Tag: career choices

April: Texas, New York, and the Oppositions

Posted on June 26, 2014 by - Columns

In the early evening of April 22 I sat depleted outside an apartment house in Red Hook, Brooklyn. From that stoop I could see the choices and oppositions of my life laid out like they were chalked on the sidewalk. Sometimes it feels like life is a tug of war—between east and west, life and career, social and personal, work and play, urban and rural, composer and singer-songwriter, professional and academic, serious and jocular, art and business, collaboration and solitude—and I can’t seem to choose my side.
April had been a rapid-fire reunion, a gonzo retrospective. It was like one of those broadly staged final scenes in Wes Anderson’s films where all the characters are seen together at once, their relationships’ dynamics laid bare. In just three weeks, I had visited most of my important places and seen many of my important people. I set foot in New Mexico, Colorado, and Iowa; I played shows in Chicago, Austin, New York City, and at my alma mater Illinois Wesleyan University. After April 26, I had no further gigs on my calendar. Plans, but no dates.

This happens to freelancers. We build a run of work, and then the run ends. It can be a difficult transition. I think of my days in theater, when the closing of a show would effectively disband a group of friends. At the end of each season, we were sent back to the drawing board; professionally, creatively, and socially, we had to reconstitute ourselves.

One time, during one of these reconstitution phases, a friend encouraged me with the words of his teacher: “Growing into yourself as an artist requires lots of time feeling lost.”
Here is Rebecca Solnit, the poet laureate of being lost:

That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost. The word “lost” comes from the old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army…I worry now that people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know.

We disband our armies, we find ourselves alone. We find ourselves.

Many creative people experience their first disbandment, their first dramatic, forced reconstitution, when they leave school. Such was the case for me when I left Austin in 2009, after completing my master’s degree. I’ll borrow the idiom again, abused as it is, because it is so terribly precise: my two years in Texas were when I found myself. I left town as soon as I finished the degree because I felt I had to keep moving forward, but when I landed in Chicago that fall, I immediately missed Austin’s atmosphere. I have heard Austin called “the world’s largest retirement community for young people”; no similar description applies to Chicago. There are swarms of creative twenty-somethings there; most of them work from nine to five at Groupon. There is bohemian culture, but it doesn’t feel endemic. Office jobs feel endemic. Commuting feels endemic. Sleet feels endemic.

I eventually found collegiality and inspiration in Chicago’s new music community, but in late 2009 I felt a bit like the narrator of Guy Clark’s “Dublin Blues,” the best song ever written about wishing one was in Austin. I walked the neighborhoods, kicked the pavement under granite skies with cold winds slipping between me and my jacket. Chicago didn’t need me. The city is a vast, fascinating patchwork of deep, disparate stories, but it’s stretched over a reservoir of such infinite sadness. It hides it well; the patchwork holds. But Austin was warmer. It felt like it had some holes, and I could find my way in.

My favorite composer these days is Morton Feldman, whose late music I find unimaginably brave. This spring, after the April fury wound down, I discovered that WQXR had posted a complete recording of the FLUX Quartet performing his String Quartet no. 2 (1983)—that’s the one that’s six hours long. As mentioned, I had no further gigs on the books, so it was time to conduct some business, and one day I dialed up the Feldman as I set to an afternoon of emails and tasks. The piece susurrated in the background, but every once in a while it leapt out and grabbed me by the spleen. It sounds like a field René Magritte might have painted, the grass glowing midafternoon green, the sky above black and starry. It’s like you’re walking a wide meadow of rolling hills, of night flowers, and occasionally you find an old wooden trap door set into the hillside. It could go anywhere. But actually you don’t open it. You keep walking the meadow instead, for hours and beautiful hours.

Feldman’s quartet lay over my emailing like so much diaphanous cloth, and in it I heard the magic of the everyday. I used to be terrified of routines, always coveting more adventure, but I’ve come to appreciate the beauty of assembling a life durable enough to make sense multiple days in a row. We don’t always see the magic in this, but as artists we simply have to trust in its presence, beneath our daily rituals, in all of our work, in the revision, the tedium, and the suspicions of futility.

I hadn’t seen much routine during April. A few weeks previous, on April 9, my bandmates and I landed in Austin a few days in advance of the Fast Forward Austin new music festival. We had a lot of rehearsing to do. We had been separated for most of the previous four months, and we were preparing two separate sets for the weekend: one with piano for Fast Forward Austin, another without piano for a bar show the previous night. A number of friends and collaborators were in town for the festival, and there were meetings and reunions to balance with our work.

Grant Wallace Band in Austin

Grant Wallace Band performing in Austin, TX.

Our subsequent New York trip, the very next weekend, was a wilder whirlwind. Ben and I landed on Friday and caught the new Anthony Braxton opera. On Saturday, Elliot Cole and I split a show at Spectrum. On Sunday Ben and I spent some time with Elliot in the studio, contributing some singing to an emergent track. On Monday we heard Bearthoven rehearse our pieces at New Amsterdam Records’ warehouse space in Red Hook, then walked to the Fairway by the water and ate grocery store sushi in the sun.

Rehearsing with Bearthoven

Rehearsing with Bearthoven at New Amsterdam Records.

That night, Ben and I heard TIGUE and So Percussion at Le Poisson Rouge. I was electrified by this show. Chris arrived from Chicago that night, and the three of us walked the streets of midtown until late, talking band talk, scheming schemes.

TIGUE performing at LPR

TIGUE performing at LPR.

Our show was the next day, at the New Amsterdam space. We found our way back to Red Hook and the apartment of Chris’s brother, Danny Fisher-Lochhead. Danny is a saxophonist and composer, and his place is just around the corner from New Amsterdam. We rehearsed, sound-checked, and returned to Danny’s place for burritos. I was so spent, I could barely socialize. This was the point when I removed myself to the stoop and admitted aloud that I felt totally empty. I was looking another reconstitution phase in the eyes. I had no home, no plan, and no way to unify the oppositions.
It hit me hard, that evening, that my work is in one place (the city) and my soul is someplace else (the west), and I don’t know what to do about it. The music in New York is so powerful, but I just don’t think I’m personally constituted to live there. In May I fled back west. Over the summer I’ll spend some time in Chicago with the band, play a few shows, and finish our album. We’ll be back in New York in early September, to play on the Resonant Bodies Festival. By then Ben will have moved to North Carolina; he recently accepted a teaching position at Appalachian State University. Chris is still working on his doctorate at Northwestern.
I used to feel, if one was very rural and ten was very urban, that I might someday be happy in some sort of three and a half. But I’ve lived one and ten in recent years, and it’s made me doubt that the middle, in America at least, can really share the benefits of either extreme. I grew up in a five-sized town and I didn’t hike mountains on my off days, nor did I have regular access to a standing, working community of world-class musicians. Subsequently I lived in Rocky Mountain National Park for four summers, then embedded in Chicago’s new music community for two years. I suspect that deepest life will always be in the ones and the tens. But I wish there were some way to live moderately.

I think again about Edward Abbey and our culture’s opposition of wilderness and civilization. The American environmental ethic has always been about extremes, about subjugating nature (see: Iowa, industrial agriculture) whenever we are not enshrining it (see: Colorado, national park system). Is there a model in which civilization and wilderness can coexist more fluidly?
The presently dominant code of wilderness travel is Leave No Trace: when passing through a wild area, one is instructed to “impact” it as little as possible. (Yes, you bury your excrement, and you also eat the nasty little food scraps from your dirty dishes rather than dispersing them on the ground or in a stream, and you find a spot for your tent where there isn’t any vegetation.) Isn’t “impact” a funny word? In environmentalism we are supposed to minimize it, in art we are supposed to maximize it. Isn’t there some way to live moderately?

