“Do I really look like a guy with a plan?” – Heath Ledger Joker

“My balloons. Those are my balloons. He stole my balloons!” – Jack Nicholson Joker

“Burn a bridge and burn a boat, stake a lizard by the throat.” – Peter Sinfield

One of those quotes has to deal with this blog post. Unfortunately, it’s not the lizard one. I would love to go through a deep analysis of King Crimson’s 1970 critical and commercial flop Lizard, which is a really cool album despite the lackluster vocals, but I am forced to talk about balloons and their negative effects on society.

“Oh he he he a ha ha ooh he ha ha… and I thought my jokes were bad.” – Heath Ledger Joker

Film Scoring and How to Get There, by Jay Reed

I don’t know

However, I have some ideas:

1. Get as much crap performed and out “there” as possible
2. Branch out as far as possible to get a larger audience
3. Get my degree
4. Repeat (the first two)
5. Get connected, son
6. Build a reputation
7. Become a well-respected film composer
8. Have a huge fall from grace as I am revealed to be a cyborg who cannot love.
9. Move in with my human best friend until I get back on my feet.
10. Wacky hi-jinks ensue
11. Realize that I could love all along.
12. Get my career started again as the new David Schwartz
13. Other things

I’m good at composing I guess, and I can do a pretty mean Palpatine impression. I need to work on my ability to tune out distractions. I’m not very good at being descriptive or starting conversations. Would you start a conversation with “Do you like Frank Zappa?” I wouldn’t, but that’s all I’ve got. Would you end a blog post with “Do you like Frank Zappa?” I would.

I am a composer and multi-instrumentalist from Houston, and my main goal is to create music that many people can relate to by combining aspects of a wide variety of genres of music, ranging from jazz to classical to rock. I feel that, as a musician and a composer, I need to be able to communicate my ideas to as many people as possible, while still maintaining my own identity. I already have works being performed across the country, and am ready to work in as many fields as possible, but am especially interested in film scoring. My name is Jay Reed, and I would love to work with you.

Each blog post makes me care less about posting blog posts blog posting the blog posts on the blog with every post. Everybody comes up with these elaborate stories about their lives and all I have is this filler. I could be watching Nicolas Cage movies right now, but noooooooo. I have to talk about my motivation or some crap.

This is where posting gets tough. I can either write a long, boring story about my life where I talk about how clumsy I am while subtly implying how much smarter and more artistically adept I am than everyone else, or write a bunch of lame joke filler. I’ll do the latter, thank you very much.

My motivation to do whatever it is that I do (namely, compose and do other music stuff too) comes from those whom I admire and those whom I despise.

Let’s start with the positive, because other people are reading this blog too, y’know. When I hear music by Frank Zappa or Rick Wright, I can’t help but be inspired. It’s just too cool. Nobody else was (or is) doing what Zappa was doing (except Gentle Giant, but they came later). His innovative use of rhythm and harmony is probably the biggest influence on my music. Rick Wright was able to turn what would be pedestrian songs into some of the greatest and most memorable music I’ve ever heard with unexpected progressions that keep the listener’s interest going while still making musical sense. Also, he wasn’t some big showoff when it came to performing, but still had a distinct sound, so that’s something too.

When I see somebody that I absolutely loathe, be it artistically or personally, I am motivated to be absolutely nothing like that person. Adam Sandler. When I am ever in a situation Bono that requires a difficult decision to Smashing Pumpkins be made, I usually think “What would post-Mars Attacks! Tim Burton do?” and then do the exact Bon Jovi opposite.

I guess the best way to summarize my motivation is this: I want to be able to make the kind of music that I think is important, but I want to be able to do so while not looking like a total fool for acting like I know how to do something that I clearly don’t. That makes sense, right? Why am I asking you? Nobody reads these.

Appendage: I should probably write something about wanting to be successful and never giving up and really wanting a Mellotron for my own, but that would be boring to read again.

As you have probably not gathered from having not read my previous posts, I’m no Jonathan Nolan (or William Shakespeare, if you don’t know who Jonathan Nolan is). However, this might form a rickety segue into the subject of my… ahem… values. “What do you value?” I don’t hear you asking (because you aren’t talking to your computer, and I’ve already typed this anyways). I value lots of things, like music, family, God, organic raspberries, and all that other stuff everyone else said. What I value most, however, is the unique qualities that (almost) everybody has. I say “almost” because some people simply copy the personalities of others, which is no fun. I think that people should find what makes them unique and use this to improve their lives. I don’t quite know what makes me unique yet, but I’m getting there.

My compositional goals, in descending order, are to make pieces that aren’t clones of other works or composers, are entertaining to me, and have the potential to be entertaining to others. I’ve been spending the past few years trying to find my voice for composing and performing music. If I can’t successfully utilize my own voice (figuratively speaking) in my music, I don’t see the point in its existence; I’m just wasting paper that could be used for better purposes, like making free hats or informing people of the wonderful offers they can receive if only they fill out this form to receive more great deals on padding for mandatory blog posts. This makes composing very difficult for me, as I will often find that I am inadvertently writing in the style of another composer and need to start over. Finding my voice has basically amounted to trying everything and seeing what works, which isn’t difficult. The difficult part is defining what works: I don’t want to come off as banal and derivative, but I also don’t want to completely alienate my potential audience.

