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Denise Santos, roaming to the music of ‘Baka Bukas’


Photo: Denise Santos.
The journey continues for Denise Santos, musical scorer for "Baka Bukas." Photo: Denise Santos.

At a recently concluded film festival, Denise Santos finally wrote her first feature film score in a long while. Coming out of a hiatus of sorts, Santos worked on Samantha Lee's "Baka Bukas", a movie that followed the journey of a woman coming out as a lesbian.

The project gave her further room to grow and continue her own journey, which started with a teacher named Mrs. Garcia and has taken her to Los Angeles under a company partnered with Hans Zimmer. 

“[Mrs. Garcia] would come over to the Santos household every Saturday morning and my sisters and I took turns with our one-hour lessons,” she said in interview for GMA News Online. “We mostly studied classical pieces by Mozart and Bach.”

It was a routine she continued until she left college, and as she grew older, her teacher exposed her to piano music from the romantic era—such as Chopin’s work—to the ragtime era. Eventually, Mrs. Garcia also taught her how to play the guitar and how to sing.

“I have her to thank for my musical foundation,” Santos said. She acquired more musical knowledge as she grew older, learning about harmonies and balance during her church choir days, et cetera. At 13, she joined her first band, Gardenwire.

“We mostly did covers and performed them at school events,” she said. She eventually joined and formed other bands and began writing her own music in high school. By the time she was a senior, she had three bands including Chronic Star, Hymn of Siren (now called Yes Ma’am), and Death by Chocolate.

At the same time, she joined the school’s drama club and began doing incidental music for theatrical productions, sparking her interest in musical scoring. It was when she was playing with Hymn of Siren, though, that she first encountered a band called Hidden Nikki.

When she was in college, she caught a gig that featured that band. By then, she already knew the band’s bassist Jason Conanan from her college music organization, the Ateneo Musicians’ Pool, and she told him that she played the piano, too. It was not long after when she started to session for the band and eventually join photo shoots as a full member.

“Being part of Hidden Nikki and the Terno family has been one of the most magical, humbling, and overwhelming musical experiences I’ve ever had,” she said, “I met people who were so dedicated to their craft and it sparked something in me that made me want to dedicate my life to making music.”

She also played for another band around that time, Bones Like Snowflakes, which had a more instrumental post-rock sound that played a role in her formation as a musical scorer. Meanwhile, she also arranged music for musician-friends like Kai Honasan (now of Autotelic) and Carlo “Ling” Lava (of Lions and Acrobats).

It was after college that she pursued musical scoring in earnest. After taking private lessons in music production with producer Jimmy Antiporda, she reached out to her friends who were in need of music for their films or other projects. Eventually, she pursued her first feature project, "Suntok sa Buwan" by Bia Catbagan and Jono de Rivera.

It was not smooth sailing for her, as is the case with all first-timers, but the experience proved to be invaluable. Since then, she has scored film projects both long and short, including features by Alvin Yapan ("Mga Anino ng Kahapon"), Ato Bautista ("Mga Alaala ng Tag-ulan"), and Christopher Ad Castillo ("Diplomat Hotel"). She also did music for the Sine Totoo documentary Gusto Nang Umuwi Si Joy by JT Pandy.

Nonong Buencamino advised Santos to study abroad to hone her craft. “He encouraged me to take further studies and told me about schools in the US that had film scoring courses,” she said, “[so] I ended up going to UCLA to take a certificate course in film scoring.”

Her certificate course allowed her to experience new things such as working with and composing for a full ensemble, and learning quite a bit about the film industry. It was after this that she felt prepared to settle in her new musical homebase, Los Angeles.

Santos currently works at Bleeding Fingers Studios, a partnership between noted score composer Hans Zimmer and Sony Music, where she works as an assistant to a composer, writing musical cues and performing other tasks. Since she joined Bleeding Fingers, she wrote incidental music for several projects including the National Geographic Channel docudrama First Emperor.

But she is quite proud of the score she did for Sam Lee’s "Baka Bukas", her latest feature film, done as a freelance project. She realized how much of a second wind she got since she took a break from freelance music writing work, explored other people’s music, and enhanced her knowledge.

“By the time Sam hired me to do [the film],” she said, “ I was ready to bounce back and I was overflowing with new creative ideas. It’s a resurrection of sorts.”

Santos intends to continue working on musical scoring at Bleeding Fingers, but she has some ambitions about where she wants to go with scoring. “What I really want to do is to work more with orchestra and be able to conduct during live recording sessions,” she said, “I feel like I have a good start and all I need to do is keep at it.” — AT, GMA News

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