This past week was my Spring Break and, for obvious reasons, we stayed home more or less the entire week. I do not exactly thrive under circumstances in which I find myself with vast swaths of free time (I suspect that I am in the minority on this). Rather, I prefer structure, especially externally imposed– likely a result of too many years of marching band and drum corps. To be sure, an occasional day without any plans or obligations is a beautiful thing, but five or six of them in a row, for me, is a recipe for disaster.
So, in an attempt to “trick” myself, I created a schedule for each day of the week. One of the many things baked into this schedule was a couple of hours each day to compose a 30-60 second snippet of incidental music, mostly as an exercise to challenge myself. For a brief moment during my freshman year of college I considered declaring Film Scoring as my major, but I did not think of myself as particularly creative at the time and so I chose the “safer” path of Music Business (“safer” is in scare quotes here because this was 2001, when the record industry was collapsing). Nevertheless, I’ve always dreamed of being the next Danny Elfman or Alan Silvestri and so last week seemed like perfect opportunity to take one small step down that road.
These exercises in incidental music are below (there are only four of them– I got sidetracked on Friday).
Enjoy!