Lee Holdridge

In his two-hour-and-forty-minute interview, Lee Holdridge talks about his parents' influence on his career and moving to Boston at an early age to study music. He discusses his early paid composing jobs, doing arrangements for RCA records, being a dance arranger for Broadway shows, working with mentor Milt Okun and Placido Domingo, and his involvement with music education outreach at the LA Opera. He speaks in depth about his passion for opera and writing full-length operas, and on his writing process. He details his experience as a television composer at Universal Studios, where he scored episodes of McCloud, among other shows. Holdridge offers his thoughts on the craft of composing and talks about collaborations with directors and producers, working with temp tracks and orchestras, and how evolving technology has impacted his work. He describes making arrangements for John Denver and Neil Diamond, working on the films Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Tuskegee Airmen, and Splash, and on National Geographic specials, films for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and Olympic films. He then discusses composing for the television shows Moonlighting, Beauty and the Beast, and One Life to Live. He shares his process for turning a music cue into a longer orchestral piece, "Elegy," his thoughts on his music being played at concerts, on conducting, on dream projects, and on how he'd like to be remembered. Richard Kaufman conducted the interview in a joint venture with the Film Music Foundation on June 6, 2019 in North Hollywood, CA.