A similar opposition plays between life and music. In America we have excised art from the daily flow of our lives, sequestered it to safe, respectful shrines built for its enjoyment and study (museums, concert halls, universities). We don’t play music with our kids as part of our social existence; rather, we buy them music lessons. And we are perpetually surprised to learn, to paraphrase the critic Dave Hickey, that in the special, clean spaces we set aside for culture, culture doesn’t work. Can’t life and art be hopelessly intertwined, every single day?

One and ten, life and art, work and play. Austin was all lifestyle to me, Chicago all career. The space is in New Mexico, the music is in New York. Do I have to pull myself back and forth so rapidly? It has become so exhausting. It is, to brandish the word of our era, unsustainable. Isn’t there some way to live moderately?

I think about Eric Holthaus. I don’t know if I can do this without flying, but I can try. I can try to slow down, travel with intention, stay for a while when I go, take trains instead of airplanes. Have you taken a train across the country? It’s so civil. You get treated like a human being, and no one is in a hurry: delays of multiple hours are not uncommon on long routes, and without our usual sense of entitlement toward punctuality, time takes on a different tint, and you sit and look out the window for hours as the land steadily changes and the light moves from east to west, from a glow to a blaze to a glow again before it disappears over the horizon, leaving you in limpid flowing darkness.

It’s like listening to Feldman’s second quartet. It rolls on and on.

Last August, a New Mexico friend came to visit me in Chicago. We used to work together as wilderness guides, and it was pleasantly incongruous to see him in the city. I even took him to his first new music concert. One day we went to the beach, sat and watched the waves of Lake Michigan.

“We talk about time like it’s money,” he said, his feet speckled with wet sand. “We ‘spend’ it, we ‘waste’ it. I wish we didn’t think of time as something we can gain or lose. We should just think of it as a shifting of light.”
Beach ending

When Life Throws You Cincinnati, Redefine Chili

Posted on April 10, 2014 by - Columns

In the spirit of creating my own artistic future, I may have decided to move to Vermont from Los Angeles immediately after graduating from college. (Yes, Vermont, the Green Mountain State, not Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles, the place where my parents thought I was moving.) Random? Yes. Crazy? Most certainly. But here is what happened.

After the supposed devastation that was “failing at composing” while an undergrad (that is, not winning young composer awards, not obtaining good recordings of my work, and not applying to good graduate programs), I decided to take a break from school. Admittedly, this was quite a bit scary: all of my other composer friends were going off to prospective graduate schools (and good ones, might I add), and most importantly, it was my lifelong goal to complete my education. What was most scary about this romantic notion of leaving Los Angeles was that I wasn’t exactly sure what to do when I arrived in New England. In fact, when I suggest to undergrads that they should take what is now called a “gap year,” the first question they blurt out is, “What will I do?”
“Get a job,” I say.

I know this sounds scary, but it’s the logical thing to do. I ended up living in Vermont for four years, and honestly, it was the best thing I did for my career. Even though I didn’t write much music, I stayed active: I conducted a church choir, accompanied and taught students at a Waldorf school, and helped produce concerts for the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble. And after four years, the beckoning from my past became too strong to avoid any longer.

Overture and Prolog to the opera Erzsébet by Dennis Báthory-Kitsz. Premiere performance run, October 2011. Lisa Jablow as Erzsébet. Directed by Ann Harvey, conducted by Anne Decker with the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble.

And so I started the dreary process of applying to graduate schools. I was hoping the recordings from my undergraduate recital of four years ago would still be relevant. I was also hoping that the two pieces I had written in the course of my four years in Vermont would be substantial enough for a portfolio. So, fingers crossed, I applied.

And then I was rejected from most of my graduate school choices.

Fortunately that school in Cincinnati decided to take a chance on me. Ultimately I decided to enroll since they gave me a good scholarship, and I thought the campus was not that bad.

In hindsight, I’m quite thankful the other graduate programs rejected me since living in Cincinnati has helped me as a composer far more than winning any composition competitions. I didn’t know it at the time, but living and composing and staying musically active in a major American city (possibly outside of New York or Los Angeles!) can do wonders for a composer.

MusicNow Festival

MusicNow festival at Music Hall, Cincinnati, Ohio, March 2014.

When I first moved to Cincinnati in 2007, I was a little underwhelmed. The town was slightly run-down (the 2001 race riots are partially to blame for that) and dreary (the 181 overcast days don’t help either). This city also had a small-town feel to it, which was something I wasn’t used to as an Angelino. And it seemed my only connection to the Queen City was that Carson Palmer, then quarterback of the Cincinnati Bengals, was quarterback of the USC football team during my undergraduate tenure.

However downtown Cincinnati—or Over-the-Rhine as the neighborhood is called—was making a little bit of a comeback. By 2012 (five years after I settled), the neighborhood was home to an influx of young professionals, and hip restaurants and shops were popping up on Vine Street. And with this revitalization, I concurrently learned that Cincinnati has a rich musical and cultural history.

As a Californian, I had no idea that the Cincinnati Symphony premiered Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. Or that the Cincinnati Opera is the second oldest opera company in the nation, or that the Contemporary Arts Center is one of the first contemporary art institutions in the country. Furthermore, the city has made a vested effort to provide the public with new music. Most recently we had premieres as part of the MusicNOW Festival by Nico Muhly and David Lang; Lang in his piece mountain was actually inspired by Cincinnati’s commissioning of Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.

concert:nova percussionists perform Musique de Table by Thierry de May
How is this relevant? The combination of a revitalized downtown, the ample cultural history and resources, and the small-town feel of the city (in other words: talented performers are nice here and are willing to talk to you) makes for a fertile creative ground for us composers. My composer friends and I know performers in the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and sometimes we chat with them after a concert. Some of us composers know chorus members of the Cincinnati Opera since many of our singer friends are hired by that institution. Some of us know Drew Klein, performance curator for the Contemporary Arts Center, who recently had TRANSIT and Roomful of Teeth stop by the Queen City. And on a micro level, Ixi Chen of concert:nova and Laura Sabo of Classical Revolution Cincinnati have been doing a fantastic job with their contemporary programming and have reached out to local composers.

In other words, if curating your own musical future supposedly takes you away from your original plans, don’t fret: it all works out in the end, especially if you make the most of where life takes you.

A performance of my Krispy Kremes and Butter Queens opera at Classical Revolutions Cincinnati.

Reflections on Liberal Arts and Late Bloomers

Posted on September 26, 2013 by - Columns

Vassar College library

The Vassar College library, by Matt DeTurk on Flickr

Last week I had the opportunity to visit my old stomping grounds at Vassar College. I was there to sit on a panel of alumni discussing careers in the arts with students and parents. It’s not an easy thing to talk about—arts-driven “careers”—and the panel, comprised of two visual artists, a novelist, and myself, did not shy away from talking about the instability and general uncertainty of working in a creative field. We all presented different approaches to building a life in the arts, and I think the conversations left students with the accurate impression that there is no one right way to be an artist.

Wandering around campus (and noting how comforting it is that the inside of the buildings still smell the same) I felt immensely grateful for the education I received there. I am quite certain that had things unfolded differently, I would not be a composer today, and I think there are plenty of young people out there now who, like my younger self, need something a bit different than the laser-focused, technical musical education one might receive at a conservatory or through some other types of programs.
The argument that a liberal arts education has no workplace value holds no water for those who actually hold liberal arts degrees and also have perfectly good jobs. Aside from the basic essentials that a liberal arts education provides—you know, the capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems, not to mention assorted other “soft skills”—there is the simple fact that a teenager entering college often has no clue what s/he would like to pursue as a career. Some don’t figure it out until after college (the acclaimed novelist on the panel was a psychology major, and never took a single English class in college!), and others don’t figure it out ever. (This is by no means a terrible thing—these people are often fantastically interesting and smart about a myriad of subjects.)

