Alumni Spotlight: David Sibley

David Sibley (B.M. ’89) is this week’s featured alum in our new Alumni Spotlight series for the This Week at Meadows e-newsletter. Each week, a different Meadows alum will be highlighted for their accomplishments post-graduation.

Meadows’ vast variety of majors affords our students the opportunity to combine their interests and shape a unique professional path for themselves upon graduation. Music alum David Sibley leveraged his own Meadows experience to excel in the entertainment industry.

While enrolled in the Division of Music on scholarship for tuba performance, Sibley also began to explore courses in the Division of Film that focused on the television business which eventually led him to secure an internship with Television Academy.

“In addition to being a first-class music school, Meadows also had a top film program with some amazing alumni teaching there,” explains Sibley, who recalls the impact of Bob Banner’s television classes. “It was this exploration of television, and professional mentorship, while at Meadows that paved the way for my entire future in Hollywood.”

That future? Becoming the Creative Director of Music for Warner Bros. Television (WBTV), where Sibley helped the producers, development executives, current programming and network achieve their musical vision as realized in television programs.

His education in both music and television gave Sibley a head start in the industry and allowed him to excel creatively in a way by which others were unprepared. Between his knowledge performing and composing as a musician, time spent studying techniques that make great classical symphonic music for film and TV scores, and collaboration experience with live stage productions, Sibley was the ideal candidate for the job.

“My time as a musician at Meadows gave me a breadth of experience most music supervisors lack, before I ever set foot in Hollywood,” he says. “As a result, I was prepared to walk into almost any environment, from sound and scoring stages to ADR and post-production mix stages, and immediately offer effective, professional support to the rest of the team.”

For well over a decade at WBTV, Sibley advised on ways to improve the story after the cameras have stopped rolling through the use of music in post-production, from the inception of the idea through the marketing and promotion of the series. This included collaborating with the team to determine a direction the music should take; helping to create a unique identity for the music; establishing a budget to achieve those goals; and pitching composers, songwriters, and music supervisors to work on the series to achieve the vision.

Over the course of his career, Sibley has served as the music supervisor on everything from sitcoms and dramas like The Big Bang Theory, Revolution, The Mentalist and Desperate Housewives to musicals like Dolly Parton’s first full-length musical Christmas on the Square, even earning an Emmy nomination for NBC’s The Little Richard Story.

“Throughout my almost 40 years as an independent music supervisor and executive, my solid grounding at SMU gave me the perspective to traverse from the studio side to the producer side and back with confidence and expertise.”