Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Aaron Fischer. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Aaron thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

Great to hear from Canvas Rebel! When I think about my favorite pieces I’ve worked on I’m reminded of that broad saying, “Art is subjective.” Another way to consider that is how art is perceived by our relationship to it—*when* we first heard a song is as important as the song itself. If Letterbox needed my four favorite movies, each answer would come with a reason or story to justify it. In this vein, one of the more otherworldly experiences for me was last fall when I was on the music team for an off-broadway musical at Lincoln Center. During a run thru of the show in a big cold rehearsal room while sitting at a table with the creative team, I had that feeling we spend our lives chasing: I am exactly where I’m supposed to be, connected with my life’s purpose.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m a writer & composer. Ask me to pick one medium and I choose musicals. How I got here is meandering. In the theater school at USC, I got lucky studying with broadway composer Jason Robert Brown. He even took me on as his personal assistant. After graduating I took a summer gig as music assistant on a Kander & Ebb show that was having their pre-broadway out-of-town tryout. (They wrote “Chicago” and “Cabaret,” this one was called “Curtains.”) Composer John Kander instantly became my mentor and essentially my grandfather. When he asked me to move to NYC and be a creative assistant, I turned down a competing offer to be in the performance troupe Blue Man Group and “moved home” to NYC.

The first year in the city is hard on everyone; I was blessed to be making copies and getting coffee for the benevolent masters putting on that silly show “Curtains” at the Al Hirschfeld theater. As that show opened and my contract ended, I was a free agent when not working on Kander & Ebb shows. I played a mean piano and was in love with the creative process, so I dillied and dallied my way as an associate music director or creative assistant or conductor/pianist or whatnot.

Then began the side missions, the parts of a video game that distract you from the main plot. The creativity continued and branched out: I became a ghost writer and editor, I scored films and helped people on their own work. I got married and ran a couple bars in the village. I got divorced and ran a couple more. All the while I studied.

(A note on “study.” I take parts of the day and pick something I don’t know a lot about to read/listen a bit. I could list a variety of examples from the last few weeks, but just pick any moment where you go, “Huh!” and then picture taking an hour to learn and let gestate.)

The power of passion is its self-sustainability. I am never not reading, listening, thinking, enjoying. Achievement is a wonderful thing to point at between projects, but the best parts just replay in my head like the opening credits to a puzzle, shifting and kaleidoscoping under various theme songs.

All this to say: I write musicals. There are lots of other things on the resume and in process, but I like the musicals most.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

The role of the artist is something I take seriously. It’s unpleasantly special. Our job is to dip into the murk and report back to our fellow man. It means I write things that I feel called to write, and that feeling plays in concert with other elements that respect the complexity of energy and time. Life is hard. Things take time and demand respect. Art is a way to honor that.

With that preamble, one of the calling cards of my creative process is BIG QUESTIONS. I love the part of creating a piece where you get to ask the big questions. Some of these (sticking with writing musicals) include:

-What is the music in this piece? Where the songs coming from, if “singing is what we do when words don’t suffice” is a limiting notion? My second musical “Unwell” is about a mother whose mental illness extends to her daughter’s health, and the songs stem from the idea that the songs are the voices in mother’s head. (It does not end/conclude there, but that is from where music is born in this reality.) Another example: In my first musical, the songs are versions of expression stemming from the pianist wordlessly telling a story of something that happened to them. The actors are giving words to this otherwise voiceless expression.

-When do we want the audience leaning forward vs. sitting back? This is a variation on a question of how you treat your audience in general, and has a menagerie of ways to inspire you. “Les Miserables” has 14 applause breaks built into the sung-thru musical (minus intermission/bows). Knowing that, you can track the audiences breath. A messier example is at the beginning of the film Avatar: The Way of Water. One of the first things the movie does is bring back to life all the characters they killed off at the end of the first movie. And I thought, “Oh I see—you think I’m a f***ing a**hole.” Harsh as that sounds, that’s what the movie was treating me like—that my feelings didn’t matter.

-Does God exist in this piece? I love this question as an example of something resembling the color of the book cover—at once trivial and yet monumental. In a movie I wrote, I decided the answer was Yes. And to prove it, in the opening shot and the closing shot I have the same note: “A Lincoln Continental in mint condition, having paused at a stop sign, resumes rolling. It’s a very dark green.” It doesn’t change what happens in the script, but it changes WHY. I love all the variations of this question, it’s so fun.

My mission is to give reason for telling stories. Of any gifts I might accidentally have, nothing is more valuable than my curiosity.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

There’s a twelve-way tie here but I’ll pick one:

When things feel like they wrote themselves. This is one of the best parts of writing. It also means you get to have a relationship to the work separate from your ego. When I think fondly of a song or a script, I get to go back and say hi like it was never mine.

Runners-up include:

-Telling a friend about a project and seeing them react positively gives you a source of pride as if your piece was accepted to a good college and you couldn’t wait to brag about it.

-The middle part of writing, the hard part. Lots of people have good ideas, and lots of people like the finish line, but if you can enjoy the middle part, you’re a chef.

-Other artists. Being an artist is a perpetual first year at Hogwarts. It’s so nice to look around the room and see everyone else feeling all the feels with which that comes.

Thank you!

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @aaronfisch

Image Credits

The pic of Curtains is from its wikipedia page. The rest are all mine.