Saxophone Quartet looming in

For the UO Composers Forum, I am going to write a 4-6 minute piece for an intermediate saxophone quartet.  I've had about 3 weeks so far to work on it, but I have not even started it yet!  I only have about 3 1/2 weeks left to write the piece, and I find it so intimidating to work under a time crunch that I feel terrified to even start it!  This is something that I really need to transcend, because as a professional film composer I will probably always be in a time crunch.  I've heard that film composers write an average of 3 minutes of music per day.  I tend to write slowly, completing about 30 seconds to a minute of music on a good composing day.  I think it will be a lot easier though with film scoring, because it really helps to have a video to compose music to.  The most difficult thing I find as a composer of classical music is to develop a piece without any other information or context to work with.  When something happens (or doesn't happen) in a film, you can just write in fitting audio (though hopefully unexpected audio for the audience), and before you know it you have a lot more music written than you think.  When writing for a group of musicians without any context, it's like being part of the cast of "Who's Line Is It Anyway?", making up everything from the top of your head - except when writing music you can go back and change/edit everything you have written, which is what I spend most of my composing time actually doing.

Either way, I realize that I need to write this piece by week 8 of the term, so I better get started today!  At least I have come up with quite a few melody ideas, and wrote them down.  My plan is to use those ideas and spin them out into something with potential.  I have found that one simple idea can lead to millions (cue Hans Zimmer's score cue from Inception entitled One Simple Idea).

I've been playing Final Fantasy IX in my spare time, and I am so tempted to start playing that again, considering I am at a cliff hanger in the game, really close to the switch to disk four (out of four), and I also have piano practicing to do (I've been slacking off too much) for my lesson today at 3:30.

This blog is really putting things into perspective, because I realize how much more I really need to give to my major.  I spend a lot of my time relaxing, enjoying the feeling of not having to do anything, but for school there is a lot to do, even if school is just an illusion - it's an illusion that's worth it.