12. How Much Is Too Much?

Koyaanisqatsi leads to Interstellar. Interstellar leads to Hail Mary. Holst's The Planets leads to Star Wars. Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring leads to Jaws. Each of these connections is real, documented, and in most cases openly acknowledged by the composers themselves. None of them are accidents. And none of them are theft. So where exactly is the line?

The Spark, Not the Blueprint

The most honest answer I can give is this: taking someone's idea whole is copying. Using it as a spark to arrive somewhere entirely different is composition.

A spark ignites something and then disappears. What it leaves behind is not the spark itself but whatever it set alight. When Hans Zimmer absorbed the minimalism of Philip Glass, the electronic textures of Tangerine Dream, the orchestral weight of Holst, what emerged from that accumulation was not any of those things. It was something that could only have been him. The influences did not survive intact. They evolved into a new language.

That is the distinction that matters. Not whether you were influenced, but what the influence became in your hands.

The Cabinet in Your Head

I think about this in terms of a cabinet. Everything you have ever heard, seen, felt, or noticed goes into it. A metronome heard through a train window. The opening bars of a score playing in a coffee shop. The sound of a rusty door hinge, the specific friction of metal on metal. A line of dialogue from a film you watched ten years ago. Your brain records all of it and files it away without asking your permission.

Then, years later, you sit down to score a scene, and something comes. You reach for it, and it feels like creativity. But what it actually is, is retrieval. Your cabinet opened and handed you something you had been storing without knowing it.

This is not a limitation. It is the mechanism. And when people marvel at artificial intelligence and its ability to generate things that feel original, I think they underestimate what the human brain has been doing quietly for an entire lifetime. We are not less capable than AI. We are simply less aware of our own archive.

Living Like an Observer

Which brings me to the part of this that is actually within your control: what goes into the cabinet in the first place.

Some of it fills itself. You cannot walk out of your front door without accumulating material. Every morning your own story begins the moment you open your eyes, and the moment you step outside you are surrounded by thousands of other stories. Every face, every conversation half-heard on the street, every piece of music drifting from a window. All of it is material, if you are paying attention.

But the best composers are not just passively absorbing. They are actively observing. There is a difference between hearing music and listening to it, between watching a film and studying it, between living through an experience and filing it away with enough precision to retrieve it later. Catching things, that is the word. You have to catch them.

The Composer's Job Description

Score composing is, at its core, an intelligent person's craft. And I mean that in a specific way: not technically intelligent, not musically educated in the narrow sense, but broadly curious, broadly aware, and relentlessly willing to learn.

You cannot be fluent in every genre of music on earth. But if you call yourself a score composer, you are implicitly claiming that you can go anywhere a story asks you to go. Which means that when something arrives that you do not know, the only acceptable response is to learn it. To research it, to listen deeply, to find the composers who have lived in that territory and understand what they built there.

Reflectiveness. Awareness. Analysis. Archive. Research. Knowledge. Experience. All of it feeds the work. All of it goes into the cabinet.

On Hans Zimmer

I will say this openly because I say it openly everywhere: I became a composer because of Hans Zimmer. His work was the first film music I ever studied rather than simply heard. I spent years taking apart what he built, trying to understand the meaning behind every choice, every texture, every silence. My cabinet is full of him.

And Hans Zimmer's cabinet is full of Philip Glass, Tangerine Dream, Holst, and a thousand other things he absorbed across a lifetime of listening. That is not a diminishment of his genius. It is an explanation of it. Genius, in this field, is what happens when a large and well-organized cabinet meets a story that needs telling.

How Much Is Too Much?

The title of this piece asks a question I have been circling around without quite answering. So here it is: It is too much when the influence is still recognizable in the output. When someone listens to your cue and hears the thing you started from rather than the place you ended up, you have not travelled far enough. The spark should have burned up on the way.

It is the right amount when what remains is unrecognizably yours, when the origin is visible only in retrospect and only to people who already know where to look.

Everything is borrowed. Everything has a lineage. The question is never whether you started from something, but whether you had the curiosity, the intelligence, and the depth of archive to transform it into something that could not have existed without you.

And for anyone who consumes art with the belief that their favorite works arrived fully formed from some higher spiritual force, untouched by earthly influence: sorry. Nothing is completely original. Nothing is produced by divine connection alone. No otherworldly transmission required. Hard work, boundless observation, the right analysis, and a little luck. That is all it ever was. Next Topic: "The Small Line Item in the Budget, The Big Return on the Screen"