I entered college fully intending to pursue the visual arts (way to pick the lucrative fields, right?) and in fact debated between attending an art school or a liberal arts college. In the end, I decided it would probably be smart to learn some other stuff in addition to art, just in case. It turned out to be a wise move, because I quickly changed my mind about a studio art major after enrolling in an electronic music class. The lure of being able to make my own sounds was too enticing, and I couldn’t get enough of it.

Although I grew up studying piano and singing in the school chorus, I did not start noodling on an instrument at age three or composing symphonies at age seven, and I never did counterpoint exercises at the breakfast table. Rather, I was at times a super pain in the butt for my very patient piano teacher, and I had barely touched the tip of the music theory iceberg by the time I arrived at college. That’s a late start, but at the time I had no idea whatsoever that I was running behind. And happily, no one ever mentioned it.

How We Learn Now: Education Week

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The beautiful thing about the small music department at Vassar was that it didn’t really matter. As I dutifully plowed (and sometimes slogged) through the music major requirements (there were a lot—aside from pre-med, music had the largest required course load), I was receiving, in addition to that core knowledge, a fantastically eclectic musical education. There were two wonderful composition professors—Annea Lockwood and Richard Wilson—whose musical philosophies were worlds apart (and they got along—go figure!). I fell in love with the music of George Crumb, Steve Reich, Stravinsky, Bartók, and Messaien, while meeting in person Nicholas Collins, Charles Amirkhanian, Kyle Gann, and Conlon Nancarrow. I had a job working for composer Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening organization just up the road. As a percussion student, I played in the orchestra, performed Elliott Carter’s timpani etudes, and participated in the performance art works of other students. I never felt a sense of competition (in the negative sense) with my peers, nor was I particularly aware that composing competitions existed in the outside world. That was just fine; it wasn’t time for such things yet.
This is all well and good, but one could conceivably have those experiences at a forward-thinking music conservatory, right? Well, maybe so. But the other piece of the puzzle lies in the acquisition of knowledge outside of one’s focus. The study of topics such as astronomy, geology, biology, and Italian, just to name a few examples, open windows to the workings of the world, and as a result add richness and nuance to whatever one’s focus might be. I actually discovered the music of Benjamin Britten not through a music class, but rather via a Modern German Literature in Translation course, for which I wrote a paper about his opera Death in Venice. Through courses in religion (so many that I considered declaring it as a minor field of study), I became fascinated by the concept of ritual throughout world cultures, of storytelling, of the power of the human mind to conjure explanations for, and forge universal connections between, life events both significant and run-of-the-mill. By having the opportunity to dig deeply into a variety of topics that were interesting to me, I learned how to explore the nature of creativity in a meaningful way and discovered how to engage with ideas that would later serve as conceptual stepping-stones for the development of musical works. While possessing a deep and ever-growing understanding of one’s craft is obviously necessary, there are a lot of other things that can help pull a person to the composing desk (or the easel, or the potter’s wheel) each morning.

After college graduation, the road has continued to unfold in a similarly eclectic way, and I wouldn’t change a thing. It certainly isn’t an easy life, but then it’s not easy for anyone regardless of how focused their training may have been. Many of us have musical lineages that are more patchwork quilt than classic pinstripe, but the past and present of any artistic discipline are inextricably linked regardless of how the connections are formed or which version makes it to the history books. These interconnections are what make it is so exciting to be an artist in this day and age.

So the next time someone asks, “A music/philosophy/history/religion/you-name-it major? What on earth are you going to do with that?” A perfectly sensible response might be, “The sky’s the limit.”

Your 2013-14 Attitude Guide: Four to Cop, Four to Drop for an Amazing Season

Posted on August 21, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

SOUL-KILLING ATTITUDE #1: SOBUSYOMG

September is coming, with all of its promise and terror. Remember that it’s a marathon, not a sprint. You’ll know you have a problem if, in mid-October, someone asks how you’re doing and this is your response.
SOUL-KILLING ATTITUDE #2: MY SCREEN, MYSELF

Most of us carry our email inboxes around in our pockets, which is both a blessing and a curse. Read the research on how addictive, counter-productive, and psychologically damaging the whole “constantly plugged in” thing can be, and make sure The Machines are serving you.
SOUL-KILLING ATTITUDE #3: MY FINANCES ARE FINE

You can’t pretend to be surprised anymore when April comes and you owe the government two months’ rent. And it’s getting a little ridiculous how infrequently you change your strings. Get a savings account and put plenty of money in it so that you can invest in your instrument, your career, and yourself when those moments arise. Ally Bank allows you to create multiple online savings accounts so that you can set aside money for different financial goals (like paying taxes, traveling, or buying an important new piece of gear).
SOUL-KILLING ATTITUDE #4: INSTRUMENT, WHAT INSTRUMENT?

I know. Being a musician sometimes feels like 973 hours of emailing, commuting, teaching, and Sleigh Ride and 2 hours of quality practicing. But your relationship with your instrument (or your compositional process) is a primary relationship, and feeling distant from that often means losing touch with your roots. When you stay grounded in the basics, a lot of great stuff will follow.
SOUL-HEALING ATTITUDE #1: SELF-PRESERVATION

This fall, you must become a fearless practitioner of The Art of Saying No. We both know that time is the most valuable resource you have, and that you never have enough of it. Approach your life and your Google Calendar like a zealous weed-whacking gardener, ruthlessly clearing space for the things that actually matter. Only one morning available for composing this week? Postpone those advice-giving coffee dates. Super busy performing month? Let friends know ahead of time, so you don’t feel guilty turning down their dinner invitations. And if people don’t like it, they can deal with it.
SOUL-HEALING ATTITUDE #2: GRATITUDE

If you’re a performer or composer, chances are you don’t work alone. You probably rely pretty heavily on tolerant quartet-mates, long-suffering stand partners, and miraculously organized artistic staff. Busy working musicians have a bad habit of not expressing appreciation often enough, heartily enough, or—in the case of Frodo and Sam—homoerotically enough. This fall, practice gratitude for the delicate ecosystem of wonderful people who make your career possible.
SOUL-HEALING ATTITUDE #3: JOY

You trained all your life for this stuff, and now you get to do it. The best gig is not at some future time; it’s the one you’re playing right now. So stop complaining and texting during rehearsal and take some joy in what you’re doing. (If there’s absolutely no joy in what you’re doing, see Soul-Healing Attitude #1. You know what to do.)
SOUL-HEALING ATTITUDE #4: CONFIDENCE

Believe in your unique self. Our classical music training sometimes makes us feel like we’re all striving endlessly towards the same unattainable ideal. But the truth is, it’s your quirks and unique gifts that make you an important contributor to our art form. Have you heard of impostor syndrome? The feeling that you’re not good enough, that you’re going to be found out as a fraud any second? It’s a thing that a lot of people—women especially—suffer from. Confidence is the opposite of that. So put on an amazing outfit and fake it ’til you make it.

Buyer Beware: Education Debt

Posted on June 3, 2013 by - Articles, Commentary

Debt word cloud
Every spring, music schools across the country celebrate commencement. There are processions and ceremonies, brunches and barbecues. Young, talented students have performed recitals of demanding repertoire, gained valuable ensemble experience, and passed through the gauntlet of theory, ear training, and music history. Commencement speakers advise graduates to be bold, creative, and persistent as they begin their careers. During this time, few commencement speakers will breathe a word about what will happen in precisely six months’ time, when the first student loan bill arrives on graduates’ doorsteps. That particular milestone will occur without fanfare, but represents a life-changing reality of its own.

