My natural tendency is to write dramatic music, but the job of a composer is to write whatever a show requires. The range is indeed quite broad, as you know, and in truth, each and every style has a unique set of challenges and rewards. It is not unusual for me to go from a very dark and dramatic scene to a lighthearted one. And my one comment would be that the difficulty lies in shifting gears! But shift we must, and we composers do it every day.

I meet amateur composers all the time who have music flooding through their heads, apparently, but they have no technical ability at all. They don’t actually have the faintest idea how to put it down on the page. These days you can actually get away with that, because you sort of mess around and track it, and all those things. But to my mind, that balance between the excitement of what is called inspiration or just simply a good idea, and the technical routine that goes into writing music down at all, is what makes a composer. You can’t have one without the other and be a complete composer. I can’t imagine how you could.

I am a composer. I am not a songwriter. Because the musical world has been so massively hijacked by big business we tend to see the single pop song as the all-important unit. But there is so much more to music than that, and while I have always taken a wide interest in every sort of music whatever its origins, the wonderful possibilities of extended music, of concertos and symphonies and opera and ballet and film and instrumental music in all its myriad forms - this is what I am interested in and what I both listen to and continually attempt to create.

(Continued) The ironic thing is that my original goal in life was to be in a famous band, tour the world and sell millions of albums. Although that didn't quite happen, I got something else just as gratifying. Instead of being in a famous band, I gained some fame in the industry as a game composer. Instead of touring the world, I receive fan mail from around the world. Instead of selling millions of albums, my music is on millions of games! And I sell enough of my own albums that allows me to keep releasing them. So in a different way, I kind of got what I wanted after all. And I'm more than happy with that. The most fulfilling part of it is that I feel I contributed something that mattered to a significant number of people, and more importantly, I got to be a part of projects that mattered a lot to my life personally, like Star Wars!

Being a composer, although I think it’s an incredible job, it’s not special. There are a lot of people who are composers. There are a lot of people who think they’re composers. There are a lot of people who are songwriters. There are a lot of people who have a musical idea. There are more now probably than there were when I began. There’s more opportunity, I think, for composers than there was back then, but there are many more composers now. So, you’re not special. You’ve got to find some way of getting hired. And I think the more you can refine your objectives, the better you are. The best advice I got about this when I was just starting was, “Ignore all of my advice and do anything you can think of”. And as I said, just get started. Just start.

I think any composer is the sum of their life experience, and that's what makes each of them interesting and different.

I am a composer first and foremost, and have always believed that being able to write memorable melodies is what sets musicians apart.

I wrote and recorded music for many years, thinking I was only pleasing myself. The fact that so many people have appreciated the music, makes my life incredibly rewarding and full.

The majority of people that get involved in film music are kind of like me, who had a dream and fell in love with it and then pursued it on the base of their mad love for it. My advice to the young aspiring composer is that film composing is about the long journey, about developing over a period of time, of hopefully creating a career that is constantly rising.

To be simply a poorly paid or seldom played composer seems so tragic to me. But to be a woman composer with all the trials and tribulations that seem to go along with being a woman composer, puts everything in perspective. The struggle becomes heroic--not pitiful. The success becomes a success for all of us in the cause, not something merely egoistic.

As a film composer it's not your symphony. You know, that's one of the things you have to get over right away; that you are, as you say, a hired gun. You know, you can inject a lot of yourself into it, but the bottom-line is that you are working for other people. The ideal situation is where you make you happy and you make them happy, and that's usually what happens. But, yeah, ultimately you are answering to someone else and the sooner you figure that out, the longer you'll be around.

My ambition was to live like music.

There were certain sounds in the 80s that were not, in my mind, desirable as a composer, because they kind of called attention to themselves in a nuts-and-bolts kind of way. Like, “pee-owww”. Oh, there’s that sound again, you know? A saw-tooth synth sound. But I really think that our job is to use whatever exists in the world, or even create an instrument for a score because there’s nothing in the universe that sounds like what your imagination is wanting for that film. Electronics and computers help that, but sometimes, literally, you have to take a piano string and string it across some kind of open box and bow it with a cello bow or something. You have to come up with a new sound, and that’s always fun.

Composing a score is like getting in one of those mini-submarines that take you to the bottom of the ocean. You crawl into this little bubble, seal yourself away from the outside world and dive deep into uncharted territory. Sometimes the places you explore are dark, sometimes they’re light. If you have the right tools and knowledge you can explore wherever you like and have a great experience. It’s a crude analogy to genre hopping, but it’s accurate. I was lucky as a kid to be exposed to so much different material. I watched cartoons and read all kinds of comics as much as I buried my head in scary stuff. It makes going from talking animals one day to shape-shifters the next pretty easy. Truth is, most composers are pinballs. They can bounce around from style to style and adapt really well.