Artist Rolodex: Cheska Navarro

Success Stories in Film Composition

Author

Ameya Deshpande
May 08, 2024

Salut Les Amis! Welcome to this edition of Artist Rolodex! It's been quite some time since my last newsletter, but I promise that regular updates are on the way. After the amazing response to our last edition, South Asian Shuffle, I've decided to make “Artist Rolodex “ a series where I bring you more interviews with diverse individuals from the music sphere.

Today, we're diving into the cinematic world of Cheska Navarro (@cheska_yo), a multifaceted artist who not only creates enthralling background scores for short films but also shares her wealth of knowledge on social media through her Instagram platform. Cheska Navarro is a Filipina-American composer based in Southern California. Her most notable scoring work includes the short film STILL QUEER which premiered at the 2023 Outfest Fusion Film Festival in the TCL Chinese Theater, dance film SEEN which won Best Original Composition at the Berlin Shorts Award Festival.

Throughout our conversation, she shares her journey of becoming a full time musician. Interestingly, Cheska comes from a background in STEM and at one point was working as a health scientist as well as pursuing music. Her journey from balancing both careers to finally making the decision to pursue a career as a full time musician, is truly inspiring. There is so much to learn from her habits, attitude and determination to succeed and I hope you all take something away from this wonderful conversation! Enjoy!

Early Life and Beginnings

Cheska’s family is from the Philippines and hailing from an immigrant family, Cheska was expected to be good at singing songs by famous vocal artists and singer-songwriters like Mariah Carey. But she found herself not relating to that kind of music at all. Cheska began taking classical piano lessons when she was 8 years old, as her mom wanted her to have a disciplined approach to learning the instrument. This taught her how to practice and learn a skill which ultimately led her to fall in love with piano music. Soon after, Cheska was composing music on her own after her piano lessons and would often try and replicate the music that she liked or if she watched an anime that had a really interesting soundtrack, it would lead her to compose similar sounding pieces on the piano.

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“Eventually it got to a point where I was secretly composing every day after school and I remember trying to ask my piano teacher if they could teach me how to write down my own music, but they didn’t really take me seriously”

At the time, Cheska’s parents believed that she should be pursuing a career in medicine and she stood true with that belief for a while. Soon after, she realized that music and art were the only things that came to her naturally. Around the same time, Cheska also met her now fiance and she decided to do something about it and pivot her efforts in a direction that she always wanted. Cheska adds that this was also around the same time as the pandemic and the uncertainty of it all led her to decide that it would be best if she completed her degree in medicine and become a medical professional at the peak of the pandemic. A short stint as a healthcare Clinical Labaoratory Scientist provided Cheska with yet another opportunity to revaluate her interests and she found herself siding with music and composition each time.

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“So I decided to put myself out there, get really good at the technicalities around composition and that is where my background in science came in handy! I saw learning music as this systematic approach where you understand the fundamentals and go on to run your own tiny little experiments”

The Role of Social Media

Around the same time, Cheska also began sharing her journey on Instagram in the spirit of a scientist. Her intention was to make all her learnings available for anyone who also wishes to be a composer. Specifically, Cheska began sharing her methods of getting film composition gigs. Often, Cheska in her interactions with the people closely involved with the film composition industry pointed out the fact that getting gigs largely depended on either getting extremely lucky or having a well placed point of contact. Cheska found this to be slightly unfair and as a scientist working on a seemingly unsolvable equation, Cheska was determined to find her own way.

Creative Workflows

Cheska approaches film scoring in a very unique way. She explains her creative approach as a venn diagram, where on one side is her musical taste, the stories that she intends to convey through her music, whereas on the other side lie the director’s approach to his film and the overlap of the two is what serves as the unique middle ground which Cheska likes to operate inside of.

“..every time I send them a snippet of the of the score, the closer I can get to the center, the better, and the center, something to strive towards, rather than like a specific value..”

Over time, she has learnt to see the creative process of making a film score as a scientific experiment where the value and overarching themes are identified at the start and Cheska is free to experiment within these themes to closely align with the director in terms of his expectations. “It also largely depends on my chemistry with the director and how closely our tastes align” adds Cheska.

In preparation for a project, Cheska often immerses herself into the various moods that movies convey. She pulls from a catalog of ideas that she has already worked on and overlays the scenes from the film with her music to gauge its fit. It could be something simple as a certain interval in the melody or the harmony that could really sparks the director’s imagination. During this nascent stage of creation, Cheska does not think about the end product as much in terms of production, mixing etc. She allows herself to be as creative as possible to ensure that every creative idea is captured before moving on to the phase of filtering out these ideas as they fit the scenes of the film.

Cheska’s film scores often include a live instrument even for a film with a significantly low budget. She always has mics handy to pull in and record sounds into and instruments like the bass guitar to add a few interesting elements to her compositions.

Noteworthy Moments

As her film composition portfolio continues to grow, Cheska shares that her journey til now has been a mix of highs and lows. Some of her best moments are when she meets a new filmmaker who genuinely appreciates her work. And it is through these interactions that Cheska realized her biggest achievement is to overcome the fear of people.

On the flip side, not everything is always smooth sailing. Losing a professional relationship with someone who you considered a mentor will always be somewhat unpleasant.

Splitting Time Between Composing and Teaching

In addition to being a full time composer, Cheska is a mentor to a handful of students where she guides them on how to begin using social media to build their repertoire as an artist and also to be in a comfortable pace while doing so.

“Having students that I see every week really inspires me. I don’t teach music but the conversations inspire me in a musical way which will naturally give rise to the emotions I feel while composing”

Cheska’s Recommendations

One of her favorite movies in terms of its film score is Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind. The composer, Jon Brion comes from a non traditional film score background and has a certain style that Cheska finds inspirational.

“..it's not really surprising since I feel like between a traditionally trained composer, and someone who has been working on their musical identity as an artist, regardless of whether or not they fill a concert hall is very different”

Gear, Listening List and More

Cheska uses Logic Pro which is an industry standard for all production related work along with an audio interface, a few MIDI Keyboards and stock plugins which are available across the internet.

On her commute to work was when Cheska really listened to a lot of music. She is a fan of Tame Impala as he inspires her to approach writing drums in a very unique way as well as artists like Imogen Heap. Specifically in terms of film composers, Cheska admires the work of Henry Mancini (The Pink Panther) Nicholas Brittel (Moonlight), Joe Hisaishi (Studio Ghibli).

As an avid reader, Cheska often finds herself reading a diverse genre of books from the productivity books like Atomic Habits to science fiction books by Andy Weir, the author of The Martian and Project Hail Mary. She has also recently begun reading books in Chinese.

To conclude our wonderful conversation, Cheska shares her current favorite chord which is “C Major over D minor” 😄 

Portfolio and contact information.

If you enjoyed reading this interview excerpt, please share your feedback and thoughts with me by responding to this email. If there are any guests that you would want me to connect with and share their story, feel free to send me those suggestions as well! DM’ing me on Instagram is the quickest way to get in touch. Alternatively, you can email me on [email protected]. 🙂 

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