Educational debt, which recently reached a total of one trillion dollars, is an acknowledged crisis in the United States. In the context of our struggling economy–which tanked just after my own graduation in 2007–the situation is even more dire. For the average American college graduate, making loan payments is not as easy as she thought it would be. Many of the good-paying jobs that she planned on have evaporated.

And what about musicians? Did any of us plan on good-paying jobs in the first place? As American orchestras struggle financially, competition for these jobs gets fiercer and pay gets lower. Academic positions are equally competitive and often require a doctorate–which means more education and often more debt.

Enter the biggest music career buzzword of our generation: entrepreneurship. Books like Beyond Talent and The Savvy Musician acknowledge that “traditional” employment for musicians is disappearing and that an innovative approach is essential. Several top music schools–including Eastman, the Manhattan School, Yale, and the New England Conservatory–now have Centers for Music Entrepreneurship. Students receive guidance on forging careers outside academia and the orchestra. They are warned about the difficulty of the formal job market. They are encouraged to develop multiple income streams, create their own opportunities, found ensembles, and create a strong online presence. In my own experience, this approach can absolutely bear fruit. We can create interesting and rewarding musical careers, even without the auspices of a “real job.”

But financial freedom–or at least a shred of financial flexibility–is an essential prerequisite for entrepreneurship. For many young musicians confronting high loan payments, financial flexibility is decades away. And when they were eighteen years old and committing to taking on a financial burden that they could not have fully understood, most of their adult mentors did not let them know that their educational loans would change their lives.

There’s a reason that our parents, teachers, and even our Deans of Students may not fully understand the way that our debts could cripple us. It’s because the cost of a college degree, according to Bloomberg, has increased more than 1,000 percent in the past thirty years. My own parents worked their way through degrees in vocal performance at Boston University in the 1980s. Today, a year at BU costs more than $53,000–more than most twentysomething musicians expect to earn in a year. Cognitively, our parents and mentors can hardly keep up with the way things have changed. “Student debt is good debt,” they might have told us. But they probably weren’t imagining a $60,000 higher education bill at 6.8% interest. They weren’t imagining a burden that would make a career in music untenable.

Given this gap, who is equipped to advise current music students about the realities of student debt in 2013? I’d argue that it’s the twentysomething musicians currently paying off their loans. So I reached out to my peers to see who might be willing to talk about the way their student debt has shaped their lives and careers. I was moved by their clear-sightedness; I was grateful for their candor. Several themes emerged in their responses, and I believe these are the words that young artists–and the adults surrounding them–need to hear before signing on the dotted line.

Loan payments change your financial reality. Depending on your loan total, the payment can be as high as your health insurance premium, your car payment, or your rent. Here are some numbers from musicians I interviewed:
– a cellist whose monthly payment is more than $700 on his $100,000 debt
– a woodwind player from Northwestern who pays $550 a month on her $46,000 debt
– a flutist who went to a state school and pays $350 a month on a $28,000 debt
– a pianist from DePaul who pays $450 a month on an $80,000 debt
– a brass player paying $380 a month on a $68,000 debt

Higher debt means less freedom to practice, grow, and choose rewarding work. “My monthly loan payment scares me into taking every single job I’m offered,” said one Chicago freelance musician. “During certain busy times of year, I can’t prepare nearly as well for each performance as I wish I could. In general, I am not able to be as selective nor as productive as I’d like to be as an artist, because paying off my debts feels so urgent and burdensome.”
Krista Lucas, a local bassoonist, said that “in order to pay student loans–not to mention rent, bills, and food–a ‘day job’ is all but impossible to avoid. Working 40 hours a week pays the bills, but it also cuts down drastically on free time to practice and improve.”

Higher debt often means working long hours outside music. “I have had to move into a different field as my primary source of income,” said composer Sarah Ritch, who co-founded Anaphora Ensemble and helps run the Beethoven Festival. “I now work in technology, and have gone back to school to give me the tools to flourish in that field.” Matthew McGuire, a music educator in Massachusetts, agreed. “I’m considering leaving my [music teaching] job to pursue a career that will pay better. I’ve stopped taking gigs so that I can work higher paying part-time jobs, and turned down all music composing/arranging opportunities that do not pay well, even if it is something that I would enjoy doing.”
Horn player Joseph Kosowski’s debt from DePaul made a freelance music career seem simply impossible. “It’s made me feel as though pursuing a career in line with my degree is too risky,” he said. “I feel the need to have a ‘real job’ with a steady income in order to meet the loan payments, and that freelancing, the occasional small orchestra gig, scrounging up students, and the like would be too much of a burden.”

It’s hard for young adults to give up “dreams” and prestige when choosing their educational price tag.
“This whole situation,” said Krista Lucas, “is made worse by the fact that music students are pressured to attend expensive conservatories with ‘prestigious’ programs and pedigrees.”

“I could have stayed closer to home and gotten my schooling paid for,” said flutist Alexis del Palazzo, “but that would have meant giving up on a lot of the dreams I had. At 18, I wasn’t willing to compromise.”

Matt McGuire remembers a similar feeling when he chose to attend his dream school, the Berklee School of Music. “I was told of the dangers of putting myself in debt,” said McGuire, “but it was difficult for me to make those choices as an 18-year-old with my heart set on the school I wanted to attend.”

Other musicians noted that they intentionally gave up prestige when choosing a more affordable path. “I went to schools that would give me money so that I wouldn’t have debt,” said Chicago cellist Alyson Berger. “I have no big name schools on my resume. I could’ve gone into debt to get the cred on my bio–maybe I should have–but I chose not to.”

Start-up costs for a music career are high. Young professional musicians are expected to fly themselves to orchestra auditions, own expensive instruments, attend prestigious but low-paying professional training programs like the Chicago Civic Orchestra, and, of course, put in the most important unpaid work hours of all: personal practice time. But when bills start to pile up, those career-building moves come into conflict with financial responsibility.

“What I was unprepared for was exactly how hard it is to get started as a musician,” said cellist and teacher Natalie Hall. “It’s not like you just walk into a full-time job right out of school.”

“The reality of paying off my student loan debt never really occurred to me when I was 18, 19, 20 years old,” said another Chicago musician. “But it definitely sunk in and created tension and stress for me by age 22, when it became clear that there weren’t $80K orchestral jobs just waiting for all my fellow graduates and me.”

There’s a lot of shame and secrecy surrounding debt–and that often means we aren’t talking about it. Our culture places a high premium on financial privacy–talking about money is often considered inappropriate–but this means that indebted musicians don’t talk about one of the most important stressors in their lives. Respondents described “a heavy burden hanging over” them, “constantly scrambling to stay ahead,” and unrelenting stress.

“I find it embarrassing to be so successful on the outside, yet to have such a big burden hanging over my head,” one respondent said. “I don’t want to share those worries with anyone else.”

“I feel dependent on others in a way that makes me feel ashamed, depressed, and anxious in my so-called adult life, partly because my debt looms over me all the time,” said another.

So how can young musicians avoid life-changing debt? Of all the questions I asked, this one seemed to inspire the greatest candor from my interviewees.

Cap your total debt amount. “Do not put yourself into incredible amounts of debt,” advised Matt McGuire. “Regardless of where you go to school, you will get out of it what you put in. Work ethic, dedication, personal sacrifice, passion, and study are just as valuable at a state university music program as they are at an expensive private music program. A great work ethic can overcome many challenges as long as you’re patient. But it may not be able to overcome a six-figure student loan debt if you choose to pursue a career in the arts.”

