If Mozart or Beethoven were alive today, instead of conducting their music from concert hall podiums, they’d likely be sitting in front of a 32-channel Neve Console, directing session players through talkback, and making sure the engineer captured a clean take. That’s exactly what composers at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music learned to do recently in a session with visiting faculty members and award-winning game music producers Clint Bajakian, Matt Levine and Jonathan Mayer.

First-semester students in SFCM’s Technology and Applied Composition Program had a real-world assignment: take video game artwork and scenarios and produce an original soundtrack. After weeks of writing, orchestrating, and scoring their work, the composers were in the hot seat. Each one had to run a recording session, directing nine string players, cueing takes, listening for balance, even suggesting articulations and dynamics.

The class almost exactly mirrored a professional session according to Jonathan Meyer, Senior Music Manager of Sony PlayStation Group and visiting TAC faculty member. “These students are making great looking sheet music but there’s still a vast gulf between mocking it up in a computer, putting it on paper, and hearing people play it.” Next month, Meyer and other TAC faculty members will help students mix their recordings down to professional quality masters at a top Bay Area studio, giving them an invaluable end-to-end understanding of the process.

“I don’t know how else you would get experience like this,” says postgraduate composer Costantinos Dafnis ’16. With a background in concert music, Dafnis expected game and film scoring would just involve long hours in front of a screen. “There was a stereotype that media composers sat at their computer, mixed it all themselves, sent it off, and cried themselves to sleep.” After his first semester, he’s thrilled by the level of creative collaboration required in the TAC program and is considering focusing his career on the recording studio.

“TAC is full of a lot of opportunities,” says first-year student Jana Ma ’19, who recently accepted an internship in product development with the microphone manufacturer sE Electronics and performed at the Shanghai Electronic Music Week festival with TAC Chair MaryClare Brzytwa and SFCM Guitar Department Chair David Tanenbaum. Having gained experience in the recording studio, business office, and manufacturing lab, all in her first semester, Ma is taking an expansive view of her career. “Anything that’s related to what TAC is teaching is my dream job.”