How much should you give away? How much do you expose yourself? Should you open yourself up for criticism? Should you hide your art away?
Music, and any art come to think of it, is an incredibly personal thing. There is a reason people won’t show you that paining they have been working on for the past two months, why that poem just never seems finished, and why film composers can be late on their deadlines ;).
It’s all about exposure! It’s fairly human to talk your way around things, get yourself out of sticky situations, and let’s be fair, talk utter bullshit at times; but when you play a piece of music to someone, or unveil you latest painting, suddenly you are naked, open to criticism and in many cases, at your most vulnerable as both an artist and as a person.
I’ve listened to loads of music from various fellow composers and what I find interesting (although never comment), is just how much that specific piece, written at that specific time is actually saying about the person, it’s very personal.
Getting to the point, I’ve wanted to start a video blog for some time now, showing my approach to composing for film and hopefully starting up some interesting conversations with others. There’s a little more to it than that though...I think psychologically, it’s very useful to break down your tracks and talk about their forms and functions as a means to perhaps understand your approach and yourself better, a way to mentally file your creative work through ways of understanding it. If university taught me anything, it’s that in my case, the best part of the theoretical underpinning in my creative work actually happens during the process of composing, it can be very subconscious.
I chose to go right back to the start, my very first score which is perhaps the most revealing of all given I didn’t really know what the hell I was doing back then (on the quiet, I still feel like that a lot), but I hope it will be helpful perhaps to others just starting out with music and film and it was actually a lot of fun to revisit my initial film score :).
I hope you will enjoy it and please, don’t be too hard on the comments!
