Andrew Petterson

Andrew Petterson was born on October 20, 1965 in Tucson, Arizona. He grew up in a rich musical atmosphere where his parents filled the house with classical, jazz, big-band, exotica, film scores and Broadway show tunes. Music was a large part of his life, just as it was with his entire family: His mother played classical guitar, his sister studied both piano and violin and his brother also studied the piano and excelled as a percussionist. Eventually, his father joined in and took up piano.
“I attended my first classical concert at the age of 6, with my parents and 4-year old brother, at the University of Arizona, where Zubin Mehta conducted The Los Angeles Philharmonic in Holst 's "The Planets" and Tchaikovsky's 5th Symphony. Ever since, "The Planets" has been one of my favorite pieces."
By the time Andrew reached the 4th grade, he knew he wanted to study music. "I had private clarinet lessons and also played in the school band. I don‘t think my parents could wait until I was able to play the slinky clarinet solo from Gershwin’s "Rhapsody in Blue", or crank out some ‘big-band’ clarinet pieces by Benny Goodman.”
After his discovery of ‘The Planets", he discovered other personal favorites: Greig's "Peer Gynt Suite" (his parents were fond of playing this recording as “wake-up music” for Andrew, his brother and sister, during the school-week), Debussy’s "Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune", Stravinsky's "The Firebird Suite", Ferde Grofe's "The Grand Canyon Suite", Prokofiev’s "Peter and the Wolf", and several selections by Copland such as "Rodeo" and "Appalachian Spring". Andrew also loved the exotic sounds of Les Baxter and Martin Denny, of which his parents had several recordings. “Instrumentals were definitely my favorite type of music. From the time I was very young, "Quiet Village", "Ebb Tide" and the theme from "A Summer Place", have been 3 of my all-time favorite, popular instrumental works. I never really got into vocal music. I’d much rather listen to instruments than the human voice, unless in a choir."
It wasn’t until the release of ‘Star Wars’ in the summer of 1977 when Andrew was 12, that he developed a fondness for film scores. "The "Star Wars" soundtrack was one of my first records and not only did I love the movie but I loved the music! I didn’t know much about John Williams at the time, just that I loved his music. I would sit in my room for hours and listen to it, running the movie over and over again in my head, listening to each cue.”
Andrew continued to study the clarinet through freshman year in high school. "At this point, I wanted to learn another instrument. I felt I already understood the woodwinds and wanted to jump over to the brass section and so I chose the trombone. Again, I had private lessons and continued in Band.”
Andrew graduated high school in 1983 and for a time, thought about majoring in Music, dreaming of playing trombone with the London Symphony Orchestra but then he discovered music composition. “We had the piano in our living room, which my brother and sister still played. I didn’t know how to play but loved sitting down and making up small melodies and writing a simple harmony in the form of triads. That was about my limit. I just wrote what 'sounded right'".
Andrew kept up with film scores... He bought the soundtrack to almost every movie he saw. His film scores now included composers such as the up-and-coming (then) James Horner and Alan Silvestri to veteran composers like Jerry Goldsmith, Bill Conti, Henry Mancini, Elmer Bernstein, Maurice Jarre and Miklos Rosza.
Andrew enrolled in some music courses at the local community college but became frustrated when the instructors had him adhere to certain voicing methods and constraints when writing a piece. “This was a big turn-off for me because I felt that composing music was all about creativity, not about how to voice a chord. So when I began scoring films for fun, I relied on intuition and common sense: I knew what an orchestra sounded like, I knew how each instrument sounded. I also had listened to so many soundtracks that I had a good starting point for how to approach scoring a scene.
When it came to writing percussion parts, I had an excellent resource in my brother, the drummer... More than anything, trying to score a film was a personal challenge I loved and I needed to see what I was capable of writing.
In the Spring of 1985, after attending community college and Northern Arizona University to study computer programming and working in that field, Andrew placed an ad in a nationally-published amateur filmmaker’s magazine, offering his services, free, as (the magazine’s only) film composer. The ad was a success and between 1985 and 1988, Andrew scored several amateur films for film-makers from Honolulu to New York City. Each director was thrilled with Andrew's work and asked him to return as composer, should additional films be produced. His family and friends disapproved of his "no-charge" composing but he knew that most of the film-makers were young and had no budget for film music. "All I wanted was to be part of the film-making experience. To see my name in the credits was payment enough." However, it cost Andrew thousands of dollars for the latest synthesizers, samplers, drum machines and effects processors to produce the most realistic and highest quality soundtrack possible.
In 1986, Andrew teamed with a local producer and director in Tucson who hired him to write the opening theme for a local instructional cable program entitled, "How to Buy a Used Car." Andrew continued writing music while working in the computer world and his brother and sister pursued other fields of study. With the amateur film magazine now defunct, he felt it would be helpful to move to Hollywood.
Andrew moved to Los Angeles in October of 1997, continued composing and in 1999 while working for Activision Publishing, Inc., was hired to write the music for one of their first-person shooter video games entitled, "Extreme Paintbrawl 2."
Andrew is currently studying film scoring at UCLA. In June of 2006 he was awarded the Jerry Goldsmith BMI Film Scoring Scholarship for his 1987 film score for "Law of the Ninja." Later that year, Andrew also won UCLA's podcast theme competition.
Andrew is a member of the American Society of Composers and Publishers (ASCAP) and the Society of Composers & Lyricists (SCL).