Even if all you caught of the 2020 Democratic National Convention on TV was the opening video sequence – a montage lasting a minute and 45 seconds, titled “We the People” and featuring notable Americans of every description reciting the opening paragraph of the US Constitution, ending with the convention being called to order – you’ve been exposed to the music of New Paltz resident Pete Calandra. The keyboardist, composer and teacher wrote and played every note on that piece, which opens with a Coplandesque fanfare designed to swell the heart of any Democrat.
Calandra also wrote the music for the opening montage for the convention’s keynote address, depicting snippets from memorable keynote speakers going back many decades, as well as a short documentary in which many of the same Dem luminaries who appeared in “We the People” describe what sort of America they hope to see “This Time Next Year.” All three videos can still be viewed online.
While 2020 has been a rough year for people who work in the music industry, Calandra considers himself “very fortunate” to have been keeping busy with work. He signed on to compose the pieces for the DNC 17 days before it started – a schedule that he terms stressful. “It was an incredibly tight deadline, and we had to go through many layers of approval,” he said. For one piece, “I didn’t get the film until Monday, and I needed to have it done by Wednesday to be on the air on Thursday … and we had a power outage in the middle of it.”
Calandra’s move from Manhattan to New Paltz two years ago was prompted by a sense of burnout after decades of performing live in the evenings and composing for TV shows in the daytime, working 50 to 60 hours a week. “I moved up here to slow my life down,” Calandra said.
The referral to score videos for the unconventional convention came because of his international reputation as a composer of themes and film-clip scores for big events for television. Probably his most widely heard piece, reaching at least 150 million soccer fans, has been the FIFA World Cup theme for Fox Sports. “I’ve written at least 40 or 50 theme songs for network sports events,” he said, including the Special Olympics World Games and Invictus Games Theme for ESPN.
Calandra has also composed music year after year to accompany biographical montages for the Kennedy Center honors on CBS, encapsulating the lives and careers of such cultural luminaries as Rita Moreno, Seiji Ozawa, Norman Lear, Al Pacino and George Lucas. He has scored more than 90 films over the course of his career.
Working in the pits
Before becoming the go-to guy for TV sports themes, Calandra honed his art as a pianist and conductor in pit orchestras for Broadway shows, beginning with the original Off-Broadway production of Little Shop of Horrors in 1982, soon after he graduated from Queens College. A mentor of his working on the show brought Calandra in as a substitute keyboard player. He stayed on for five years, becoming music director by the end of the show’s run. Contacts he made there led to steady work in jazz clubs, the Radio City Music Hall Orchestra and on Broadway musicals.
Calandra performed in the Broadway productions of The Lion King, Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera, playing keyboards for Miss Saigon for a full ten years. Spending that much time night after night in the pit together with “people with a wide variety of training and education” created a culture among the orchestra that somewhat resembled a dysfunctional family, he said. “The pit is like a psychology experiment on a long-running show. You’re playing with people and communicating with them on an intimate level. People can get on your nerves, and there can be blow-ups. But we mostly work things out.”
Asked for some wild anecdotes, he demurs. He mentions Mozart in the Jungle, a 2005 memoir by Miss Saigon oboist Blair Tindall that eventually spawned an Amazon video series.
To keep artistically fresh while playing the same musical score night after night, Calandra always tried to mix things up by day: practicing piano and writing music, taking up new instruments, and eventually learning new technologies for programming synthesizers, electronic composition and mixing.
“I’m a creative musician, not a recreative musician,” he said. Even as he expanded his success scoring for film and television – mostly a solo pursuit – his long and deep grounding in playing with large groups has served him well. “A lot of me learning to compose orchestral themes has come from sitting in orchestra pits for more than 25 years. I would listen to how they play their instruments, how it all fits together.”
Life hasn’t slowed down
In recent years, he has been recording and self-releasing solo albums of his own compositions – most recently Carpe Noctem (2018) – which get airplay on Sirius XM and are available for purchase through such platforms as iTunes, Amazon and CD Baby. Wikipedia classifies their genre as New-Age, though many stylistic influences are incorporated in his compositions, and Calandra himself leans more toward the label “ambient.” In fact, he “just okayed the mastering session” for Ambient Tuesdays, Volume I, the first in a planned series of releases of new works that he has been accumulating over the past several years.
Also in process right now is the score for a new documentary for ESPN about Dara Torres, the first American swimmer to appear in five Olympic Games and the oldest US Olympic swimmer in history, winning three silver medals at age 41 in 2008. Calandra is on the faculty at his alma mater, the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College, teaching audio/MIDI, film scoring and music composition to both graduate and undergraduate students – remotely this fall, of course, instead of commuting down to New York City several times a week. “I have so much to do!” he says, half-excited, half-lamenting.
It sounds as though his life hasn’t slowed down all that much since his move upstate, despite Covid 19 putting a gigantic dent in the performing arts. He acknowledges that most of his peers in the music industry are having a harder time right now: “It’s exponentially more difficult now than it’s ever been. There’s no place to play.”
How does he explain his own continuing success? “It takes more than being really good,” he says. “It takes being the right person with the right skills in the right place at the right time.”
To sample Pete Calandra’s music, visit his website at www.petecalandramusic.com and his YouTube page at www.youtube.com/channel/UCCjFoAdqzUpnMw21CJkov8A.
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