If you’re doing several different things at once, are you really paying attention to any of them?

Why is it that we take such care programming a concert by professionals, yet often fail to take the same approach with our students?

I’m still as excited as I was before I arrived in Minneapolis 10 days ago for the Composer Institute.

Gossip and post-modernist fun in a time of economic and social uncertainty.

Exhaustion and its effects have begun to sink in, for all of us involved. The glazed-over look has become all the rage in the wing of Orchestra Hall we’ve taken over.

Have I lost focus, here in orchestra-orgasmafantasyland? Have I begun to think that now I would actually like to inhabit this world and set up a little patisserie?

Does the amount of time and effort a composer dedicates to composing directly translate into effective music?

This week I want to check in on an issue I grazed, as it were, with a haphazard spray of speculative birdshot last week: What does a composer have to be in the 21st century?

A reading is one of those things that there is nothing you can do to prepare for (other than the hundreds of hours making the paper look good). Once you are there, it just happens, whether you’re ready for it or not.

It’s become a joke among us composers here in Minnesota. In our face-time meetings with members of the orchestra, when we get to the part when it’s time to talk about individual pieces, it happens without fail: “Now first, where’s Sean? Who wrote surface tension?”