Gone Composin’

I’ve decided to take the rest of the calendar year off from going to concerts. I need some time to mentally consolidate the things I’ve heard in the past few months, and on top of that, I have a lot of music to write! I think there’s something to be said for a finite period of self-imposed exile; it’ll give me a chance to make sense of all the music I’ve heard so far in London and Huddersfield and to regain my focus as I make war against a hard deadline for the first time in years.

You see, I have a bit of a problem. It’s been so long since I’ve had a performance by a group of more than five players that I’m really terrified about this workshop I’m working toward which will involve 11 players. My last piece for comparable chamber ensemble (12 players) was a tremendous failure, a disaster so abject that the sinking feeling that hit me as I stepped down from the podium was nothing compared to the gradual realization over the following year that I could have done something really cool but utterly dropped the ball. To make matters worse, a colleague of mine had a vivid, engaging piece on the same program for more or less the same ensemble that absolutely blew mine out of the water. All my effort is now no more than a useless score that it took me month upon wasted month to produce and a useless recording I’ll never feel comfortable sending out.

On the other hand, I learned a lot. One thing I learned is that I should delegate the conducting to someone who really knows how to do it. Another is that if performers don’t think they’ll sound good playing your piece, they won’t particularly try to. And a third is that when you have more than ten players assembled on a stage to give life to your creation, you have to bring your A game. In other words, I can’t afford another debacle like the one I just told you about.

So that, in part, is why I need a month to decompress from the heavy concert schedule of the past few. It’s time to basically forget about everyone else’s music for a little while: I have to bend my will to the construction of an audacious, idiosyncratic, potential-reaching essay on late capitalism and the 21st-century condition. I have to win over the players and show my British peers how we get down in the New World. I have to make sure I’ve learned from my mistakes and overcome the flaws in my technique and creative personality that led me to make them in the first place. I’ll let you know how it goes.