Take some time off before grad school… or skip it entirely. “The feasibility of making a life in music is different for each of us,” said oboist Andrew Nogal, “but I think I’d urge musicians in general to keep their years of formal schooling to an absolute minimum. There’s an expectation that a musician will immediately pursue a masters degree after finishing their bachelors, but that track can be a shortcut to massive amounts of debt. I think musicians need some time away from the safe academic environment in order to evaluate what being a musician really means to them and estimate what it will take, emotionally and financially, for them to keep doing it at a high level.”

Know that you can’t pay your way to building a strong network. “The learning doesn’t only happen in the classroom,” Joe Kosowski noted. “It happens in the outside rehearsals, gigs, jazz clubs, symphony halls, after concert parties, summer institutes, and all the other places you spend time with the people you meet because you are in music school. If you can manage to get those same experiences and playing opportunities without incurring the exorbitant debt, do it.”

Talkin’ ‘Bout My Generation!

Posted on December 14, 2012 by - Columns

We’re at that time of year where the pace of life accelerates considerably (at least for those of us in the teaching biz) before the inevitable caesura around the holidays, so it’s not too surprising that I almost missed Dan Joseph’s article last week decrying the absence of composers from his “generation,” which he defined as 1963-1980. Beginning with a story about Frederic Rzewski ranting about composers from that generation back in the mid-’90s, Joseph leaps into an extensive essay on the dearth of composers born in that era.

To give you a thumbnail sketch of Joseph’s viewpoint, I offer the following extended excerpts:

“Of course, they are out there; I do actually know some of them, and no doubt readers of this column will know of numerous others. But relative to the generations before and after, it seems that there is a shortage of Gen X voices out there.”

“While there may be some truth in this stereotype, what the classic Gen X personality is arguably really expressing is a kind of indifference, to both radical rebellion and to traditional roles and paths. The prototypical Gen X’er is skeptical, cynical, and self-effacing and not surprisingly, many of this generation have followed unusual, non-linear paths in life, often without attracting much notice. This would seem to fit the broader profile of Gen X composers whom, I have suggested, appear to be missing.”

“Of course not all Gen X composers were or are writing in a minimalist idiom, but if we were to take an informal survey of some of the more prominent composers of this age group, what I think we would find is somewhat of a muddle of conflicting influences and styles with no real significant innovations or discoveries. There is no signature movement or style of this group as there is with the Boomers, which, as I have suggested, is really a second phase of minimalism, or post-minimalism. The Millennials, I would argue, have coalesced around a new style that fuses classical and contemporary pop music in new ways that might be characterized as “post-classical” or “indie-garde.” Sure, there are interesting, talented and accomplished figures among them, but as a group, Gen X composers seem caught in the same wrinkle of ambivalence, between rebellion and tradition, that characterizes their generation as a whole. I might posit the Gen X sound as “a little bit of many things, but nothing in particular.” Is this part of the reason for our absence, the fact that we have no distinctive sound of our own? Is ours’ the sound of “a sad, sad bunch”?”

“Perhaps you, the readers, know some important Gen X composers out there that the rest of us have overlooked. I would love to learn about them.”

In culling through Joseph’s essay and subsequent comments, I see that his concerns can be condensed down to the following:

– There is a seeming lack of Gen X composers (at least at new music concerts in NYC), in relation to those from the Boomer and Millennial generations.

– Many of us had really depressing childhoods (“the America of our childhood was also somewhat of an impoverished land of broken dreams and broken families”), thereby fostering a current generation full of skeptics and cynics and resulting in non-linear life paths.

– There is no signature movement or style (“a little bit of many things, but nothing in particular”) associated with our generation, resulting in a lack of notable voices.

– We can’t help having been “passed over” because of the timing of when we were born.

– While we have had a positive influence on our musical world, our lack of need for the spotlight has muted our overt importance on the broader musical culture.

Starting with the first issue regarding the lack of Gen X composers, this confused me at first. Anyone who’s read my columns over the past two years knows that 1) I’ve been interviewing many composers around the country from precisely this demographic and 2) I’m comfortable making lists of composers if it’s necessary, so please know that my first reaction to this was to create a massive list to disprove Joseph’s thesis on its face. But after re-reading his article and the subsequent comments, I understand that a simple list would miss what he’s pursuing. In his comments to David Smooke, Dan interprets David’s own examples of Gen X composers as being representative of the “academic classical establishment” (an interpretation that I would strongly disagree with), after which he states that his “field of view” is broader than that and that his argument is qualitative rather than quantitative, describing our generation’s character and profile as “muted and muddled.” In his comments to Jennifer Higdon, he again asks if Gen X composers are “missing” after agreeing that there are many active and accomplished composers in that generation–again, this was confusing to me.

I think I read Dan’s comments to David and Jennifer in the following way: previous generations have always seemed to have their A-list composers, who were considered as such during their lifetimes as well as after their deaths. These A-list composers were broadly recognized, at least within the musical community if not in the general population, and they were known for having very distinctive musical styles that could be easily associated with their own public personas, which were also often known and recognized. One could use just their last or even first names when speaking about them and be understood (Igor, Bela, Aaron, Benjamin, Samuel, Lenny, Milton, Elliott). Dan’s thesis seems to be that because Gen X does not seem to have any composers who he can point to who fall under this rubric, there must be something wrong with us and our upbringing. From here he extrapolates his subsequent arguments about the lack of an organized musical “movement” among these composers, which has ultimately resulted in them making a less substantial impact on our culture and our world.

Regarding the number of composers, I’m comfortable in pointing toward the rapid increase in the number of graduate academic degree programs in composition that started in the 1960s and 1970s and have steadily increased since then to suggest that, at least numerically, there are more (professional and otherwise) composers in the Gen X group than there were in previous generations. While in the past, most composers may have congregated in several cultural urban centers, the ability for composers to thrive outside of those centers has increased dramatically since the advent of the internet and, I would argue, that the Gen X’ers were the first generation of artists to break ground on that front.

Joseph’s comments on our childhood and its effect on our current psyche, while overly dramatic and reductionist, include some (relatively) valid points. Did more of our parents divorce than the Boomers? Yes. Did the steady disintegration of the utopian ideal that was propagated during the 1950s and early ’60s have a lasting effect on how we as adults view our career options? Yup. Did the fact that both mainstream composers and academia began to (slowly) move away from didactic, overly process-driven, and dissonance-laden concepts as their only viable options have an enormous effect on young composers in the late ’80s and early ’90s and subsequently create an “all-bets-are-off” free-for-all attitude towards musical language and technique? Definitely. And did that free-for-all pull composers away from the supposed importance of a “signature style”? Very much so.

Were we born at the “wrong” time? Only if you believe it to be so. Would I rather have been born in the mid-’80s or early ’90s instead of 1970? (Give up cassette tapes, Dungeons & Dragons, and getting to see Star Wars during its opening week in the theater?) Not on your life. I think our generation has the unique luck to have connections to both the social turmoil of the 1960s/’70s as well as the changes in technology and social interaction of the 1990s/’00s. We were the last generation to live without the internet, the last generation that remembers not having the option of using notation software, and the last generation to remember how the arts could be supported by the general public. Does that put us at a disadvantage against our more respected elders or the media-savvy Millennials? It depends on what you mean by a disadvantage.

