For me it was teaching myself to compose classical piano music. I knew nothing about composition. I had to write every good boy deserves fruit and all cows eat grass on a piece of card to look at. I composed everything in a computer program; you were thinking that I PLAY the piano? I play the piano about as much as I swim in The Olympics. I would compose the score on Finale and then import the score into Fruity Loops to get the piano sound. This was all in 2015. I had not done any music since the usual beginner stuff at school. That was when East Germany still existed.
For the first few months I composed total noise. Over time I started to use triads. Then I used more complex chords like suspended chords. I even started to do weird experiments like having a different key in the bass clef and the treble clef. Then I stumbled upon a music composition competition. It asked for ten minutes of original piano composition! But the deadline was in TWO WEEKS!
I made the insane, maniacal decision to enter! I composed over those two weeks like a maniac. Every minute I was composing. I composed into the night sometimes till 3 or 4 am. Pssst yep this was composing vampire style! Somehow I finished it and posted my printed, bound [ as required] composition off by the TWO WEEK
deadline. According to WHO going without sleep is a class two carcinogen. Well, I would have made a medical man shudder more than Watson seeing Holmes put stuff up his nose. My composition to me sounded like someone running past a traffic light. I had looked for pictures and stumbled on those weird German traffic lights: Ampelmännchen. Yes, I called my composition that: Ampelmännchen. Lorda and anyone else German here would have picked up the nearest weighty object and thrown it at me. Of course I did not expect to seriously win anything in this effort. Nonetheless I was mad, bonkers and obsessive enough to enter. Most competitions were for "young composers" so this was a rare one for having no such restriction. A few months passed. Then I got an email:
"Your entry Ampelmännchen has not succeeded. There is a high standard of entry in this competition. Enter again in 2018".
That really is snark. Don't say that you're happy for me to enter again. State it like a date. Someone does something for nothing and that's all they get. I don't even know if they listened to the entry; it did ask for an mp3 file of it as audio and I had provided that. At least if people enter a science fiction writing competition you can say that Judges read your entry. They may hate it. But at least they would read it. That summed up the whole classical music culture to me: they just think that people are there to work their guts out to make massive compositions. They are so entitled.
I didn't compose a lot after that. I messed around with psychedelic electronica. Then I went all Linux in 2019 as Windows became a radioactive bomb crater that I had to escape at any cost. That ended it. You can compose in Linux but I couldn't be bothered.
According to The musical cognoscenti I am meant to be ashamed of what I composed. Give any of these music professors the circumstances that I had and two weeks and see what the heck they would do. See how they would handle it. TWO WEEKS. What I did wasn't good. But it was 100% mine. I didn't imitate or recirculate anyone else's stuff in any way whatsoever. Yes, I know the quote that great people steal and all that. I don't feel any shame. They would try to recycle some fugue or something. I'd say no no no no you're not doing that! This is ten minutes of ORIGINAL music for you to do in two weeks pal. I still have the score somewhere. I can hear it when I cast my mind back to it. It sounded to me like rushing cars on a highway after a traffic light has changed.
What a useless skill to have spent SO much time and effort to do. I try to joke that I was either George Constanza learning to compose music, or maybe Manuel from Fawlty Towers. It's not funny. I am proud of what I made. Even if it was terrible. The reply of snark saying in effect that I should not have entered: well that said a lot more about them then what it did about me. To me being a musician isn't about how many degrees someone has or how many orchestras someone conducts. One of us appreciated musical creativity. One of us didn't. One of us had basic respect. One of us didn't.
It's been nearly nine years since I composed Ampelmännchen. I can still hear it in my head right now. Those judges can not. Their loss.
Thanks for sharing!