Nick Totten: Complete Musical Works, 2005-2015: High School: 2005-2009

In my first year or so of composing, I played around on an old electric keyboard. I spent hours and hours in the downstairs living room of my home, sitting on a comfy chair with the keyboard on my lap. I learned how to play my favorite music themes on the keyboard, experimenting with many different sounds. As I experimented, I wanted to write film music for my Bot Island stories. I thought it would be fun to create a theme for each of my characters in those stories. I also wrote a few compositions based on themes, ideas, or sounds I liked. All of these themes were written by hand on pieces of blank notebook or printer paper.

I had never heard of music notation software until my mother discovered a free program called Finale Notepad 2007 (She found it in an effort to support and encourage my pastime. She did the same thing when I once had an interest in animation.). Finale became my new toy to experiment with, and I especially liked the playback feature. To compose, I sat at a computer, opened up a new document, and just started to put notes on the screen. I would first select a few instruments I thought would sound good together (especially cello and woodwinds). I would then start on one instrument with a short idea (you’ll notice, for example, that I used the beginning of Ravel’s Bolero theme in the top voice of T. 11, 27, 38, and 39), and write notes and rhythms measure by measure for all instruments at once until I decided to stop. Then, I would hit the play button and listen to my new piece. At times I went back to tweak a few notes that sounded out of place. Beginning with T. 11, many of my compositions from my high school years, especially T. 26-31, are a direct result of this exploration.

My other approach was to base everything off of an original melody. I came up with so many melodies, but I didn’t really understand much about chord progressions. This is why you see so many ostinatos, especially in intervals of perfect fifths (I really liked the strong sound of perfect fifths, so I used them all the time.).

It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I started to put more thought into the structure of my pieces. It was also at around this time that I tried my hand at arranging hymns for my family to play together in church meetings. This is when I started to see the usefulness of my developing compositional skills. Of all the pieces I wrote during my high school years, the one I am most proud of is T. 21. I consider my experience with that piece to be the highlight of my years as a high school student-composer.

One final note: Even at this age, I was conscientious about recording the date I wrote each piece (for which I am now very grateful), but there are a number of pieces (particularly T. 26–39) that don’t have a recorded date. In my attempt to be chronologically accurate in assigning T numbers, I decided to start with the pieces with recorded dates, and then assign numbers arbitrarily to those pieces without a recorded date.

List of High School Works

T. 1—The Arret Bros. (May 15, 2005)
T. 2—Chess Masterpieces
T. 3—Botoran 101 (Apr. 7, 2006)
T. 4—The Importance of Background Music (Apr. 29, 2006)