This past weekend, while more than 5,000 delegates and alternates were wending their ways from all over the US to Chicago to participate in the 2024 Democratic Convention, one man with a rare and valuable skillset was squirreled away in a tiny studio in New Paltz, working feverishly to meet a major deadline. His mission: to compose the musical scores for three biographical snippets about presidential nominee Kamala Harris, to be aired on succeeding nights during the convention.
The last time HV1 checked in with composer, keyboard player and teacher Pete Calandra (https://hudsonvalleyone.com/2020/09/11/democratic-convention-featured-music-by-new-paltz-based-composer-pete-calandra), he had just finished a similar gig of scoring short films for the “virtual” Democratic Convention that took place during the thick of the COVID-19 lockdown in the summer of 2020. He had been working on a tight schedule back then, but 2024 has proved even more challenging. “We knew about it a month in advance for 2020,” he says. “This year we got only about a couple of weeks’ notice, because of the nature of the campaign.”
Calandra is referring, of course, to President Joe Biden’s announcement on July 21 that he was dropping his candidacy in favor of Harris. Whatever had been previously planned as programming for the big show in Chicago’s United Center from August 19 to 22 was suddenly off the table, and new mini-documentaries needed to be written, edited and scored. Enter Lookalike Productions, a video production service based in Englewood, New Jersey, run by Nancy Stern Winters, Lisa Lax and Amanda Postel. Calandra has been working with them for more than 20 years, scoring short films for such prestigious events as the Kennedy Center Honors and a variety of sports extravaganzas including the Special Olympics World Games.
“They called me on Tuesday last week,” Calandra recounts, meaning August 6. “On Friday we had a conversation where we went through every film… I took all these notes, and then wrote a piece for each film that was around two to three minutes long.” He structured his compositions in sections of 30 to 40 seconds, which could then be tweaked to fit the timing of the edited video footage. There’s a lot of back-and-forth between composer and filmmakers before the clips can even be sent to the convention organizers for their comments, he says, but Calandra and his collaborators at Lookalike have got the drill down. “I know how they put a story together. I also know what kind of music they like.”
While generally eschewing labels, Calandra leans toward “ambient” as a descriptor of the style of music that he typically composes, though various of his works might also be categorized as world music, jazz, contemporary jazz, New Age, pop and neoclassical. In the past decade, he has released three albums of his original work: First Light, The Road Home and Carpe Noctem. As a film and TV composer, he has scored more than 100 films and written more than 2,000 compositions for television, including “at least 40 or 50 theme songs for network sports events.” Probably his most widely heard piece, reaching at least 150 million soccer fans, has been the FIFA World Cup Theme for Fox Sports.
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 at both the graduate and undergraduate level. His long and distinguished live performing career, mainly as a keyboard player, was launched soon after he graduated in 1982, when one of his mentors brought him in as a substitute keyboard player on the original Off-Broadway production of Little Shop of Horrors. 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, including The Lion King, Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera. He played keyboards for Miss Saigon for a full ten years.
All the while that he was playing out live in the evenings, Calandra was spending his daytime hours composing original music, taking up new instruments and learning innovative technologies for programming synthesizers, electronic composition and mixing. In 2018 he relocated his home from New York City to New Paltz, “to slow my life down,” he says. There, inspired by a long-ago high school teacher who transformed a piano practice room into a recording studio with a mini-Moog and a four-track recorder, he has created his own 12-by-14-foot den of musical wizardry. The walls, windows and ceiling are buffered with “sound treatment” panels, bass traps and thick theater curtains, “to get rid of as many reflections as possible.”
On either side stand analog synthesizers that can be used for live composition, routed into a mixing console. But because the time was so short to produce the scores for the Democratic Convention pieces, in this case he was “using sample libraries and doing everything inside the computer.” His favored software includes Pro Tools for composing and Piano Roll for editing. The samples of notes on every imaginable instrument are archived at AIR Studios at Lyndhurst Hall in London, founded by longtime Beatles producer/arranger George Martin and now run by his son Giles. During a lull in production while waiting for feedback from the filmmakers, Calandra treated HV1 to a demonstration of how these clips from what he terms musical “food groups” can be electronically massaged into a nearly infinite range of sound dynamics. “This is how everybody in Hollywood does it these days,” he says, “except for John Williams. He’s about the last one who still composes on paper.”
We were allowed a sneak peek at a rough cut of the film about Kamala Harris’ childhood set to screen on Monday evening, titled The Protector. “This one’s score is finished. It has the sweetest sound,” Calandra says. The son of an Italian immigrant, he notes how relatable the short video makes the candidate seem, emphasizing her upbringing as the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father in Oakland, California. The mini-biopic begins with “ethereal strings” and ends on a more dramatic note, as Harris’ sister recounts a time when Kamala offered refuge to a high school classmate who was fleeing incestuous abuse in her own home. The tone of the music will grow ever more stirring and inspiring, Calandra says, in the second film, The Prosecutor, scheduled for Tuesday, and The Fighter, on Wednesday.
“To write one of these pieces of music takes me 10 or 12 hours. I start with a template, and then create a sonic world that this film is going to inhabit,” he explains. To be able to accomplish this gracefully, under extreme time pressure in the ever-surprising world of contemporary politics, is a talent worthy of our admiration indeed.
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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