We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Aaron Schondorf. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Aaron below.

Aaron, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

So, this story requires some preamble. As a child, my first real passion was not music, films, games, or really anything related to the core of my role as a composer – it was the circus, which grew out of my being a gymnast and having a distaste for rules and competition. I thought that could be my career: living the dream of running away and joining the circus. After many years of training in juggling and acrobatics, I auditioned for and was invited to join Circus Smirkus, a professional youth touring circus, for five summers during high school. I loved being on tour – helping pitch the tents, performing multiple shows a day, and enjoying the camaraderie of the troupe. However, at the end of those five summers I knew it just wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
So, as many of my fellow troupers headed off to circus colleges, I turned in my juggling clubs and studied at a liberal arts school. By this time, I had already been composing as a hobby, but I thought it would remain just that: a hobby. But when, during my junior year, my old circus director reached out to check in with me, I decided to take a chance and inquired whether I might be able to help with the music for their upcoming summer tour. Not long after, they offered me a job helping out on the technical side of the music process: tailoring the music to fit the acts, creating sheet music for the live musicians, etc. So that summer, I headed up to Vermont not as a performer but as the composer’s assistant.
Having been a performer, I thought I knew what the experience would be like leading up to opening day. Not at all. I spent my days bouncing between tents to catch rehearsals, taking lunches in my trailer so I could notate the sheet music edits, and staying up long after everyone else was off to bed to check over the program that ran the show to ensure that the new music drafts worked smoothly. I had so much work that I did multiple 16+ hour days in a row. And I loved it. I specifically remember this moment, sometime past four in the morning, in an unheated trailer in the middle of nowhere Vermont, having worked straight since 9 am and now doing a relatively menial task because I wanted so much for the music to be perfect and I was not going to sleep until it was; I paused for a second, took a breath of the surprisingly cold and crisp Vermont summer air, and said to myself, “This is the life.” That fall, I applied to all of the best film composition programs in the world to start my career.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am a multimedia composer born and raised in New York City. Unlike many of my peers, I was not born into a musical family – in fact, my father’s side of the family can hardly carry a tune. My parents were both attorneys and I was largely pushed towards academic pursuits in mathematics and other STEM subjects. That being said, I was always aware of and appreciated the music that was around me in the world – in the movies I watched, in the shows I saw, and in the songs my parents played me that influence my musical tastes to this day – and I took a lot from that. Nevertheless, even when I attended Carleton College and declared a double major in mathematics and music, I wasn’t seriously thinking about pursuing music professionally. But as I developed as a composer, and had more experiences working in the musical field – including that magical summer in Vermont – I came to realize that it was music, not math, that was my true calling.
After Carleton, I continued my studies at NYU Steinhardt where I will soon graduate with a Masters in Music Theory and Composition: Screen Scoring. During my time back in New York, I have composed for many short films – including The Faerie Queene, which premiered at the 2024 Brooklyn Film Festival – some production music companies, and a few video games, one of which is set to be released through a major indie game publisher this year. I’ve also been able to return to Circus Smirkus and compose original music for some of their shows.
I think that my experiences and background have given me a better appreciation for and understanding of the role of media composition and what it can achieve. While media music has a stigma in the composer community because of its inherent attachment to the media it was written for, which some see as muddying the composing process, that is exactly why I love it. Music and film, or game, or circus, coming together – composer and director working together – to create an experience that is more than the sum of its parts. My earlier experiences of being a performer, and working collaboratively – both as a performer and a composer – to create performances, has made me especially attuned to and adept at creating musical compositions that go beyond providing an accompaniment, but actually become an integral part of the story that the artist is trying to tell. This is what I strive to achieve for my clients; my goal is not only to capture their unique vision for the project, but also to use music to add a new dimension that enhances that vision.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I have two goals: one personal and one professional. My personal goal is to recreate the atmosphere that led to my realization that I wanted to be a media composer. When people think of composers, they usually think of these lone musicians who lock themselves up in a room with a piano for months on end and then emerge with a finished piece. That is not at all how I see my role as a media composer. My time with the circus taught me that collaboration is not just beneficial, it is imperative. Media composition, too, is an extremely collaborative endeavor, simply because the music and the media need to work together on a fundamental level. As such, when I approach a new project, I put people first and truly listen and connect to everyone involved. In my experience, this will create the best end product, be it a film, a documentary, a video game, or a television show, or TV ad. People can purchase generic music online to plug into a project or reuse previous compositions in a film. What I strive for is to take the unique project at hand, and moreover the unique individuals creating it, and compose music specifically with and for this group and this project.
As for my professional goal, obviously, part of it is to keep learning my craft and advance in the industry. However, to view the world as a “zero-sum” game – every success for another composer is a loss for others – is short-sighted. I am also invested in helping other composers, my friends and colleagues, become successful as well. Even now, at the beginning of my career, I look for opportunities to contribute to the community where possible. I’ve taught a class to undergrads in film scoring at NYU, and I have helped my peers both in class work and on professional gigs; I look for musicians just getting into the industry when I need live players because you never know if my project could help start their career. It is not much at this point – I am saving most of it for when I have climbed up the ladder to a place where I feel like I can perch – but it is an important part of my mission nonetheless.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

This question is a bit hard to answer because, being a media composer, I ingest a lot of media from a wide variety of sources – films, television, games, music, books, etc. – both because I love it but also for actual research purposes. All of these elements impact how I think about music, story, narrative, and all of the other factors that govern how I compose. There is, however, one particular video that stands out to me. This is a video of Alex Hirsch – creator of the TV show Gravity Falls, story consultant on multiple films, and voice actor – talking about failure in the creative field. To summarize, Hirsch posits that we all imagine that we are standing on a cliff and that on an opposing cliff far out of reach is our goal: finish a project, land that dream assignment, become wildly successful, etc. While many of us can get stuck in this place, Alex Hirsch says “Jump!” At best, you might make it. However, Hirsch’s way of looking at failure is that if you don’t make it, you respawn back on the cliff as if we’re in some giant cosmic video game. And if you keep flinging yourself off the cliff, eventually there will be enough metaphorical bodies in the canyon that you’ll be able to walk over your past failures to reach the other side. In other words, your failures are your pathway to success – perhaps not at first, but with time and perseverance.
Is this thinking a bit idealistic? Yes, but there is definitely some truth to this and thinking about that canyon has helped me think differently about failure. When I give a director a cue and they don’t love it, we talk about how to change it to better fit the scene. And then I jump again with that in mind and maybe this time, I nail the scene. And if someday I reach that point where failing has serious negative consequences, hopefully my canyon is full of past selves that have failed. This recontextualization of failure has helped me get beyond the mentality of “I hope I don’t fail today” to one of “Lets see how many times I can jump today,” which has been beneficial for my productivity, my creative expression, and the quality of my work across the board.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://aaronschondorf.com/
• Instagram: @aaronschondorfcomposer
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aaron.schondorf.3
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@aaronschondorf1560
• Soundcloud: https://on.soundcloud.com/Hc6jSAdBJno5XMyp8