Meet Tai Schiavo

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Tai Schiavo a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Tai, so good to have you with us today. We’ve always been impressed with folks who have a very clear sense of purpose and so maybe we can jump right in and talk about how you found your purpose?

Honestly, it’s always seemed like my purpose found me – I didn’t have much of a choice. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved music. I remember when I was in the third grade choir, there was an eight bar piano interlude in one of the songs we were singing. I would look forward to lunchtime just to hear those eight bars. I think I liked the piano because I could hear how multiple notes interacted with each other. I begged my parents for a piano and I got an old sixty-six key Casio keyboard from my uncle, I think. I spent most of my time growing locked away in my room playing the piano. My favorite thing to do was write my own “songs.” I actually have a manuscript book, a gift from my grandmother, full of music I wrote when I was a kid. Everything is so poorly notated – I had no idea how to write music down, I could just play the sounds I heard in my head. What’s funny is that looking back on those compositions I still recognize my musical voice as if I’m looking in a mirror. Perhaps I’ll release those pieces. I was in high school when I discovered film scoring. I saw music for film as the ultimate musical purpose – music crafted with such specific intent to emotionally move an audience and transport them into other worlds. Now I’m twenty-one, I graduated from Berklee’s screen scoring program in May, and moved here to Hollywood last month to write music for films.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

A very literal description of what I do is sing to myself for hours a day while arm wrestling technology, but as most people understand it, I’m a composer, and I create music.

I suppose my composing career started in high school. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but right when I got to high school as a freshman, my peers in the music department figured out that I had a knack for putting notes together, and I immediately became the guy to call for any music needing to be written or arranged. I think it was all the time I spent experimenting at the piano growing up that made me very familiar with the DNA of music (and why I still can’t throw a football). I discovered film scoring in high school and decided one day to structure my future around that and go to Berklee. Low and behold, the same thing that happened when I got to high school happened when I got to Berklee. I have a very vivid memory of locking myself in my dorm all day on my nineteenth birthday (two months after I got to Berklee) and finishing two arrangements for that season of American Idol, while feeding myself with a box of Dots candy that my grandmother sent me in the mail.

I’ve worked on many kinds of writing and arranging projects, but most of the work I do now is writing music for films. Writing for films is its own beast, but it’s a beast I love like a son, and probably feed too regularly. It definitely takes a different skill set than writing music just for music’s sake – you have to be able to understand the emotions of the story and the characters so well, down to the nuance of every line and small facial movement of each actor. So much so to the point where you begin to feel the emotions yourself. Then (and only then, in my opinion), you write, and process every frame of the film through a musical lens to give viewers a second dimension of the film experience.

The most difficult part of the process is perfecting my understanding of the film, and tuning my mind to its frequency. Until I understand it and resonate with it completely, I can’t write anything. But once I truly understand the film, ideas flow faster than I can write them down. That’s the best part of the job. Once everything clicks and music starts flowing, it’s euphoric. It’s probably the one kind of feeling that makes all the work that goes into film scoring worth it. The film I just finished working on is a prime example of that. I wrote all the music in eleven days, starting each day at 9am and finishing each day at 1am, aside from the final two days before the recording session, during which I didn’t sleep at all and worked through the nights. Most of the time in a music career, you just have to make it happen, against whatever the odds may be. For me, the thrill of creating music makes that possible.

That film, “Terroir,” by the brilliant director Casey Rogerson, is coming out quite soon and I’m very excited about it. The film is a hilarious horror/comedy film set in France and writing the music was a blast. This score takes you on the wildest ride of any score I’ve written before and I can’t wait to share it. Over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing about its release and teasing some music, photos, and writing process, all of which you can catch on my Instagram, @taischiavo

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

The three skills that have helped me the most in my career are understanding the nuances of emotion, drawing from emotion to conjure musical ideas, and the ability to get anything done that needs to be done.

As a twenty-one year old I feel like I’m in no position to give advice, but one thing that helped me develop my writing is having experiences – going on adventures, meeting people, and seeing what the world has to offer. The more experiences I have, the more I inform my understanding and appreciation of life, and fuel my creativity and writing.

How would you describe your ideal client?

Right now I’m focused on pushing boundaries with my work, and I’m taking on films that are trying to say something new and different. I love communicating unique ideas to viewers and having to create new sounds to do so.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://taischiavo.com
• Instagram: @taischiavo

Image Credits

Cole Nelson