After having worked for a year successfully in Hollywood, I was very fortunate to have my story covered by the most important media outlets for Latinos in the United States and my native Colombia. I was interviewed by EFE, the major multimedia news agency in Spanish and the world’s fourth largest wire service after the Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse. The article was featured on Univision, Fox Latino News, Caracol Radio, La W Radio, Terra and Cable Noticias Colombia. I was also interviewed by El Latino San Diego. To read the articles (in Spanish), click on the logo of each news outlet. For non-Spanish speakers, I have included the text of the article in English below the links.
ANDRÉS MONTERO, THE COLOMBIAN PROMISING STAR OF FILM SCORING IN HOLLYWOOD
Miami (EE.UU) March 4 (EFE). According to the young Colombian musician Andrés Montero, “there are no limits” in writing music for films. Nor are there any in his musical career, which began in front of a piano when he was 7 years old and continues today in Hollywood, where he works with the acclaimed orchestrator and composer Tim Davies. The first achievement of this collaboration was the orchestration for the video game “Batman: Arkham Knight”, which will be released mid-2015, and it shows, as Montero explained in the interview with Efe, the “magnitude” of professional projects in the film industry mecca.
The 26-year-old orchestrator participated alongside Davies in Mexican director Jorge Gutiérrez’s film “The Book Of Life”, which was nominated for a Golden Globe this year, and Disney’s “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day”. Montero’s American dream began just three years ago, when he entered a film scoring program in Los Angeles, but his trajectory started long before – playing piano at the Conservatory of the National University of Colombia. “Back in the day, the composition I was studying was (…) too intellectual, which I liked, but we had a film-scoring class and I realized that that was what I wanted to do in my career”, he reminisced. In his last year as student, Montero won a competition and performed one of his favorite pieces, “Rhapsody in Blue”, by the American George Gershwin, with the Symphonic Orchestra of the Conservatory. This concert launched his professional career. The director of the academic music education counts on him as a soloist for multiple shows that led to the establishment of what is today the Capital’s third professional symphonic orchestra, La Fundación Orquesta Sinfónica de Bogotá (FOSBO), of which he is a co-founder.
His professional debut as pianist was at the first New Year’s Concert celebrated at the Fine Arts Theater, a cultural institution where he worked as artistic coordinator for two years before his move to the United States in 2012. According to Montero, who also played for the beauty pageant Miss Colombia, the piano allows “experimentation” with an orchestra, because it offers a “general map of all ranges and sounds” that one can get away with. “Working with a symphonic orchestra has been a fundamental part in my work”, he said. “In fact, combining instruments to create different textures is what made me pursue a career in film scoring”, he revealed.
While studying in the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), he was selected to be part of the Mentor Program by the Society of Composers and Lyricists, where he met renowned Hollywood musicians, the likes of Oscar nominee John Powell and Emmy winner for the music of The Simpsons, Alf Clausen. It was there that he met Tim Davies, who in March 2014, offered him a job that has been extended to this day and has resulted in many projects. “In films I can use any technique and style – there are no limits” Montero pointed out, who embraced the possibility of composing music for a variety of genres from horror to romance.
While his goal is to keep working as an orchestrator for Davies, Montero reaffirmed his desire of composition and being involved in projects where he can write original music. “I want to start to write music for short films. I have been working on some of them with many directors, but eventually, I want to write for feature films” he said. The Colombian youth, based in multicultural Los Angeles, assured that “Latinos have entered the film industry gradually” and he is very proud to see Mexican directors such as Guillermo Del Toro or Oscar winners Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro G. Iñarritu making waves in Hollywood and paving a way for others. EFE
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