Watched "Love Actually" yesterday (yes, I really do like it) and the soundtrack made me want to go and play piano. The "Glasgow Love Theme" is particularly impressive to me; it is so simple but so evocative. Genius. The film reminded how less really can be more. The score is so minimal, in many cases it is simply a piano with strings, but it works so well. One of my major pitfalls is wanting to add more and more layers to a musical cue. I do at least now realise this and will be very conscious in the future of how rich my texture is.

Other films such as American Beauty also drive home this point. Newman delivers a very minimal score to great effect. The key is finding a great motif or idea then playing with it; expanding it, inverting it, changing timbre. Simply whacking a huge sounding mass of music down does not do the job! I must remember this!