DAVID LISTER – A MODERN COMPOSER WORTH LISTENING TO
David Lister is a Seattle-Based composer. His works include video game soundtracks “Wanda (A Beautiful Apocalypse)” and “One Loves The Sunset,” along with several piano works. He is currently working on his second symphony and is heading for his yearly sabbatical in Cannon Beach, OR to focus on composing.
Judy Grover: How’s it going?
David Lister: Great!
JG: So tell me more about this yearly sabbatical in Cannon Beach. How long have you been doing it?
DL: This will be my 8th year, although I think I’ve done it 10 times in total. A couple years I went twice.
JG: Cool. What inspired you to start doing it?
DL: A high school classmate of mine, who is now a professional artist, posted on Facebook that she was spending a month at a retreat in the mountains where she and other artists would have their own cabins to create their work and support each other in community. This sounded like a fascinating experience, so I decided to try something similar by transporting my studio to a place where I could do something similar, but alone. I chose Cannon Beach, Oregon because it’s a quiet, sleepy seaside town and I love the ocean.
JG: That sounds wonderful. I love the ocean too. Do you get a lot of inspiration from being near the ocean?
DL: While I do love the Oregon Coast, I don’t know that I necessarily get inspiration from the ocean itself. I think what’s important for me is that it’s away from my super highspeed life in the city. When I’m in Cannon Beach, there are no interruptions and I can go deep for hours writing music and tapping into places I wouldn’t otherwise.
JG: Sounds very productive. What projects are you planning to work on this year?
DL: My sole project this year is to record music for my 2nd Symphony. I started this project last year while in Cannon Beach and have been steadily writing the music since then. The work is tentatively titled “These Things Are Like Angels”, a phrase used by American mathematician Eric Weinstein during an interview with New York-based artist London Tsai. It refers to a hidden world of structures that we know exist but cannot be seen. London’s work is an attempt at “smuggling higher-level science into transcendent art forms”. His rendering of the Hopf Fibration is incredibly inspiring and parts of my music are an attempt at describing this phenomenon in 4-dimensional space.
JG: Wow- that sounds awesome! What was your first symphony? Did you have it performed by a live orchestra?
DL: My first symphony was titled “No Frontiers” and was not performed by an orchestra. Instead, it was recorded in the 90’s on (4) Roland JV1080 synthesizers because that’s all I had access to at the time. Someday I’d like to revise it and re-record it with modern sample libraries.
JG: Gotcha. So you record most of your music on the computer now – what programs do you use?
DL: I use Steinberg’s Cubase as my digital audio workstation (sequencer). I use tons of different sample libraries in my orchestral template but tend to gravitate to East/West Quantum Leap’s Symphonic Orchestra. I also like just about anything put out by Orchestral Tools and Sonokinetic. There’s a comprehensive list of every sample library I use on my web site in the Gallery section.
JG: You mentioned (in a previous conversation) how difficult it is to record on the computer and have it come out like you hear it in your head – but you do a wonderful job of it! Your “Wanda” score really sounds like it was performed by an orchestra. How long did it take for you to get so good at it?
DL: I’d say about 2-3 years – and I’m still learning. There are constraints with the technology and certainly, the quality of samples available may dictate how realistic the execution of orchestration will sound. It’s partly a tedious manipulation of sample technology and clever execution in the performance to mimic a real orchestra to the extent that that is possible. A lot of electronic orchestration sounds just, well – electronic. It sounds too perfect because everything is “keyed” in and “quantized”.
Real orchestras don’t have perfect timing and our recordings shouldn’t either. They should sound human and that’s more difficult to pull off because you must perform each track separately to get that feeling. There are exceptions, of course. I’m not going to play 32nd triplets with violins in real-time, for example! But I still play them, just at a slower tempo before speeding them back up. My point is simply that performance will always be a huge part of the recording. Nothing will ever replace a real orchestra with its expressiveness and nuance, but I try to get as close as I can.
JG: Indeed. You’ve been composing for more than 25 years, though…and you grew up in a musical family, so music has always been part of your life. When were you convinced that was your calling?
DL: In 1990 I walked out of a theater, having watched the science fiction film “Total Recall”. I was completely blown away by the music. It was composed by Jerry Goldsmith (who is still my favorite movie composer.) and I rushed out to buy the score on CD even though I didn’t own a CD player! I purchased one as soon as I could afford it. I had always enjoyed classical music, choral music and movie scores, but “Total Recall” was different. Goldsmith had combined all sorts of odd meters with synthesizers and super aggressive brass. It sounded like something Stravinsky would have done in the modern era. In any event, this started a season of spending my every last penny to collect movie scores and I listened to them obsessively, 6-8 hours a day while working. Fast forward to 1994…My father gave me his Peavey 488 digital piano. I started sequencing music on it and that’s when I knew that with enough time and effort I could learn to play the piano and compose.
