NYU Application Essay

Classical music? Electronic music?

As an art form, music is transcendental. However, as a business investment, it’s not your typical
investment. You wouldn’t buy an album thinking you could invest in it and its value would
increase, you’d buy that piece of music because you resonated with it, because it gave you access
to the empyrean for an hour? (or 3 hours, if it’s a deadmau5 album).

The approach into making music has changed a lot since the introduction of personal computers,
since the introduction of DAWs. Let’s say you were a child in the late 1600s. You’re inspired by
Purcell, you’re spellbound by his operas. You want to become a musician. And how do you go
about doing that? You could pick up the violin, try your luck at the clavichord or learn the art of
composition. Repertoire and the level of one’s instrument really mattered back then.

What do you need to do to become a musician now? Get a cracked version of Fruity Loops,
install some plugins, play with the sequencer and progress as a modern ‘EDM’ producer. What
did you do if you wanted to become an artist back then, get a canvas, paint? What could you do
now? Download sketchbook and use it with a drawing tablet and there you go. You can create
pieces of art without a brush or a canvas; create music without any knowledge of sheet music
and music theory in general (yay piano rolls) .

Well, one could also learn the old way in today’s day and age but what I meant to say was that
now you have a wide array of choices. Classical music has only been going forward from here.
Back then, composition was limited to the instruments of that time. You could not write four
note chords for the cello because it was virtually impossible for a single cellist to play four notes
at once. You needed to have two cellists, write the chord on two separate sheets and have them
play it. All this work, for a seventh chord?

Take film music for example. Two amazingly talented composers: John Williams and Hans
Zimmer. John, whose compositional style remains more traditional, brought out almost the full
potential in an orchestra with complex melodic structures and in a broad diversity of genres and
moods. Hans Zimmer grew up toying around with mini synths and modular synths. Although his
music sounds classical to some extent, many people classify his music as neoclassical or modern
classical with heavy influences of electronic music. John relied upon his influences from earlier
composers like Mozart to create a memorable melody that often sticks in your head *Star Wars
theme intensifies*. Hans took on the route of modern classical. The art of expressing a lot from
less. I mean, Inception really is just four notes. How many notes was Star Wars again?

The debate between using technical complexity or the very sound of the music as a means of
comprehending a piece of music or a score is something that won’t really end soon. Let’s look at
it this way though. Sound consists of three main characteristics: amplitude(which one can
manage through note dynamics or the loudness), frequency(pitch) and the timbre(the very
waveform). When you say John’s pieces are more complex for let’s say a session violinist to
perform, Interstellar has that many sound design elements routed through synths. It’s a graph that
can never be one sided.

While I intend no disrespect towards academia, it’s time we broaden our horizons. It’s time for
composers around the world to use each instrument, each sound to the highest of it’s potential
keeping in mind the limitations of each instrument. This is what I really aim to go for as a
composer, to write music that says what’s on the screen with no limitations. To quote Hans, “If
there’s a rule, break it.”

*Interstellar theme plays in background*