I have nothing more to say, so I’ll end this blog post the way I end every post, with a quote from Mark Twain. Wait, that’s not how I end blog posts. I end them abruptly.

After realizing that he had no idea of how to talk about his work habits, Jay decided not to do it all in the third person, because this attempt at putting a unique spin on the same blog post that you’ve already seen from everyone else has already probably been done by somebody else. That was fun. “Anyways, work habits” would be a sentence fragment, so pretend I wrote something better in its place.

My “work habits” are barely habits at all, because they change all the time, depending on almost every possible minuscule factor imaginable: where I am, who I am with, what is going on around me, what I had for lunch, what I had for lunch yesterday, what assignments are due, what is going on at home, what isn’t going on at home, what music I was just listening to, what I list, what I don’t list, and you stopped reading. The only thing that I know is that I work better under pressure. If I had to say what works about 62% of the time for school work, it would probably be seclusion in an empty room while listening to “The Grand Wazoo” or “Atom Heart Mother”. Sometimes, however, I try listening to music and get so frustrated that I throw something at the wall. Studying has never been a strong suit of mine, because my brain lets me be distracted by everything around me unless the subject which I am studying is so interesting that I am able to ignore that buzzing sound coming from the ceiling. Regardless, I will try as hard as I can to get all of my schoolwork done during my free hours during the day in my dorm, which is usually quiet.

As far as practicing the violin goes, I find it hard to practice while I can hear someone else practicing, because I can’t concentrate on trying to make music while completely different music is infiltrating my senses. I just hope that I never have to play Charles Ives. I usually reserve anywhere from one to two hours for practice, but I will sometimes have to sacrifice this if I have a major paper due in the (dangerously) near future. The actual structure of my practicing could definitely use work, because it is currently (to put it gently) not well-defined.

However, I can compose in almost any conditions. If you’re actually still reading this, you’re probably violently shaking your computer screen, asking it, “If you can’t practice with someone else practicing nearby, how can you compose in noisy settings?” Beats me. If I knew that, I would probably find it easier to practice in a noisy area, having isolated my problem and improved upon it. Nevertheless, this is probably the thing about myself I like the third-most, because it means I am not limited in doing what I love most. Actually, maybe that’s why I can do it anywhere. Oh. Well, then… I guess that settles that. So… how ’bout that election, huh?

Here are some things that I won’t be talking about because you’ve heard it all before:

• I’ve loved music for as long as I can remember.
• I never really fit in with the crowd.
• At the age of 12, I was injured with a baseball bat.

Basic stuff. Anyways, I was born in The Woodlands, Texas in 1994. I started playing the violin at the age of four, and played in both my elementary and middle school orchestras. In seventh grade, my dad bought me a guitar and I started to learn to play that as well. When I was in eighth grade, I applied to two magnet high schools: the Academy of Science and Technology in the Woodlands and the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Houston. I almost got accepted to the Academy of Science and Technology, but I (for lack of a better term) bombed the interview. In retrospect, this was actually wonderful, because it gave me the drive and determination to not screw up my violin audition for HSPVA. I got a callback, and after what seemed like weeks (most likely because it was weeks), I received an acceptance letter in the mail.

From the moment I entered the ninth grade at HSPVA, it was impossible for me to even consider going to any other high school. The whole school was focused on bettering and improving knowledge, abilities, and talent centered on the arts. Collaboration between students was heavily promoted and I was able to grow academically, socially and emotionally as I worked with other students in senior recitals and exhibitions, chamber music, and ensemble performances in other art areas. I was able to make friends with people in all areas of the fine arts, and was able to gain artistic perspective from the view of actors, dancers, visual artists, and writers.

During my freshman year, I was introduced to music composition through the school’s composition club. Composing quickly became my favorite activity, but I didn’t realize that I wanted it to be my career until I saw the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Seeing the perfect marriage of music to film made me realize that I wanted to become a film composer. In the summer of my junior year, I attended the conservatory program at the American Festival for the Arts, where I learned invaluable information about all aspects of the world of composition: counterpoint, advanced music theory, the history of 20th century music, communication with performers and institutions, and countless other subjects. There, I studied under many successful local composers and got a piece performed by professional musicians.

Needless to say, I attended the program again this year. Aside from getting new perspectives from different composers, I also had the unique opportunity to collaborate on a work with a member of the Ben Stevenson Academy at the Houston Ballet. After sending each other possible ideas, we had roughly two weeks to generate a finished work to be recorded the following week and premiered the next. The experience was truly amazing, not only to be able to get a different perspective on my work, but also to open my eyes to the possibility of joining different art areas to create works that were greater than the sum of the parts.

One thing that I find interesting about myself is that I am quite good at composing endings to music but dreadful at writing endings to blog posts.