A Composer's Serenity Prayer

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

The courage to change the things I can,

And wisdom to know the difference."

-Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)

I first read what has come to be known as "The Serenity Prayer" in the winter of 1992. At the time I was living in Cuenca, Ecuador as part of a two-year mission. During that experience I spent hundreds of hours in a lot of homes and met people who seemed to represent the vast array of human experience. In December, my mission companion and I (we always traveled in pairs) found ourselves in Nestor's living room. Nestor was a one-time seminarian studying to be a priest, and had subsequently taken an interest in these two American teenagers, starkly out of place in this traditional Andean city with its cobblestone streets, colonial cathedrals, and braided women wearing the traditional bright skirts, shawls, and white fedoras. Having invited us into his home, Nestor gestured toward a short poem, framed and set neatly on the coffee table. 

"Have you ever read this before?" he asked.

"No. What is it?"

"It is called the "Serenity Prayer," and it is well known to those who are striving to overcome addiction--and particularly those participating in the Alcoholics Anonymous program."

Upon reading it, I was struck with its theological thesis conflating human imperfection and divine mercy. Although I had been raised in a largely affluent, religious household where a drop of liquor never once touched the bottom of a crystal glass, I was intimately aware of my own seething array of inadequacies and private demons. In a few short words, the "Serenity Prayer" preached of a god that could dirty his hands in the messy business of human intervention, and yet emerge unsullied. It acknowledged a god that acknowledged my condition--and could help divide the wheat of what I could change, with the tares I could not. A happy life, I would learn, depends in no small part on our ability to discern those things that lie within our power to change from those things that lie beyond that power.

Accepting The Things I Cannot Change

As composers, we comprise one part of a two part, symbiotic relationship with performers. Our product--the summation of our gifts, dedication, and hard work--is consigned to silence without forming  an essential partnership with a performer. Therein lies the limit of our power: the broadcast of our music into the physical world relies upon a performer choosing to play it. Moreover, while the performer must also rely upon a composer's work in order to have something to play, the predicament of dependence between composer and performer is hardly equal. Living as we do in an era in which hundreds of years of published music is available, the performer possesses an infinite array of options--many more so than we as composers realistically do. In this way, performers enjoy a greater advantage as the power differential skews heavily in their favor. Many of us will protest at this realization, others will rationalize that their importance as composers is such that their music is more desirable at any given moment than that millennia of other repertoire. Perhaps. It is just as likely though that if Prominent Composer X fails to deliver a suitable work, or simply expires, one can be sure that another suitable work will be easily found. Although this 'delivery failure' is documented here in extremes, that failure could simply be an observed, undesirable variable such as an excessive commissioning or rental fee, excessive technical difficulty, something too easy or boring. The failure could simply come as a consequence of a personality quirk or a reputation of being difficult to work with. The power differential is an insuperable fact in a composer's professional life. The sooner we acknowledge this, the better. Why? Because knowledge is power.  

Composers Who Know

It would be easy as a composer to assume the victim mentality. We've all met these victim composers with their respective taglines:

"There are too many composers"

"They only program the music of (add university name here) composers"

"They only got that commission because their teacher was__________" 

"There are no jobs"

"She/he is a careerist"

"I'm too old"

"I'm too young"

"They only play experimental music"

"They only play tonal music"

...and on and on drone the common refrains. Such a composer understands well one half of the equation: that there are circumstances beyond one's control (however misunderstood those circumstance might be). Nevertheless, that composer fails to comprehend the power that remains in their own hands. Far from being an acquiescence to failure, acknowledging the agency of others to make choices about our music is liberating on two fronts:

1. It teaches us to no longer worry about the disposition of competitions, calls for scores, grant making committees, etc. Why? Because those decisions rest entirely with other people. No matter how much we persuade or sell, somebody else will make the decision. Worrying and wringing our hands over whether we'll win the Rome Prize, get the grant, or be offered that residency is absolutely useless and has no bearing on the outcome. It should also eradicate any animosity we--heaven forbid--might feel toward another composer that was the recipient of a favorable decision.
2. It gives us a perspective on those aspects of our career over which we DO have power and control. Why is this important? We have finite amounts of energy. Evolutionary biologists understand better than ever the significance that preserved energy bears on our survival. It is why we often opt to take the escalator instead of the stairs, prefer walking to running, etc. Far from being a loathsome weakness, our desire to sleep-in instead of go to the gym is likely an evolutionary survival instinct. We need to preserve as much energy as possible in order to flourish and use it where we really need it. When we get lost in worry and expend our strength over matters beyond our control, what do we have left to give to our work? What remains for those critical hours of pondering, sketching, writing and re-writing? What space is there left for playing with and manipulating sounds? What room remains for great dreams that precede great work? Composing is fulfilling, but it is also exhausting, and its craft deserves all the strength we can spare. 

Learn to embrace the notion that some things we cannot change, and you will find abundant new stores of energy to create and dedicate to those aspects of your career entirely within your control.

