German composer, orchestrator, and songwriter Thomas Eggensberger perfectly illustrates what it means to be a very talented artist who feeds on the opportunity to collaborate on new and exciting projects that challenge his creative boundaries. He has collaborated with a broad spectrum of creative artists in the US, UK, and Germany, composing for film, television, and games, as well as concert music and collaborative art. Now based in Los Angeles, California, he is co-founder of the composer collective and sample library builders ‘Green Light District’. We had the opportunity to discuss his career, Green Light District, and much more!
Thomas, thank you for agreeing to this interview with Occhi Magazine. Congratulations on your career to date. How did you get into music?
Hi! Thank you! My pleasure, thanks for having me! That’s a good question. It started pretty early on in my life when I was living with my parents in a town called Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Germany when I was around five. It is a lovely city at the foot of the German alps and incredibly picturesque and inspiring. My parents often listened to lots of music, in particular Debussy, Ravel, Chopin, and Richard Strauss (who to this day is one of my all-time favorite composers), so my young mind was definitely saturated with music. I really loved listening to the music very much and my parents actually recently told me that apparently that one time when I was hanging out with a friend and was having dinner with his family, I lifted up the table cloth pretending to play the piano. His parents didn’t seem to know how to react and told my parents about this when they picked me up and thought something ‘might be wrong with this kid’. My parents actually took it totally seriously and realized that I just pretended to play the piano because I had listened to so much piano music and wanted to learn it. They then decided to buy me a piano for my sixth birthday and I took lessons from that day forward until my late teens. That really started it all.
Who have been your industry influences?
My biggest influences have always been the classical composers such as Ravel, Debussy, and Strauss, but there are so many more in the media music industry as well. One of my main inspirations is definitely the late film composer Jóhann Jóhannsson whose work I very much admire, in particular his work for Arrival, The Theory Of Everything, and Sicario. He had such an incredibly unique musical voice by merging the world of orchestral hybrid music and sound design and he really shaped what film music is and sounds like today. His approach to sound design and creating intriguing textures continue to inform my music and many decisions I make when composing or orchestrating.
You trained in composition and sound engineering at the Deutsche Pop Musik Akademie in Munich before studying at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff, Wales, UK for a BMus (Hons) degree under Joseph Davies and Owen Lloyd. Please share how your experiences at both institutes shaped your approach to composition and creative music technology.
Both of these places really shaped me as a composer and person. When I was in my teens I – like many other people of that age – played in a few different bands. Whilst I really enjoyed playing on stage, I kind of always preferred recording sounds in the studio. I often recorded the bands I was in in my parents’ basement and started to learn how to program believable electronic sounds on the computer (such as drums and keyboards, etc.) out of necessity because we never had the budget to record a real drum set in a professional studio. This really improved my recording, mixing, and mastering chops which are helping me to this day. The recording process was so much fun that I decided to study sound engineering at the Deutsche Pop Music Akademie.
The training there was fantastic, I learned so much about recording and microphone techniques, how to set up a session in a studio and making the musicians feel welcome, and getting the best performance out of them as possible. I use this methodology to this day…After studying there for a while and finishing the course, I came to a conclusion along the lines of ‘I love recording all these bands and musicians, but I kind of would prefer if someone recorded my music or I could just write music for a living’.
I then decided to study abroad to broaden my horizon and to experience another culture and applied to the prestigious Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in the United Kingdom to learn about classical composition and creative music technology. I was lucky to get in and during my time there really thrived and was encouraged to experiment with many different types of music. An amazing aspect about this conservatoire was the constant access to world-class musicians, many of who became my friends and always played my music. It was really all about ‘learning by doing’ and being in an environment where ‘making mistakes’ wasn’t a bad thing, but an inspiring tool to improve one’s music. There, I learned so much about orchestration, instrumentation, and how to interact with musicians. We had many recording sessions there, recording soloists, choirs, string quartets, chamber ensembles, orchestras, and really any ensemble we wanted to put together. It was all about: write a piece, experiment, organize recordings, fix players, make scores and parts, and recording, mixing, and mastering the performances. I often think back fondly to that time and apply the skills learned there every day in my professional life.
You co-founded the composer’s collective Green Light District, with Marlon Lang and Dylan Love. Can you tell us more about the initiative?
Totally. It all started in Chicago, Illinois in 2018. My two buddies and I were studying together at Columbia College Chicago and were in the same program (Composition for the Screen). Throughout the course, we all became really good friends and often collaborated on multiple film projects. We have pretty similar musical tastes and styles and quickly found out that we sound good together. Our musical styles really complimented each other and whilst learning about how to script in Kontakt (a software by Native Instruments that allows you to map out recorded sounds on a keyboard so composers and artists can play them on their keyboards at home and use them on their tracks) at college, we started thinking: ‘why can’t we also build our own instruments?’
There are many software instruments you can buy out there, many of which are great, but there is also a huge gap of instruments that we would love to have for our music and that haven’t been made yet, that we just thought we would make our own, out of necessity. So we made them and, to this day, use them every day on a variety of projects. Those sound libraries really help us create ‘our sound’ and help us stick out a little bit. It’s just so much more fun to work with instruments you’ve made yourself and it inspires you to make more and to innovate. As you can imagine, having our own sounds totally makes our collaboration process much easier and helps us have a consistent sound and vibe to our music. Meanwhile, we have two of our sound library collections out for sale for other composers and artists to use as well; we really want to make inspiring tools for other people and be part of the slow and steady change of the sound of the media music industry.
