APPLETON, WIS. — “Creators: Commercial Music Careers,” an open forum for individuals interested in careers as composers and songwriters of pop, jazz, film, television, radio, and media music, takes place at 1:00 p.m. February 10 in Harper Hall, located in the Music-Drama Center on the Lawrence University campus.
Hosting this educational event is Fred Sturm, director of jazz and improvisational music at Lawrence University and a jazz, orchestral, and media music composer. “This forum will give interested composers and songwriters the opportunity to ask questions about what to study, how to prepare themselves, and what they need to know about commercial music as a potential career,” said Sturm. “Our area high schools and universities effectively inform aspiring composers about the worlds of jazz and classical music. But commercial music careers frequently get short shrift, for institutions typically assume that music students will explore pop, film, TV, radio, and media music on their own.”
The guest panel for the day includes Maury Laws, John Harmon, Lovell Ives, and Patty Darling. Laws, is the music director for “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” the renowned Rankin/Bass animated television specials and films, and arranger for Fred Astaire, Danny Kaye, Angela Lansbury, Burl Ives, Danny Thomas, Art Carney, Judy Collins, and Ethel Merman. Harmon is a composer of music for jazz, orchestral, choral, and chamber ensembles, a former composer and pianist with Matrix, he has music recorded on RCA, Warner Brothers, and Pablo Records, and was the featured artist on Marian McPartland’s PianoJazz.
Ives is the retired director of the Green Bay Packers Band, the retired director of jazz studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, conductor of the annual Cerebral Palsy Telethon in Green Bay, instructor at the Institute of Advanced Musical Study in Crans, Switzerland, and renowned composer and arranger of jazz, pop, and commercial music. Darling is a composer and producer for numerous industrial, film, television, and radio commercial music productions, a staff composer for Saxe Productions in Appleton, and an outstanding jazz, classical, and media music composer.
“We’re blessed to have some of the most respected and diversely experienced commercial music composers serving on our panel. They’ll have meaningful answers to most the questions coming from their audience,” said Sturm.
