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I did it like two and a half years ago, it was sort of an improvisation in c minor, I didn’t know how harmony worked so I stayed in the tonic for the whole minute that the piece lasted Somehow it wasn’t dissonant, just too basic I am embarrassed to say that I was staying in the tonic during 90% of the time the pieces I wrote lasted, and I knew nothing about harmony until seven months ago, when I started taking composition seriously

Fortunately, my first attempt at composition was never written down

I think my first composition was not inspired by any particular composer or genre but by my having a computer and midi program which gave me the capability to hear anything I put in which to me just opened up the whole world of composing. My first piece was an impossible piano piece that could not be played because it had so many consecutive repeating notes (it wouldn't even be playable if one arranged it for four hands or two pianos LoL). As I learned music through learning Clarinet and Piano with my best friend in Jr. High and High School, eventually my Slavic/Polish roots came out in my music as I composed a Polonaise type piece without even really trying to write in nationalistic/folk music forms. But I like to think that a huge part of my attraction to music was because of my experiences of playing video games and listening to the kick ass music in classic Super Nintendo games from the 1990's. With my midi software I was able to search the internet to find midi's of VGM tracks that I opened up in my sequencer and tried to analyze/understand and then (of course) imitate that. I think a big part of my musical philosophy (which is basically that I believe that all music is playful) comes from those experiences of listening to really awesome video game music while having lots of fun playing games like Zelda: A Link to the Past, the original Star Fox, Sim City, Final Fantasy VI, and Chrono Trigger (all for the SNES). I also tried to imitate those musics through writing short incidental/programmatic imaginary VGM tracks with a limited instrumentation. All those old works are lost now but some of the melodies are still in my memory. Another kind of music I tried to imitate when I was first starting out is Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 4 - Pizzicato Ostinato. For some reason the string orchestra all using pizzicato all at once was a very attractive sound to me and I tried to write my own Pizzicato Ostinato piece which was one of my most chromatic and harmonically complex first compositions. It included harp and I was told by a Violinist friend in University that it was in fact playable (to my surprise LoL). But these days I feel like I've grown out of trying to imitate other composers. Maybe I might still imitate certain genres I am not particularly familiar with if there's a purpose for that (like if I need to write that kind of music for my own future video game I'm planning to make).

I was 11, and had some weird TV Show in my head called Demon Hunters. We were learning to play Pirates of the Caribbean in Orchestra so I decided to try and write a theme song for the show. I don't remember what it sounded like, but I listened to it a couple years ago and even though it was about 2 bars in length, it was rubbish. There were a few improv things I did earlier than that, but I dont consider them compositions.