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The trajectories of our life and career journeys can be straightforward, or they can be convoluted, with many sharp turns, nooks and crannies, and detours along the way. The changes and challenges that life has in store for us can be great. What matters most is that they eventually lead to a happy and fulfilled life – and not just in career terms. The following stories of personalities from among AMU graduates illustrate this statement.
Advertising copywriter, music composer, and sound director; Creative Director for Apple; the author of two books on the history of brewing… That’s the range of activities that Igor Paleta pursues, though he only focused on music until age 26. “My other talent or hobby started peeking out towards the end of my studies at AMU, and that was script writing and fascination with advertising creativity,” says Igor, adding he does not mean advertising geared towards selling products that we can see on TV every day, but creative advertising he first saw abroad and in creative competitions. “It coincided with a period of ‘piano overload’ in my life, which is what I was studying at HAMU at the time. I’d had enough of having to practice for many hours every day and stress from public performances,” Igor describes what led him to take a detour from the piano for a few years right after graduation and join an advertising agency. He is currently a freelancer and works on the jobs that find him. “Right now, I got an opportunity to get back to piano playing, as my music has made it to the multi-genre show Conversations with Escape by choreographer and director Martin Dvořák,” says Igor who believes the most creative pieces result from two or more disciplines. “Like if you combine J. S. Bach’s music and break dance. Or if you mash up the French and Japanese cuisines and explore the potential results. If a person is ‘trapped’ in just one field of activity, they will operate along models set over many years. They will do things the way they have always been done, because that has proven successful. But creativity won’t thrive in such environment. Creativity needs to take risk and not be afraid of failure,” the graduate pianist says adding that he perceives his multi-genre career as a competitive advantage in this sense. He also views creativity as one of the potential avenues in today’s world where artificial intelligence is beginning to take jobs away from people. “Take From the Future World, the well-known project where AI composed music in the style of Antonín Dvořák. It’s fascinating what AI has been capable of. But I can’t help it – I could feel at all times that it was just Dvořák’s progressions arranged in a somewhat meaningful whole. I missed something new and an overall arch of the piece. So far, this has been the domain of the creative approach of the human genius, which comes up with things unseen and unheard before,” he says. What does Igor Paleta like best about his professional diversity? “Most importantly, it never gets boring. Your mind will not burn out so easily. I mean the situation where you are fed up with your job and just want to quit. Simply put, you retain a pleasant balance,” he concludes adding that he would like to do a podcast on classical music and compose a piano score for a film. We will see.