I would also suggest that Gen X had a dysfunctional relationship with the media at the same time as the media was going through its massive transformation from dead-tree and network to digital and cable. Because there were so many composers doing so many different things in the late ’80s through the early ’00s and there was a rejection of the concept of a single signature movement or style, this caused both the media and the academics to wait until the dust settled before they made any proclamations of importance. The issue for the Gen Xers arose when the generation born at the end of the ’70s/beginning of the ’80s began to get noticed because of their (supposed) stylistic homogeneity. Personally, I think it had more to do with their comfort with breaking out of the typical concept of what a composer should act like and look like than with any purely musical trend, but whatever the reason, the updated media models (of which this magazine is a fine example) have given composers born in the ’80s and ’90s quite a lot of attention. This attention, which was never available to Gen X’ers during their careers’ formative years, could easily engender feelings that our generation was “left behind” in favor of the young whippersnappers with their savvy and moxie (I’m hearing myself say this in a Grandpa Simpson’s voice…).

Returning to the main “A-list” argument I described earlier that underlays Joseph’s entire article, I have three responses. The first of which is that there are A-list composers in our generation, but you have to be willing to have a truly broad context to see them. Mention the name “Eric” to anyone in the choral realm and they will know who you are talking about; Whitacre’s music has transcended the concept of “standard literature” and his Virtual Choirs have brought unknown attention to the choral genre (I’d also put Tarik O’Regan in that category for choral works). There are thousands who would recognize the names Mackey or Bryant from their high school band concerts. In the concert world, Adès, Puts, and Theofanidis are already known throughout the industry and Mazzoli, Bates, and Friedman are not far behind (as well as many more I really want to list but won’t, to save space). How about jazz? Darcy James Argue and Vijay Iyer. Musicals? Jason Robert Brown. Film music? Michael Giacchino, Alexandre Desplat, and Marco Beltrami.

Secondly, the fact that Gen X composers don’t have a single movement or style is not only a good thing, but it is the most important aspect of that generation as well. Our generation was the “reboot” that erased the many years of serial/chance/minimalism debates from the musical whiteboard altogether. It’s not surprising that it took 10-20 years of exploration in the wilderness by Gen X composers before the situation improved to the point that the introduction of the Millennial composers seemed so effortless.

Finally, years ago in my undergrad days when I was a hardcore jazzer ignorant of the concert world, I got the chance to play with the great trumpeter/flugelhornist Marvin Stamm. I distinctly remember him musing about his place in the jazz world, frustrated that he wasn’t old enough to be a respected elder but was too old for the media-friendly “young lions” who were prevalent at that time (the Marsalis brothers and their coterie were all the rage back then). But there he was, surrounded by excited student performers who hung on his every word and looked up to him no matter what he himself thought of his place in the world. It is with this mindset—glass half-full—that we as creative artists must meet the world that surrounds us. Whether or not we are “noticed” by the proper authorities or the general public means so much less than our own well being, both now and in the future.

Secondary Concerns

Posted on August 22, 2012 by - Columns

In a recent blog post, Jeffrey Parola writes about some of the struggles facing contemporary concert composers in today’s world:

Affirmation from friends, family, and colleagues is scarce – very few people listen to, like, understand, and/or respect your music… material returns for your work are paltry or non-existent, and… it is incredibly difficult to find a secure and gratifying job.

While Parola is talking about his own personal experiences, I’d wager that most composers have dealt with similar issues. I’ve certainly felt discouraged by many of the same things Parola describes, and I find his honest account of these concerns to be brave and valuable.

Meanwhile, Brian M. Rosen argues that composers cannot and should not rely on external affirmation or compensation:

Creation of music that didn’t exist before HAS to be its own reward, devoid of compensation, recognition, or praise. If that drive for creation for its own sake doesn’t exist, I might humbly suggest that a composer should just stop… Money and acknowledgement have to be secondary concerns for a composer.

Rosen’s statement is hard to argue with on its surface. Certainly a composer has to, on some level, enjoy the process of composing. However, in my mind it poses a solution to a non-existent problem, the mythical “composer who doesn’t love composing.” It also omits the fact that external factors like money and acknowledgement can have a profound impact on one’s intrinsic motivation. Furthermore, I think it disguises a deeper and more insidious problem: that our intrinsic love and need for making music can deprecate the real world value of our hard work, and make it all too easy for others to exploit.

As one counterexample, Eric Whitacre was able to redefine what his music was worth to others almost accidentally, through sheer stubbornness:

Whitacre became known for the steep fees he charged for new pieces. A vague mixture of naïvete and instinctive savvy led him to price his work at least three times as high as other composers’. “I just kept pushing the envelope on commission fees,” he said. “It’s just like Craigslist, where if you sell your futon for ten bucks everyone thinks it’s a crap futon, but if you list it for five hundred everyone thinks it’s a great futon. So I just priced myself into a place where it was perceived as more valuable than it was.”

But even more salient than money, I think, is the issue of “relevance” that Parola mentions. It’s all fine and good to make music for its own sake, as Rosen proposes, but that’s not quite enough for me, and I don’t think it should be enough. While composing is a solitary activity, it’s one that radiates outward, as a means of expression or communication. If it doesn’t communicate, or communicate in the way you want it to, that is a definite problem, and I don’t begrudge anybody for feeling discouraged by that. This dissatisfaction shouldn’t be ignored—it’s a wake-up call, and it should be listened to very carefully.

Parola’s account has a happy ending of sorts, upon finding “complete relevance” in his role as a church organist—a role where his music is appreciated and respected. I think every musician worth their salt deserves to find this, and if they don’t have it yet, to keep looking. For me, it’s not any one particular role, but a combination of roles that I find fulfilling in different ways, from playing accordion in a klezmer band to writing soundtracks for video games to, yes, composing concert music. I do all of these things because I love them deeply, but it’s indisputable that some of them carry more extrinsic rewards than others, things like rowdy enthusiastic crowds or fan videos of ridiculous mashups.

If I’d kept my head down and refused to be affected by these “secondary concerns,” I might never have discovered these things that have immeasurably enriched my musical life. It’s even possible that I would have given up composing entirely. Maybe my motives aren’t pure enough and I really should “just stop” as Rosen suggests, but I’d really hate to see many other composers take the same advice. So I have to be contrary: if the drive for creation for it’s own sake isn’t enough on its own, please don’t just stop!

Keep going.

Why Do We Write Where & When We Write?

Posted on June 20, 2012 by - Articles, Commentary

Sometimes, I envy my composition students. I loved being a student. I remember sleeping in until noon. That was awesome. I remember the excitement of learning new things about new music things, and writing new things at all hours of the day and night. I remember we ticked away on malleable composer-clocks. That was fabulous. Time felt easily scheduled and free. In 2002, I left school and somehow continued to write things; yet I wrote under a new umbrella of anxiety and discomfort. I did not have a hold on how I could control and shape my writing time.

Over the course of the last decade—a path that runs through a handful of adjunct teaching jobs, having a kid, living and freelancing in New York City, and now nearing my fifth year on the other side of the desk as a full-time faculty composer—it became necessary to snap my Dali-glob of a composer-clock into a strictly delineated circular grid. Apart from the time we take for performances, networking, promoting our work, etc., I am fascinated by how we composers inhabit our composer-clocks. Writing time: where is it, when is it, how is it.

In 2004, I had a late-night drink with composer Betsy Jolas after we had gone to hear the St. Petersburg Chamber Choir present Rachmaninov’s Vespers. Betsy spoke of the first time she met Stravinsky, her summers at Tanglewood, and her children. I asked her, “How did you find time to write while caring for young kids?” She explained: First, one makes time to write; second, she had a special attic, all her own. She would sneak upstairs at 3 a.m. and write until the children awoke. She called it “my precious, protected, space and time with my music.”

