Winning the Short Liszt Competition

On Sunday, August 16 I participated in the Academy of Scoring Arts Short Liszt Competition. It was a great opportunity led by their team to compose up to 40 seconds of music within 2 hours. The task was presented with three secret ingredients which the participants learned about on the day of the event. The three ingredients were:

Image to be inspired by
Sound Sample
A motive to use

Each ingredient needed to be used at least once.

We then met on Zoom with other members of the ASA community to play the compositions live and vote using these three parameters:

1. Use of “ingredients” – did the composer use them in a creative way?
2. Composition quality – is it an interesting/effective piece of music?
3. Production – mix/technical execution

If you read my post about composing for the penguin documentary, you’ll remember that composing under a tight deadline is a common thing for me and many composers. Both Adagio for Those Who Need It and Breath were composed in less than 24 hours.

Below is an image of my working on the project. This is with my 3 screen setup, which is helpful to keep the image up for reference.

I’m honored to have been voted a winner of the competition. There were 26 other great submissions and you can really hear the amazing different styles and ideas from all of the different composers. You can hear all the composers below.

Carrin Tanaka interviewed me to speak more about the process of composing the snippet. Watch the interview below!

It’s a fun challenge to compose in a short amount of time and it blocks out any opportunities for overthinking the project. Of course more time can be helpful, but it’s important in this industry to work quickly. These types of challenges also highlight weaknesses in our workflow.

In the video I talk about how I used the sound sample. In the image below you can see the filter I put over the sound sample to create some movement in the piece.