate enough to have parents who support me in my goals as a composer and musician––something that I know is absolutely not the case for everyone, particularly in music. I did somehow manage to graduate from CSUN right before the pandemic and then from USC right before the strike, so finding work hasn’t been easy, but overall I can’t complain. I like burrowing down and working on passion projects, so in that sense, again, I’m fairly fortunate.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I love orchestral and hybrid orchestral music. I know that writing electronic music is also part of the gig–and it absolutely has its place, but I definitely believe that the potential of the orchestra–namely as a collection of people in a room (instrumentation aside) with a common musical goal––has not yet been exhausted.

I’ve also always had a love for songwriting and have spent the last year or so exploring theater and film musicals as a way of tying in my love for creative writing with my music.

In terms of your work and the industry, what are some of the changes you are expecting to see over the next five to ten years?
In general, I consider myself an optimist, but I do think that the value of custom music is decreasing as a result of the extent to which our lives have been saturated with content. As a society, we’re definitely moving away from consuming media in a way that justifies to its creators the amount of money that it costs to pay composers for their time. That being said, great to see content democratized and different voices given a platform to express themselves, but it’s going to be interesting to see what that means for composers.

It’s sort of an interesting dichotomy, too, because it seems like people’s love for music in general is the same. You see the way that people are fans of artists, the amount they pay to get a concert ticket, or how they wait in line for three hours for merch, and there there’s not doubt that music plays a significant role in their lives.

I think ultimately, as long as there are filmmakers who are doing it for the “art”, who value the human interaction that comes with the filmmaker/composer relationship, or who are maybe nostalgic for the films were made before library music–and soon AI–were so easily accessible and affordable, there’s going to be space for people to keep expressing themselves artistically through film music. I’m not sure what it means for film music as a career though.

All this being said, and apologies for the slightly bleak outlook, I’m excited to see what the immediate future holds for the profession. We are totally saturated with content, but I think that also leads to innovation, which could in tern lead to the next iteration of what custom music could look like.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://play.reelcrafter.com/G9j_8qxhRuWCmKmajQfLUQ
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ethanalgazi/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/ethanalgazi

Image Credits
Amanda Dayhoff, Christian Amonson