I’ve never had a piece played to such a large audience before. The energy of the crowd felt overwhelmingly positive; there were a lot of different ages of people, and you got the sense that everyone was excited to be there and anxious to hear what was going on in new music for orchestra.

My personal perspective about writing music and having it played feels addictive: those first rehearsal glitches, where your piece is still unknown to the players cause a certain amount of terror in a composer, but once you start to hear them smooth out, and the piece start to assemble itself into the entity you created, you get a burst of energy like nothing else.

After meeting and mingling with the donors, board members, and the commissioning club who were all in attendance, the six of us participants each got to say a few words to everybody.

The six of us participating in this year’s Composer Institute all met at 5:00 p.m., scurrying as quickly as we could across the block of chilling Minnesota winter from the hotel to Orchestra Hall. Most of us had not been acquainted with one another prior to this evening, but the experience of critiquing and receiving criticism for something so intimate as a creative act is probably one of the most intense and speedy ways to get to know others.