To date, your career includes working with a wide range of people such as freelance filmmakers, directors, illustrators, musicians, and artists around the US, UK, and Germany. The collaborative process is very important to you. Please share your experiences and any milestones that have shaped your approach to how or who you work with.
Collaboration has always been really important to me, I feel like it brings out the best in people and really helps make a piece of art together. I almost think of media music like a painting. It has the director (the brush) who leads the team and decides which paint and colors go together and all the other elements of a visual media project are the different colors and the canvas (probably the producer, because they make it all possible…) You need all of those elements to create a media project and they come out best when everyone gets along and strives to create something collectively, egos aside.
I have always loved collaborating with many other people. I think the time when I realized the most how much I love this process, was when I studied at the Deutsche Pop and the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. Just being surrounded by so many amazing musicians and composers was inspiring to me and I even lived with three other composers for four years. It was a great experience: everyone I lived and worked with was very driven and worked hard every day, pursuing their dream of writing music for a living. Everybody was so different and had so many talents that it was possibly one of the best working environments I have ever been in. We had a music room dedicated to write and listen to music, with hundreds of scores from different composers, different eras, and multiple instruments (including a harpsichord). We set the room up in a way that we could record in it at any time and recorded multiple musicians in that room; pretty cool for a college housemate scenario… being able to experience the different music cultures of that time definitely shaped me as a person and composer.
This was a very important time for me and in 2017 I had the incredible honor to work with the late composer Jóhann Jóhannsson (Arrival, Sicario, The Theory Of Everything, Prisoners) in Berlin, Germany. I had admired Jóhann’s music for a long time and one day decided to contact him and tell him how much his music meant to me and that I would love to work with him one day. Surprisingly, I got a very prompt reply and before I knew it, I was on a plane to Berlin to start an internship with this legendary composer. First of all, Berlin is amazing. I had visited the city many times before to visit family, but this time I really got to experience the creative side of things. Everyone is so free and can fully express themselves without being judged, and this city has a creative and inspiring vibe to it, unlike any other place.
There I met the most amazing music team, incredible artists, and composers, including the amazing Hildur Gúdnadottír. The studio environment was highly inspiring, everybody had their own individual studios and there was a main ‘hangout’ room that connected them all, where people would chat about music, life, and the work they’ve been doing. During my time there in Berlin, I had the opportunity to work on one of Jóhann’s last film scores for Mandy (starring Nicolas Cage, Andrea Riseborough, and Linus Roache) and Jóhann’s and Híldur’s soundtrack for Mary Magdalene (starring Rooney Mara, Joaquin Phoenix, and Chiwetel Ejiofor). This was definitely a big milestone for me and I often think about how privileged I was to have met all of these amazing people and Jóhann; this continues to shape my compositional inspiration to this day.
Another big step for me was to move from the United Kingdom to Chicago in 2018. I had always loved the States and always kind of wanted to end up there, and I moved there to study Composition for the Screen at Columbia College Chicago. I was so keen and excited to start this next part of my journey and to experience yet another culture and living in a major American city. I always remember seeing movies that took place in Chicago when I was young and being able to live there and soak in all the city has to offer, was really amazing. From a young age, I always had the plan to move out to Los Angeles and to start a career in film music, and in late 2020 that dream actually became reality. I’ve been living and working here ever since and love it!
The milestones really can be summed up with: experimenting with recording and mixing in Germany, moving to the United Kingdom to learn more about classical composition and orchestration, living in Berlin for three months to work for one of my all-time heroes, move to Chicago to pursue film music, moving to Los Angeles to pursue my lifelong dream of working in the industry of media music.
What has been your biggest challenge as an artist and how do you overcome it?
I’ve been very fortunate so far with how my creative life is going, but I would say the biggest challenge for me so far has been dealing with visa applications whilst working. I love being here in the States and can’t wait to continue to form my career here, especially in Los Angeles, and it is totally worth the extra effort to apply for the next visa type that enables me to stay here longer. It is where I have always wanted to be and I am striving to continue living my dream here.
Your most recent orchestral work ‘Their Future Passage’ was recorded on the famous Newman Stage at 20th Century Fox in the heart of Hollywood with LA’s finest musicians in late August 2020. How did the pandemic affect your schedule and the recording process?
That was definitely an interesting time to record an orchestra. The recording was part of my Columbia College Chicago course and the schedule shifted quite a lot due to Covid. We had scheduled the session for a specific date, which then got postponed to a later date, then canceled, and then rescheduled again. I have to say, the staff at 20th Century Fox really did an incredible job very quickly adapting to the new scenario and creating a ‘Covid-safe’ environment with strict health and safety measures to allow recording sessions to resume and continue. Ultimately everything worked out and we recorded in late August with extreme health and safety measures in place, ensuring everybody was safe and comfortable. Needless to say, recording at this scoring stage is every film composer’s dream, so that was pretty awesome.
Can you share any information on other projects in the pipeline?
Yeah totally. I am currently working on a cinematic, hybrid-orchestral sci-fi album that I am hoping to release around mid-May or June 2021. Additionally, I recently joined the roster of an LA-based music library that licenses tracks and albums to film and TV, so I will be writing lots of music for them. Other than that, I am scoring two films soon, a horror feature and a sci-fi drama short.
I am also planning and working on a new sample library with my two partners Marlon and Dylan at Green Light District and we are extremely excited to go into production in the next couple of weeks and releasing the finished product later in the year. We are extremely excited and passionate about this product and can’t wait to share it with the creative community of media composers, we have been wanting to develop a library like this for a while and are finally doing it!
Where can our readers find out more about you and your projects? Note: please provide website and social media links.
The best way to check me out is probably through my website or Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/te_music/
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