Tim Rohwer: Composer

As a fun experiment, a decided to take a shot at some minimalism as a weekly warm-up.  Minimalism is where you take a few basic elements and develop art from them.  The idea is simplicity, although sometimes the results can be quite complicated in sound and appearance.  For example, here is a minimalist painting on the right.  It takes a shape and colors to form a painting.  the result is quite beautiful. Composers can do the same thing in music.  An example is Steve Reich's clapping music: The composer takes a rhythm and has people clapping it.  One group then shifts the notes.  This creates an amazing effect that sounds new and fresh even though it is the same rhythm again and again. Another famous minimilist composer is Phillip Glass who wrote the music for "The Truman Show" and "The Illusionist" among others.  Again, he uses some simple ideas to create pretty neat music. I tried my hand at this style of composition and came up...

I am very much a perfectionist, and this comes out in almost everything I do.  From the simplest tasks at work to my artistic endeavors, I strive to make everything the best I can.  But where do we as artists draw the line between a healthy goal of achieving beauty (and even potentially a masterpiece) and the inhibiting and self-destructive pursuit of perfection? Striving to write beautiful and powerful music has been my goal since I started composing many years ago.  However, I've recently realized that my own perfectionist nature has made me freeze up when dealing with the compositions I've been striving to write.  I currently have around 15 or more unfinished projects in various stages of development.  Each one was started with enthusiasm but has since become stagnant, and the main reason behind this is the desire to get everything "right" on it. I pondered about this the other night while driving home.  I was listening to a piece on the radio and wa...