Art & Creativity Quote by Trevor Rabin

There is a quiet pragmatism hiding inside Rabin's seemingly casual career math: art is the laboratory, movies are the payroll. Coming out of Yes - a band synonymous with prog-rock maximalism, virtuosity, and long-form ambition - he frames the group as a space to "explore" ideas, not to monetize them. That verb matters. Exploration implies risk, detours, indulgence. It also implies impermanence: you explore, then you move on.

The second half pivots hard from romance to logistics. "Orchestral music" carries the prestige of tradition and the scale of a bigger canvas, but Rabin pairs it with the blunt phrase "make a living". That's the subtext musicians rarely say out loud: the grander the arrangement, the steeper the economic barrier. Studio time, players, arrangers, scores - orchestration is expensive, and rock stardom doesn't automatically underwrite it forever.

Movies, in his telling, aren't a compromise so much as an infrastructure. Film scoring is one of the few mainstream pipelines where orchestral writing is not just tolerated but required, and where deadlines and budgets force craft into repeatable practice. "Perfect spot" reads less like starry-eyed destiny and more like a professional solution: if you want to keep composing at scale, attach your music to an industry that needs it every week.

Rabin is also quietly redefining credibility. In prog culture, "selling out" is a favorite accusation. He answers it preemptively by reframing the move as continuity: the same exploratory impulse, now matched to a medium that can actually sustain it.