Music Composition & Production

Q: What’s your approach to creating original music for professional commissions?

Eric Scott:
To track ideas, and the end result was an unending process which was to create a music library of ideas that I can just repurpose and pull from, from whenever I needed something to use in a project.

Ultimately, the goal was to make everything as quick and as effortless as possible so that if I had an intuitive need to find a piece of my music I wouldn’t have to create in panic a new work while on a deadline.

But I would quickly be able to research and find my own previous work as a source for something I could make, in order to create a meaningful end product.

Because sometimes, you know — under pressure, under duress — you might have 18 to 36 hours to make something.

That might be a fantastic window if you have best of circumstances to create a new score or a new commission, if you’re a composer. But what if you don’t have the luxury of inspiration? That was the other thing that bugs me when I was getting started was the kind of terror of “what if you’re presented with a deadline and you don’t have inspiration?”

So I took a body of work that I’ve been crafting since I was 17, maybe even earlier probably 14-15 and began to record and keep everything. Just for the purposes of archiving and recording my work so that it would become a meaningful repertoire… I didn’t really want to be ever stuck when I was trying to make something for a client… Because, the pressures of deadlines can be stressful. On a day where you have a deadline, and you wake up at 6 AM, trying to make sure you get this thing delivered by 5 PM, you could age the equivalent of five days if you’re not careful because you might have a tremendous amount of pressure about that deadline that doesn’t really free you from the needs to make something of genuinely good quality.

So I always wanted to jamming process of making music to be “a freedom” to kind of leverage when I needed something for myself. And if it was for deadline, or for personal work, the continual building up of a library, and building it into something that you could count on, was really the nature of an archival system. The Day For Night library is archival library of music and ideas, writings, visual media design and so forth.