Out of all the creative pursuits I've attempted, music is unfortunately the area where I've developed my skill the least. I've played plenty of music composed by others, but trying to write and arrange my own is an entirely different beast. Nevertheless, I've managed to make a few pieces I'm somewhat proud of.

Score for "The Optimist" / Journey Through a Forgotten Land (2015)

Written and animated by my high-school friend John Mervin, The Optimist is a "visual poem," portraying the world of a blind girl from her perspective. To match the sparse, evocative visuals, I composed a tune of beauty and melancholy woven into one.

The arrangement was relatively simple, but even that was a little too elaborate for how he envisioned the short film's musical identity. We had to pare the song down to its essentials, in some places reducing it to a bare arpeggio or even a single emphasized note. I still disagree with some of his choices, but it was his project, not mine.

My role in his work was complete, but I still wanted to see a finished version of my music as I had originally envisioned. I rearranged the material into a standalone piece of music in GarageBand and paired it with a personal photo of a sunflower field for album art.

The Optimist (YouTube)

Composition #7 / Ideas (2018)

A few years later, I shelled out the cash for Logic Pro because I wanted to try making stuff without the training wheels of GarageBand. Out of all the melodies I had composed as a child, the final one was by far the best fit for a high-energy electronic arrangement. I didn't give my compositions names, so I finally had to pick one. Further, the original "Composition #7" was actually quite short, so I extended it with a new middle section and a reprise of the original melody.

I never had any kind of formal training in music production, let alone experience with electronic music. In hindsight it really shows, as I had essentially taken the solo-piano composition and simply layered synths and a drum machine underneath it, leaving the finished product stuck in a weird limbo between genres.

Unfinished concepts and sketches

I continued dabbling with this stuff for a little while later, playing with sounds but never finding anything satisfying enough to properly develop or finish. It wasn't until much later that I finally realized I had never shaken the mindset of classical solo piano, but by then I had moved on to other projects.

While this is almost certainly not the last music I'll ever try to write, I no longer want to fully arrange and produce my own material. Like with other media, my goal now is simply to competently describe my vision for something, then hand it off to a specialist who can fully realize the idea better than I can.