I grew up in beautiful Boulder, Colorado, in a house built into a hill nestled beneath the Flatirons. Along with a perfect view of the south side of I.M. Pei’s stunning National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) building, our house had a funky, small, modernist layout. The “yard” consisted of multiple levels with rock steps leading to little curious outside-spaces to explore. I often awoke at night to one cricket singing, deer rustling, aspen leaves twinkling in the breeze. It was quiet.

The most dazzling place I knew as a kid was my mom’s parents’ house in Northern Indiana’s Dune Acres, on the shore of Lake Michigan. With architectural characteristics of Bauhaus and the International Style, its layout was supreme funkytown: cool angles everywhere, half-walls, a bewindowed breakfast nook that jetted out over trees, a “yard” of multiple levels with rock steps leading to secret, small, side patios. I often awoke at night to the steady waves whispering on the beach. It was quiet.

I love visiting friends’ and colleagues’ “places of work.” The way we as individuals shape the environments devoted to our creativity is telling. Our spaces are windows into who we are as creative thinkers: precisely where the piano or keyboard is placed; if there is a writing table, its size, shape, and location; what, if anything, one chooses to hang on walls. Compelling among these spaces are those in New York City—workspace design gets mighty quirky in minimal square-footage. (Mine was seven-feet by three-feet when I lived there.) There is also a fun-ness in our dealing with our “stuff”: some studios are so pristinely organized they verge on being hermetically sealed; some have scores of scores, books, sticky notes, instruments, electronic gear, piles of paper seemingly strewn haphazardly. We all have our ways of organization, organized chaos, or preferred chaos here.

Throughout the apartment-hopping days of college to today, I have meticulously laid out my writing spaces. I also obsessively studied the history of architecture. I wrote, and still write, music inspired by buildings. I now understand the symbiosis of all of this: a thirty-eight-year evolution of a cognitive comfort zone, deeply rooted in, and informed by, the architecture of the spaces I inhabit. To ease the struggles of writing, I devote varied compositional activities to specific locations. These days, the writing time I have in my office at school, or in a coffee shop, is devoted to proofreading, editing, and making to-do lists. Large- and small-scale imagining, choosing notes, pacing while considering what comes next, I do best in my tiny home studio. It is a nook; it looks west over the Ann Arbor treeline, and its walls form a funky-angled trapezoid. The space feels easy.

In 2007, I caught up with composer Chen Yi over lunch. She was immersed in a busy season full of travel. I asked her how she manages to keep up her writing with her packed schedule. She told me she often writes on planes, and lit up at the possibility of the middle seat being empty, allowing her to spread out her work.

Whatever we have, whatever we choose to do, fills our lives. Composers with kids are no more busy than those without, composers who teach are no more busy than those who do not, and composers with multiple converging deadlines are no more busy than those with lengthy stretches of time between. Each of us is simply different-busy. The obesity of to-do lists ebbs and flows in seasons of varied intensities for everyone.

Student composers are a particular sort of different-busy, in part because they are still gaining a multi-textured self-awareness, one not limited to their evolving creative capacities, but also including the development of time-management skills. When a student opens a lesson with, “I didn’t have time to write much this week,” we talk about what that means: Are they scheduling writing time? Are they able to stick with that schedule? Do they protect their writing time from external interruptions (e.g., turn the phone off)? How are they using that time?

I believe it is important, particularly for young composers, to commit to a diligent habit of writing every day. Seth Godin has a great blog post about every-day writing, and what applies to writers of words is also relevant to writers of music. Godin’s blog is primarily focused on small-business marketing strategies. I like his posts because they are short, interesting, and frequently contain little gems of creative wisdom that resonate with an artist’s life. I often check @ThisIsSethsBlog on Twitter first thing in the morning, which one day revealed this delicious irony.

Over the last few years, my primary writing time has settled into fairly consistent spans of late night or early morning hours, which was not merely born out of a necessity from “much else to do” during the day. Although managing my own different-busy—I parent, I compose, I teach—my choice of these wee hours for creative focus is also informed by the sonic spaces and thinking-time of my youth; a propensity as a kid to enjoy awake-time when everyone else was asleep, and possibly most importantly, my efforts to carve out a specific space with a veil of silence: I need silence to write. Within the mountains of emailing, meetings, proofreading, editing, phone-calling, and even fun-having, I am comfortable allowing for interruptions. Given that which fills my life, my wee hours are best suited for the kind of writing that warrants its own, protected, space and time.

The term “writer’s block” should be stricken from the universe as a term. Composing is a multifaceted activity, one which requires the use of thinking-muscles, and one must figure out how to use those muscles in comfortable, useful ways. It troubles me to hear young composers express fear that creative thinking-muscles might atrophy. They get this notion from someone somewhere, and it can be paralyzing. In addition, telling a young composer they should write every day for at least an hour, and leaving it at that, can be equally paralyzing.

What is writing time, and how does one fill it? If not feeling particularly note-y or conceptual-y, take a walk for twenty minutes and think about titles. This is writing. Have a pile of empty bars waiting to become a contrasting section? Hit a coffee shop for an hour and make a list of adjectives describing how it can, or cannot, sound. This is writing. If staring at the blank page when starting a piece, unsure of what to do: relax, settle in some place comfortable, and simply imagine what it can be, how it can sound. Over and over, imagine it, without putting anything on a page. This is writing. An afternoon roaming a museum pondering visual likes and dislikes: this is writing. Spending fifteen minutes on a bus considering what piece one would write if one could write anything for any forces: writing.

Mentors, friends, and books suggested some of the above to me when I was a student, yet none put it like so: Make time for your writing; vehemently protect it; set a timer if it helps; find or create spaces solely devoted to writing; pay attention to how your writing sensibilities change, and respond to them; during your writing time you are available only to your creativity. P.S. Turn off your phone.

Holy smokes the world provides a lot of input. In some ways it is super cool. Our ability to rapidly disseminate information is mind-blowing, and can be useful. I love reading composers’ blogs, many of which explore our efforts to “filter out the noise” as we navigate the layers filling our different-busy schedules. The most poignant shift in my daily composer-clock ticked into place in 2005 with the birth of my son. Turn-on-a-dime time, people. Baby asleep = hurry up and write / Baby awake = stop writing. While I have little memory of choosing the notes I chose for the first two years of my son’s life, it was a tremendously informative time in shaping how I write now. Time to write = writing time. Period. I am still working on filtering out the noise during non-writing times; yet I am grateful that at least I am aware when the noise is fading in.

I wrote my first music at my grandparents’ Dune Acres house. We visited there most summers of my childhood. When the weather held, we spent long lazy mornings at the lake. After lunch, while others napped, I would sneak outside to my secret side patio. I made up songs, sang with the crickets, waves, and trees. It was the beginnings of my precious, protected, space and time with my music. Sometimes, I went out alone in the rain.

***
Kristin Kuster

Composer Kristin Kuster “writes commandingly for the orchestra,” and her music “has an invitingly tart edge” (The New York Times). Kuster’s music takes inspiration from architectural space, the weather, and mythology. Recent CD releases include Two Jades with violinist Xiang Gao and the UM Symphony Band, and the title work on the PRISM Saxophone Quartet’s New Dynamic Records CD Breath Beneath. Kuster’s music has received support from such organizations as the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Sons of Norway, American Composers Orchestra, the League of American Orchestras, Meet The Composer, the Jerome Foundation, the American Composers Forum, American Opera Projects, the National Flute Association, and the Argosy Foundation. Born in 1973, Kuster grew up in Boulder, Colorado. She earned her Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of Michigan, where she now serves as Assistant Professor of Composition.