JG: I used to collect film scores myself – well I still do sometimes, though I don’t find many that are worthy these days. One recent score that blew me away is Ludwig Goransson’s music for “Black Panther”. That movie was all-around amazing. Do you have any ambitions for doing film scores?
DL: That’s a tough one. Movies aren’t made the same way they used to be. The production process has evolved and the music has changed along with it. The kinds of scores that we used to get with Williams, Goldsmith, and Silvestri are to some extent the result of the process whereby movies were made. Those composers would watch the entire movie and “spot” it with the director or producer. They could see the entire story arc and write “leit motif” themes for the characters, places, and other elements, and in this way the scores have an incredible amount of structure and specificity.
Production on movies generally works differently today. Composers will receive reel 6 and then reel 3 and then reel 10, never having viewed an entire first cut of the film before starting to write. And you can hear it in their scores. I don’t want to get myself in trouble here, but my opinion is that a great deal of movie scores today sound rather generic. Most superhero scores, for example, are interchangeable with an action movie or another superhero score. You could never do that with Williams’ Superman or Harry Potter themes. Long explanation, but suffice it to say, I’m not interested in writing music that way. If I had a “locked cut” of a film I’d be interested, however. (This is why I scored Wanda because I knew the story front to back.) While there are exceptions, It’s just a difficult time to do the kinds of scores we heard in the ’80s and ’90s these days. Those are the scores I listen to the most and what I try to emulate with the more traditional sound you hear in Wanda. Some video games can be a haven for more traditional approaches to orchestration, narrative structure, and precise musical development of stories.
JG: So what do you feel is the one project that has brought out your best so far?
DL: I think composers generally like their most recent work and for me, that’s been the symphony I’ve been working on. But it’s still not entirely recorded. So I’d have to say I’m rather fond of a 3 1/2 minute piece I composed for my sister’s wedding a couple of years ago. My brother and I gave her away and it was kind of surreal listening to your own music while marching your sister down the aisle. While there’s nothing particularly innovative about the composition, the piece threads the needle in regard to styles, beginning with a more traditional orchestration approach and ending with a more modern sound.
JG: That is a special thing to be able to write music for your family and friends. I love doing that.
Speaking of family, how do you balance composing with family time, and I assume you also have a day job? (I mean, we gotta pay the bills, right?)
DL: That’s tricky. I haven’t always been the best at it, but I think I’ve done better in recent years. Once the day job is done and the family is taken care of, I can compose late in the evenings. I’m somewhat of a night owl and a short sleeper, so this works well. I think the real challenge is that I need large blocks of time– 3-4 hours– to really be productive and efficient. It’s important to eliminate distractions and simply get into a state of “flow” where everything clicks. When that happens, you get a euphoric feeling and it seems like you’re unstoppable. Later, once that moment is gone, it can be a little puzzling as to how you wrote the music you’re listening to!
JG: Yes, it is a tricky balance. What do you do for a living?
DL: Computer Science. (LOL) That’s a junk drawer title, though. I’ve done a lot of different things: Software development, Computer-Aided Design, and Non-Newtonian Physics. It’s kinda far-out stuff, but I thoroughly enjoy it. I’ve always gotten along well with technology. I taught myself to write code on an Atari computer when I was 11.
JG: That explains why you’re so good with music recording technology!
You can hear the results of David Lister’s experience and expertise with composition and music technology in the game soundtrack “Wanda (A Beautiful Apocalypse)”. I’m not a gamer so I haven’t played the game, but listening to this sweeping, cinematic score makes me wish it was a movie – I’d definitely watch it if it were! The soundtrack runs the gamut of emotions with a strong, well-defined musical theme throughout and a whimsical feel reminiscent of soundtracks by Alan Silvestri or Danny Elfman. It is certainly as enchanting as the work of any well-known film composer. It is indeed hard to believe that this entire soundtrack was done electronically and not performed by a live orchestra! I know from my own experience that making a composition sound the way you hear it in your head with a computer program is no mean feat, but Lister accomplishes this nicely with great attention to detail in this recording. You can hear or download this enchanting work at https://davidlister.bandcamp.com/releases and check out more of Lister’s music at davidlistercomposer.com
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