In the first of a new series of articles where we look in detail at our artist, label and publisher clients we caught up with Christian Andersson from Sweden, who holds a publisher account with Lisnmusic.
Listen to samples of music on Christian Andersson’s Lisnmusic page.
Swedish composer Christian Andersson recently received a scholarship from the Swedish Musicians’ Union for his unique artistic work. Starting music at an early age, he learned to play several instruments like the piano, recorder, trumpet, and guitar. His genres include Funk, Jazz, Rock, World, and Classical with a passion for huge orchestral arrangements perfect for films, trailers and video games where moods and styles vary from dark and epic orchestrations and spooky arrangements to bright and majestic.
Christian Andersson by LisnMusic
What is your musical background?
I grew up in a family where all family members were involved in music, so music has always been a big part of my everyday life. My mother was a professional musician, a piano teacher, so I learned to play the piano, recorder, trumpet and guitar pretty early. The harmonic knowledge from piano and guitar gave me some great possibilities to start writing my own music and also to try some really big orchestral compositions. In the 1990s, I started to produce music on my Amiga 500, and then I simply followed the technical evolution for home studios from primitive tools to today’s high-end professional virtual instruments and production software. Today, I have a home studio with professional studio equipment and a huge collection of the best virtual instruments available on the market.
How would you describe the style(s) of music you make? Do you focus on any specific instruments in your work?
I focus on melodic production music with an orchestral sound. For me, it’s really important with a strong melody, so I try to enrich my songs with interesting melodies that make them stand out from the average music producer. I believe (and hope) that this was one of the reasons why I was awarded a scholarship by the Swedish Musicians’ Union. For instrumentation in my orchestral pieces, I love the mighty brass sounds from French horns and also the cello sections playing a tense spiccato/marcato in orchestral arrangements. I also enjoy working with emotional solo instruments, for instance a melancholic and lonely Stradivarius violin or a soft and melodic fairy-tale-like harp.
What successes have you had in the music/synchronisation industry so far?
One of my songs was recently picked out by a major cable network for usage by 20 TV-channels. This was a great success, as it will (very likely) give good royalty payouts. Right now, I am also very close to sign a deal with a feature film production for one of my songs where a nice sync-fee will be paid out, and then there will be royalties on that.
Have you been involved in any exciting projects?
Last year, I wrote the complete sound track for a great online video game. I also licensed music to many of the emerging video games produced for the iTunes/Android market.
What are you goals for the future?
My artistic goal is to continuously develop my skills and find new interesting styles and musical figures. I also aim to double the size of my portfolio and to write at least 10 new epic orchestral style tracks during this year. My commercial goal for this year is to double the amount of film placements from last year and to triple the sale figures from last year. I have worked hard during the beginning of 2011 to establish some really serious business relations, and I feel that Lisnmusic is a great partner in this business, and I look forward to a great partnership and a common success.
Anything else you would like us to know?
I’d like to say something about my relation to music as a profession. I often think about that. I used to work as a software developer. But after having written my first big orchestral compositions, everything around engineering and technical stuff suddenly seemed very dull, dry and boring. For me, music is art and passion. When I have written a new song that feels perfect, I get tears in my eyes, and it’s almost like falling in love. I have never felt something like that when I constructed some great piece of software or engineering work, and I doubt that someone can feel like that for those technical things.
Music is something completely different. Once you start to write music and once you get this strong emotional connection, like a direct link to your soul, there is no turning back. I understand that I am now stuck with music forever, so I will continue to write music as long as I live. I often think about a Latin inscription, written by Tycho Brahe, a famous Danish astronomer: “Non faces nec opes, sola artis sceptra perennant”. It means: “Neither power nor wealth, only Art and Science will endure”, which very much applies to music as an art form.
So can music as art coexist with financial interests? For example: I need to write music that sells, not only music as “art”. Yes, I believe so, but it’s a constant struggle to find a good balance. I allow myself to sometimes forget about if the music will sell or not. That will often yield a piece with a variety of moods, but with a very high quality, interesting melodies, and great emotional content – a song that is really interesting as piece of music art, but not very commercial (because it has too much variety in moods). However, from those creations, I can often spawn some new commercial creations. For example, one of my songs – “Tales from the Forgotten Monastery” – would be hard to place commercially, but it gave me 2 very nice separate creations that I could break out from it – “Peaceful Thousand Oaks Forest” and “The Desecrated Sanctum” (and I have had great commercial success with “The Desecrated Sanctum”). So yes, I think that it’s possible to create true art, and that this will give some great opportunities to find and produce commercial elements from this art.
Tags: Christian Andersson, Instrumental, Melodic, Orchestral, Profile, Publisher, Synchronisation, Video
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