Down the Pigeonhole

Posted on May 31, 2012 by - Columns

In composing, as in life, it’s all too easy to become boxed in by our past decisions in a way that makes personal change harder and harder as the years go by. Some of this is imagined, and it’s a composer’s prerogative to always seek out new stimuli and accept new challenges in order to ward against stagnation. But there are also external forces which conspire to define composers and lump their work into handy pigeonholes, and in my experience this doesn’t make our aforementioned inborn tendency toward a gradual narrowing of focus any easier to resist.

Composers can be pigeonholed by critics, colleagues, and geographic location, and situated along any axis—commercial/academic, minimalism/complexity, young upstart/old master—that seems handy at the time. How music journalists and gatekeepers adore these handy dichotomies! The best music most often eludes the grasp of these convenient labels, while other flavors of the month—usually, shining examples of X category or Y trait or Z way of working—receive attention and frequently favor by inciting strong reactions from professional partisans.

One of the easiest ways to pigeonhole a composer is to make assumptions based upon the types of ensembles for which he or she composes. There are increasingly few composers of my generation who can do it all, and this is not made easier by the fact that if and when a composer’s work is received with any amount of attention or success, people invariably want you to write more of the kind of music that worked so well in the first place—not exactly a recipe for avoiding stagnation!

Last year I made a studied decision to pivot into two areas of music with which I wasn’t yet well acquainted: vocal music and music for winds. I was a string player to begin with, and a few initial gigs with some exceptional string groups ensured that much of my subsequent music was written in response to requests from string groups. All of a sudden, I was in danger of getting stuck and decided to implement a new plan to help me pivot towards writing for different ensembles.

A year has passed and a little elbow grease has paid off: new gigs writing art songs, chants, and a choir piece are humming along, and this fall I’ll be writing a new piece for band (my first), commissioned by a consortium of ten college wind ensembles. After five years of writing for instruments and ensembles with which I was mostly comfortable, it’s going to be refreshing—and terrifying!—to spend so much time with genres of music (band and choir) that I know comparatively little about.

Of course I’ve been fast at work, studying the lessons of past masters and checking in for advice from luminaries like longtime Volti composer-in-residence Mark Winges, or “he’s so hot right now!” band and orchestra composer John Mackey. In fact, I sent John an email that literally began, “Dear John: I’ve just agreed to write for band. Help!” It’s so encouraging and helpful to have the support of other brilliant composers and mentors—many of whom I’ve met via my weekly column at NewMusicBox—because it makes me feel less foolish, awkward, and alone as I struggle to reach out for new experiences. Our best friends—our true friends—are the ones who refuse to limit us to who we are now, but who instead actively encourage us to engage in the process of becoming.

Hollywood

Posted on May 25, 2012 by - Columns

I’m in California this week–ostensibly to knock out five more interviews for my book project–but what I really find myself focused on is something more personal. I’ve had several “adventures” in my life that on the surface seem relatively unrelated, but have ultimately been spiraling me towards where I am today, and my visit to Los Angeles has been unearthing old and forgotten memories of one of those adventures. I will admit that this particular episode is not one that I talk about or think about much these days, since it is so very different from where I am now and in some ways, represents a “failure” in my life, but this seems to be as good a time as any to revisit it and, hopefully others will find something valuable in it as well.

I am of the lucky generation that got to experience the film music renaissance of the late 70s and early 80s at a pretty early age (I got to see Star Wars on its opening weekend when I was seven years old), so after I discovered that composing was my true calling during my undergraduate days, it did not take long for me to decide the direction my career would take–I wanted to be a film composer. Not just a little bit–for most of my twenties, I was a voracious film music geek, and once I decided that that was where my destiny lay, that was it.

Somehow I was accepted into the Scoring for Motion Pictures and Television advanced degree program at the University of Southern California, and while I was there I was absolutely in heaven. Imagine a class of almost 20 students from across the country–all just as geeked-out as I was–getting to meet and interact with giants like Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith, David Raksin, Buddy Baker, and many others. In addition to the courses, there were scoring assignments for the coursework and extra scoring opportunities with the film majors who always needed music for their projects.

It was during this time in my life–through the year of studies at USC and the two years following–that I truly thought I knew where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. Slowly over time, however, I discovered that the person I was turning out to be was not necessarily the type of person who could be content with that vocation; the instability of the freelance culture, the lack of control, and the growing realization that my career was going to always be dependent in one form or another on that of the filmmakers with whom I worked. As my composing skills improved and my confidence increased, the stronger my belief became that if I was going to succeed, I wanted to succeed on my own and with my own voice. Add to that the fact that I really missed teaching and my decision to move back to the Midwest to pursue my graduate studies in composition and conducting seems obvious and, in hindsight, the best choice I could have made.

Now, that narrative sounds nice and all, but there was a darker aspect to it that lingers to this day…

I quit.

I’m not sure I’ve ever admitted that in public before, but in my own mind one of the primary reasons why I don’t focus much on my time and experiences in film music is because instead of making a left or right turn down my career path (such as my decision to switch focus from education to composition), I stopped, turned around, and backed up. Leaving Los Angeles and changing career directions like that was the bitterest pill I’ve ever had to ingest, and for a good long time I was loathe to talk about it, much less encourage others to pursue the goal of being a film composer.

I bring this up not only because my circumstances are forcing me to return to the scene of the crime, so to speak, but because of the relationship that the film community, the music community, and the general public has with film music. One only has to go to the local Barnes & Noble and leaf through the array of film directing “DIY” books to get a sense of how filmmakers view composers and music–there are usually variations of either “find music that already exists and that is cheap to get permission to use” or “track down a student composer at the local university and they’ll surely do it for free.” In the same way that so few composers are being taught how to score films, most filmmakers are rarely if ever taught how music can be used to augment their own films, thereby forcing them to use preexisting (and usually current) film scores for their scoring concepts in what has become a slow spiral of artistic inbreeding.

There has always been an uneasy relationship between the concert and film camps; detractors in the classical music community have existed since the early days of cinema and continue today to look down upon film as a lesser cousin. That being said, there have been a good number of concert composers who have ventured into the scoring booth as well as several film composers who have done well on the concert stage. I can safely say that there is a lot to be learned from the act of scoring films that any composer would find beneficial, and I have often compared introducing students to the skills of film scoring to a personal trainer introducing a client to a new set of exercises in the weight room–both will work muscles that are not yet developed. By incorporating basic scoring concepts into their studies–even something as simple as re-scoring a preexisting Hollywood film clip as an exercise (I prefer Hitchcock’s The Birds as a resource for scoring scenes), students will quickly discover how visual information drastically alters the way someone could interpret their music.

That being said, one only has to sit through a few audition interviews to discover that writing music for film and/or video games is the predominant reason why young musicians get interested in the idea of composing. The composition education community really should be aware of what is going on in the film–and yes, the video game–worlds, at least to be aware of the context in which many younger would-be creators are wanting to delve into music composition.

Would I score a film if I got the chance? You bet. I have quite a few friends who were classmates at USC who have done extremely well–Deborah Lurie (9, Dear John, Footloose), Ed Rogers (Warehouse 13, NYPD Blue), and Lee Sanders (This Amazing Race, Family Guy) are three that quickly come to mind–and I know of many others that are thriving in an exciting genre of music-making. But as my own history shows, while the idea of a young composer deciding to move to Hollywood or New York to begin a career in scoring films can be a viable one, it can also lay bare one’s own strengths and weaknesses and force an individual to weigh his or her dreams heavily against the challenges and benefits of such a journey.