15 Minutes

 

About five years ago I started a series that was called 15 Minutes as a riff on Warhol's "15 Minutes". It was supposed to be an album with 15 tracks with each one exactly one minute long. There are three or four of them that I've made videos of and the last one is called Tessellation, a piece in 5/8.

It's ironic how long it can sometimes take to write a piece of music that's one minute long taking into account producing a recording and making a video of it. Writing one minute of music doesn't typically take a long time but it depends on the density. If it's at a fast tempo and has a lot of 16th notes for an orchestra then that's going to take a long time.

A rule of thumb that I heard a long time ago was that you should write a minute's worth of music a day. But it will depend on how many notes get packed in. If it's a slow piece, one minute might be whole notes and half notes and take an hour. Other days might take 12 hours.

15 minutes can take a very long time or some duration that's not 15 minutes on the clock.