Today we’d like to introduce you to Cheska Navarro.
Hi Cheska, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
My story is funny in the sense that growing up to compose music for film was inevitable, but I was always convinced that I was supposed to be doing something else. Looking back at where I started and where I am now, it seems so obvious… but life is complicated.
I grew up in a Filipino family that has always loved and encouraged musical talent, but it was highly frowned upon to pursue a career outside of medicine or engineering. Music was for karaoke and showing off to your relatives, not for working. This is pretty much why today I have a day job as a scientist, but I’ll get to that later.
Anyways, growing up was so confusing because my life seemed to revolve around creativity, music, and film. As a little kid, I fell in love watching Fantasia (the old Disney movie with Mickey Mouse wearing a wizard hat while waving his hands to classical music).
Classical music naturally entered my life that way and at 8 years old I began taking piano lessons. A few years later, I started composing on my own when I got bored of being forced to learn pieces like Beethoven’s Für Elise. I didn’t write full pieces or anything impressive really… I was just bored.
I also developed this interesting habit of journaling as early as 1st grade and frequently documented my life and ideas outside of school. I think these were all signs of a musical storyteller in the making.
At home, my dad also constantly gathered our family for movie nights where we watched whatever he rented or bought, which felt like everything in popular existence (regardless of whether it was PG or not) from all the Disney films, The Matrix, Rush Hour, Alien, Lord of the Rings, and even the cringiest Adam Sandler movies. Somewhere in there, there were films I liked.
In middle school, I started taking my studies very seriously and went on autopilot until mid-college thinking I was going to become a doctor. I gradually became very withdrawn compared to my younger self, always trying to keep up this image that I was smart and had everything figured out. The truth is that I never stopped to ask myself what I wanted and because of that I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere.
When I went to college for medical lab science and moved out of my parent’s house, I finally realized what was happening. Things kind of just naturally fell into place; I met the right people at the right time, made Google searches, and emailed or DMed people at the right time, and the dots connected. Suddenly I was scoring films and getting paid, but not enough to leave science behind.
As luck would have it, I finished my degree and got a job as a scientist just in time for the pandemic and I slowly started to build up my composing career on the side. Although it was hard at first to feel like, “Hey I know what I want to do but now I’m stuck here doing this day job and I spent thousands of dollars to become a scientist…” I started to see the real pros and cons of my situation.
Today, I’m grateful for all these experiences and how they’ve factored into my journey to becoming a film composer from the way I approach composing, problem-solving, finding work, and all the skills anyone creative has to have in order to pursue the unconventional.
The best part about where I am today is that I feel more like myself 🙂
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The biggest struggle for me by far has been managing my anxiety.
I’m the kind of person who obsesses over the details, even after I know I’ve done the best I can with what I have and know. I’ve generally always been impatient and had high expectations for myself even before I became a composer, and it’s been an interesting experience trying to take myself less seriously in just the right amount… without being lazy.
In my first year of freelance composing, I was struggling to come to terms with the fact that I couldn’t leave my day job as quickly as I wanted to. Being at the lab, in a building without windows, and typing in accession numbers at a computer in a corner over and over again became a trigger for anxiety attacks.
I was genuinely terrified at the thought of having a job I didn’t like for the rest of my life and have nothing to show for my dreams. My heart rate would go up, my chest would feel heavy, and in my head, I was constantly thinking about how much I didn’t want to be there. It felt like I was in danger- like I was going to die.
Some people would be perfectly content with my situation, having a day job and a passion project on the side. As hard as it was to accept, I’m just not one of those people.
It sounds really dramatic for me to say all this, but being a clinical lab scientist as well as an artist, I deal with the concept of death on a medical and artistic level.
I even remind myself of my own mortality with my favorite Van Gogh painting of a skeleton smoking a cigarette at my home studio. Nothing inspires and motivates like mortality.
Ultimately, I decided to calculate how much of my life would be spent working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week until I was 65 years old. That’s 2,080 hours a year. You can do the rest of the math.
From these calculations and fear of death aside, I made the decision to work 4 days a week instead of 5 and knew exactly how much of my free time I got back. Slowly but surely, I became more flexible with my plans to transition into my new composing career.
Out of all the things I’ve done to try and manage my struggle with anxiety, figuring out how to meet myself halfway and secure one extra day out of the week for myself was the best decision I’ve made.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
Currently, I score independently produced films and work with filmmakers internationally. I specialize in composing music for dramas and gravitate towards more intimate ensembles. Most recently I composed a piece for string quartet called Saturday and am scoring a short film using piano, bass, and cello. I’m primarily a pianist, so a lot of my work has some kind of bittersweet piano in it. One of my piano/cello pieces that I wrote for the dance film SEEN won an award for Best Original Composition at the Berlin Shorts Award Festival in February 2022.
People have generally recognized my many influences including Joe Hisaishi, Coldplay, and French Impressionist and Romantic era musicality, and know me mostly for my melancholic personal voice across a range of different emotions.
I can’t bring myself to choose which film scores I’m most proud of because I’ve loved collaborating with nearly all of my directors… so I’ll just say I’m proud of myself for not giving up and becoming who I am today. I really feel like composing has brought out the best in me and I finally feel like I belong in my own skin again.
What makes me different isn’t so much the music that I write but the way I approach music and the collaborative process with my eclectic background in music and science. I may not be a genius, once-in-a-generation composer, or scientist separately, but both of those sides are at play when I score a film. I really think it shows in the way I create and live as an artist, and so far, it’s paid off.
Is there anyone you’d like to thank or give credit to?
My parents definitely deserve a lot of credit for giving me the tools, education, and resources that led to me composing. The wide variety of music I listened to at home, the piano lessons they paid for, the live orchestral performances we saw, and movies we watched over the years were only possible because of them.
We butted heads a lot over the years as I started to make my own decisions, but they’re very supportive now and I’m really grateful for them.
I’m also super thankful for my sisters Annie Navarro and Betthia Hern who ended up starting their own music journey with me. We experienced lots of firsts together over the years in life and music and have always supported each other in developing our ideas and sharing them online.
I love that we have this shared passion for music and storytelling, especially since as I get further along in my journey, this part of my life alienates the rest of my friends. It’s nice to share your successes and lessons learned with loved ones that really know what you’re going through.
My boyfriend also deserves credit for showing me an alternative route to the one handed to me by my parents. Over the years, he has always encouraged me to dream bigger, ask better questions, and of course, not take myself too seriously. He also reminds me to take breaks and makes sure I have good food to eat, which has been a recent struggle. Time really flies for an obsessed artist hard at work.
And finally, I’d like to acknowledge someone I consider my mentor- she knows if she’s reading this! She was the first Filipina composer I ever discovered online and made me feel like there was someone out there that understood what I was going through. I learned a lot from her indirectly by observing her journey unfold online through the articles about her and the Instagram posts she shared and directly by taking screen scoring lessons with her.
She was the first person that really encouraged me to go for it, but not in the self-sacrificing way I think a lot of aspiring film composers tend to do.
Without these people and countless others over the years who showed me some kindness and support for my music, I wouldn’t be composing today.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.cheskanavarro.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cheska_yo/
Image Credits
Lara Diano Betthia Hern Kim Moran Erika Kim
