Welcome to significant others.

I'm Liza Powell O'Brien and in this week's episode

we looked at the complicated relationship between Duke Ellington and his bandleader

and collaborator Billy Strayhorn.

To help us understand some of the intricacies of what it is to work as a professional musician,

I'm excited to be speaking today with composer and musician

Fernando Arroyo. Fernando, thank you so much for coming today. You have a PhD in

composition from UCLA and you're an educator and also I know you are a

musician as well. Yes exactly. And I thought this is following up our episode on Duke Ellington and his band

leader Billy Strayhorn who had a very complicated relationship and I really

wanted to talk to a composer first of all because it's such a specific art form and I have many questions so I'm

going to start though by asking you to tell us what types of works you compose. I started my undergrad and my

master studying concert music. I always wanted to be a film composer but as it is with a modern life of a musician

and composer you end up working on all sorts of projects so just to give an example of

how eclectic a year in my life can be, last year I wrote a piano trio, I wrote arrangements for a symphony orchestra, music for a video game, well they asked me to write folk, Mexican

music and low writer music.

I worked with a pop artist that she does R&B and pop writing arrangements, worked on a documentary, a podcast writing music for it,

and films and whatever it calls for, you know.

And in between that I also play a lot in the Hollywood stories as a musician and I also

Arrange and have done even music editing for a big film so it's a very eclectic life. We had a really exciting moment which I

told you about when it happened but our family has known Fernando for years

because he used to teach our son piano and we were

...