User:Zorba We

My Musical Background and Outlook

My musical background is mostly based on classical and film music, through playingand composing. I started playing the piano since I was six years old and havebeen playing mostly classical piano music. In my teenage years, I was introvertedand spent a lot of time listening to music on the radio, playing pieces ofBach, Beethoven and Chopin, or daydreaming with the imagination that I obtainedfrom musical activities. I think that was the time that I was becoming closerto music and began to think about being a musician. However, I was in a harshreality in which I had to study very hard in order to be accepted into abetter-ranked university. After the high school, I made a strong decision tofollow my dream, started to study composition, and one year later, I finallyenrolled in a university, majoring in composition. Duringthe university years, I was mainly exposed to 20th century artmusic, which had various kinds of styles and movements. While listening to thedifferent sorts of music and learning to write new music, I began thinkingabout what music I was interested in and wanted to compose. I had interest incontemporary classical music, and film music as well. I was determined to gainexperience in film music after the university and began to build my career infilm scoring. Watching my name on a film’s credit gave me great excitement andworking with other people on a film making team was also attractive. After two years of living a film composer’slife, I found myself thirsty for broadening my horizon as a composer, and as aperson. That brought me to Boston to study film scoring. Ibelieve that music can affect one’s life. Once, I happened to listen to Polishcomposer Henryk Gorecki(1933-2010)’s Symphony No. 3 when I was in the thirdyear of my university. At that time, I was thinking a lot about how to be a great composer and what a greatcomposer can do for the world. Gorecki’s symphony gave me a direction. In themusic, which is subtitled, ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs,’ he talks about thelife and death of human beings and our greedy desires. I could feel what thecreator wanted to express through musical notes and sounds. The music was themeans through which he conveyed his thoughts and messages. What I seek to do inmy music is what he does; composing music which contains my own messages sothat I can communicate with people through it, and giving people the chance tothink about the messages in their lives.

Characteristics of My Music

My music that I have written is divided into two categories; one is concert music(classical music), and the other one is film music. The concert music pieceshave diverse styles of musical elements. Some pieces have no tonality at all,but other pieces have the tendency of a specific ‘key’ center although they arenot in tonality in a traditional way. Rhythmically, a lot of my pieces have‘free timing’ feelings. They are not written in specific meters, but in my ownmusical pulses and timing. I consider that the traits of my concert music comefrom my learning process of contemporary classical music. My film music israther different. It contains a lot of harmonic languages from the Romantic Periodand a use of modality can be usually found. For both genres, my music is mostlybased on acoustic musical instruments, except one piece made from experimentingwith electronic samples. Writing music for various combinations of instrumentsis fun and exploring the instrument’s sound and timbre is interesting to me. Inrecent years, the audience of my music was the audience of films anddocumentaries that I wrote music for. They met my music through these otherforms of media. However, I also wish for my ultimate target audience: those whowant to gain profound musical experience and deep appreciation of art.