Writer's Confusion (Not to be confused with Writer's Block)

Writer's Confusion.

Yes, I just made up a term. But hey, I think it's pretty clever. This is just a quick post talking about my goal of writing a certain amount of music before June... And why it's not coming along very well.

As an self taught amateur composer, writing music takes me a long time. However, it's not because I can't think of any notes to play. No, it's quite the opposite actually. As a violinist and high school student, I listen to a lot of music. I listen to the classical pieces that I'm playing, I listen to film scores, and I listen to other music as well. Unfortunately, this creates some problems. For starters, I have dozens, hundreds even, of songs stuck in my head. Because of this, when I sit down to write, I jot down some notes and say to myself "That's really good. I like that," after that, I'll just keep expanding on those notes, and eventually have a decent portion of a song.

Then, maybe a minute later, or an hour later, a day later, or even much longer than that, I'll realise it sounds familiar. From that point forward, I'll try to convince myself it's not from anything, it's just my music. But then, out of the blue, it hits me. It's from this movie... or it's from a T.V. show... or it's from that one song I play in symphony.

One day I wrote two minutes of music in a matter of hours for a full ensemble. Later that day, I was watching a show on Netflix and... what would you know. The music that I wrote.

In a sense, this "writer's confusion" thing must happen to all composers... right? Well, like I said, I listen to a lot of music and honestly, I almost never hear the same music in two movies by the same composer. There are a couple of odd cases here and there, but there's so much music in the world it might be a coincidence. However, film scores aren't the only modern compositions I listen to. I'm subscribed to over two dozen music channels on YouTube, and several of them are composers. Of those composers, I'd say three quarters are really repetitive. Is that a bad thing? Not always. It's good to have your own style, but it's different to have several variations of the same song. In my house, I'm infamous for being able to name almost any film score that I hear. And the ones that I don't, I can't generally identify the composer. If you listen to only music by one famous composer, none of it's the same, but it all has the same style. It takes skill to master your own style, and I congratulate the people who have done it. But again, plagiarism is different than style, no matter how accidental.

Up next... Pixar's "Big Hero 6"