Meet Riya Kumar | Film & TV Composer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Riya Kumar and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Riya, why did you decide to pursue a creative path?
First, thank you for your invitation. I am honored to share a platform that has featured my heroes and role models in the composing industry.

I am a High School senior aspiring to become a Film and TV composer. I’ve been fortunate to have had some early success in this field, motivating me to pursue music as a career.

Though my family is not very musical, I’ve always had access to many instruments and musical resources. When I was 4, my dad bought me a cheap keyboard and encouraged me to learn nursery rhymes by ear through Youtube videos. I would play these at family gatherings and received a lot of attention. Because of this, I was motivated to spend all my spare time on my keyboard. By 7, I could play a few dozen tunes from memory – mostly nursery rhymes, western pop, and Bollywood songs.

I had formal piano lessons in the second and third grades, but otherwise, I was self-taught. I would find myself on the keyboard for hours experimenting and creating my own melodies coming up with new jingles or tunes almost every month.

I grew in my learning and composed more complex pieces as I entered middle school, where I joined the school orchestra as a violinist and wrote some ensemble pieces for the students to play. I also studied Hindustani vocals and harmonium to broaden my understanding of Indian classical and pop which I found musically intriguing.

When COVID hit my freshmen year of High School, I convinced my parents to use the savings from my four years of soccer refereeing to scour eBay and put together a cheap home studio, including Logic and free sample libraries. During this time, I was fortunate to receive occasional composition lessons from Will Van De Crommert, a Film and TV composer. As a young and successful film composer, Will’s journey was very inspiring and his lessons helped me to understand the technicalities of film scoring. I spent that entire year of virtual schooling from home immersed in composing, orchestrating, mixing, and mastering; the experience was challenging yet fulfilling. Ever since then, I’ve been inspired to pursue this creative career.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
After spending the first year of COVID in my home studio churning out about a dozen orchestral compositions, I was fortunate to meet Mack Price, an award-winning composer with a local studio. Mack saw potential in my writing and spent invaluable time guiding me to polish my compositions, for which I am very grateful. He facilitated the buyout of one of my orchestral pieces for a well-known international television network, to be aired on a promotional video broadcast. For a 16-year-old, this was exhilarating; I felt assured that I was on the right path.

In the spring of my junior year in High School, I was selected as a lead composer on a 30-member LA-based animated feature film project, The Frozen Sky. Over the past 8 months, I’ve composed several cues for this project, attended weekly meetings, and learned how to communicate and collaborate with a creative team.

In the summer of 2022, I was awarded a scholarship to attend the prestigious month-long NYU Film and TV Scoring Intensive at their New York location. Most attendees were graduate and undergraduate students and working professionals, with only a few High School participants. The workshop intensives were led by well-known Film and TV composers to simulate the high-pressure real-world scenarios. The participants were assigned several clips without any music to be scored for submission the following day. The cues were then critiqued by the original composers in front of all the participants – this was nerve-racking yet extremely affirming when we received positive reception. As one of the youngest participants in the intensive, spending a month in New York living with 60 fellow composers and receiving daily critiques was extremely challenging, yet provided a rare opportunity for growth and learning.

Since returning from New York, I have been fortunate to be offered a contract to write for Mpath, a Production Music label in LA that is the first and only company to achieve gender parity in the world. I am very thankful to Michael Levine, the award-winning composer and curator of Mpath, for this offer and for helping me finalize my debut orchestral EP. The EP is soon to be published by Mpath and distributed by APM (owned by Sony/Universal). Michael has also conveyed that I am the youngest writer to ever write for Mpath, which is very humbling.

While the path I have traveled so far has required a lot of hard work, I would not trade it for anything else. The people, teachers, and mentors I’ve met along the way have been nothing but kind and supportive. I look forward to continuing and seeing what unfolds.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
I have been to LA a few times, and honestly, Disneyland has been the highlight of my trips, especially since it appeals to my creative interests. As almost all of my contacts in the composer community and current projects are in LA, I hope to move here soon. When I do, I will definitely take my visiting friends to Disneyland as their first stop.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
I want to dedicate this Shoutout to my parents; they have been supportive from the very beginning. When I look back, the instruments they bought, the lessons they provided, and the environment they created were critical in developing my interest and skills as an artist. As early as I can remember, my parents encouraged me to use music to express myself with complete freedom to experiment and prioritized investing any discretionary funds to help me pursue my passion.

My parents also helped me join the middle school orchestra. They paid for my weekly violin lessons with Robert Padgett and Stephanie Moorehouse who enthusiastically validated and encouraged my interest in composing. I’ve benefited tremendously from being a part of the school orchestra for the past 6 years as I’ve been exposed daily to advanced classical repertoire and am surrounded by proficient and hardworking musicians.

Website: https://riyakny.wixsite.com/composer

Instagram: riya_s_kumar_

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/riya-s-kumar-51293221a/