Courage To Change The Things I Can

If the first half of the equation is acknowledging the conditions beyond our control, we sell ourselves short if we don't then discover the wealth of aspects well within our control. A few years ago I realized that I needed a lot of help in learning to share the work I labored so long to create. Having become something of a junkie for the self-help genre, I started reading Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In his book, Covey describes two metaphorical circles in which we can divide our time and effort. The first, the "circle of concern," I have described above (those conditions we cannot control). The second, the "circle of influence," demonstrates those things that we can. As a composer working to negotiate performances of my music I learned that the two circles are significantly interconnected. In other words, if someone chose not to award a grant application or program a piece, I shouldn't simply dismiss the rejection outright as some kind of irrelevant or pesky affront to my impenetrable ego, but rather at the very least, utilize the opportunity to refine my discipline at not worrying, and sometimes, view it as a beckoning for improvement. 

Learning To Recast Rejection

One of the most important things we can do is view our rejections critically--scanning them for clues that we can take back to our work. A few years ago I had an orchestra piece selected for a prestigious reading program. Over the course of the weekend, four composers received two extended rehearsals and readings of their work, followed by a long session of critique by the composer-in-residence. After the final rehearsal and reading, it was my turn to receive this critique. With some confidence that the ensemble enjoyed my work, I was ready for the inevitable accolades that were my due. Something very different, disastrously different, happened. After one very brief, very modest compliment, the composer-in-residence began to dismantle my work section by section. In fact, the dismantling was so thorough as to blossom into a full-blown excoriation. I was livid. I was convinced that I was being used as fodder in some indecipherable political card-playing match between this composer and the other professional staff present. I had been in a tenure-track position teaching composition at a university for nearly four years--I was the one who levied criticism on others, not the other way around. The whole weekend felt like a waste. I was angry for going, angry for the seemingly wasted time, angry that I had to be away from my wife and two young children and subject myself to the stress of travel just so I could have my you-know-what handed to me in a sling. Far from the triumph I had expected, the whole thing seemed an abject, miserable failure in a prominent setting. The mantra "I will never work again" played over and over in my mind. My poor wife was more than a bit surprised at my grave martyr's countenance when she picked me up at the airport shuttle.

After a few weeks, this hot, emotional experience began to simmer into something miraculous. For several days I couldn't bear to even look at the score of the work, symbolically shredded as it was. I began to convert my resentment into curiosity and started to peek back through several pages. There they were, for all the world to see: clear and significant problems with balance, dovetailing, texture, narrative, etc. I recalled how I wrote the piece in a rush, bypassing much of the important sketching time that precedes even a rough draft. Sure the work had its moments, but the sum total was a shadow of what it could have been with careful planning, sketching, and revision. While the memory of the critique still stung, I was grateful for the incisive, direct criticism. What's more, I was motivated. I began to exercise MY power to study other pieces more carefully, to plan adequate time to compose, to scrutinize down to the level of small technical details. Two years later I wrote another orchestra piece. A much, much better piece. Today, I am grateful for that painful tutorial as it gave me a path forward and taught me that I could do something about my work.

Recasting rejection is an important way to translate 'circle of concern' issues into 'circle of influence' ones. In fact, there are often multiple ways to recast 'circle of concern' statements. For example:

Circle of Concern: Quartet X isn't programming my piece/responding to my inquiry, etc.

Circle of Influence Response #1: There are dozens upon dozens of quartets I can still contact. What other contacts do I have, even tangentially, to the quartet community?

Circle of Influence Response #2: Did I ask Quartet X if they know anyone I could contact that might be interested?

Circle of Influence Response #3: While I am waiting for Quartet X to respond to my inquiry, I have created a spreadsheet naming a dozen other pieces for different forces that I am going to send out. I will start by sending these pieces to people I know, or who are friends of friends.

Circle of Influence Response #4: I am going to look at recent programming by Quartet X so I can honestly assess how my work fits their style and reputation. Is my work at the same level of other works they are programming? If not, I am going to study additional works and make improvements to my own. If so, I am going to research other Quartets (you know, A-W and Y-Z) to see whose brand and programming shares greater resonance with my work.

Inside of a few moments, an unanswered email (or unsuccessful inquiry) can turn into an entire morning's worth (at least!) of work we can do that will vastly improve our chances of finding others with whom to collaborate. Once we grasp the second half of this equation, we realize that there is so much that we CAN do. We can study, write, go to concerts, meet people, make new friends and contacts, revise, promote, etc. We can even choose to perceive rejection in a new way, one that preserves our energy and saves it from useless exhaustion within that black hole of the 'circle of concern.'

Wisdom To Know The Difference 

Finally, sometimes knowing the difference between what we can and can't do or control simply comes with experience. There are rejections that will still sting, and entire work sessions where we feel utterly powerless to write anything of consequence. In fact, there may even be moments where a rejection or unfavorable decision comes due to truly unfair circumstances that have nothing at all to do with our work. Life is inherently unfair. Yet, in all of its unfairness, you and I reserve the right to declare where we spend our efforts and our energy. It takes courage to dust ourselves off and get back to work when life momentarily tells us "no." Accept, we must, those things we cannot change, but embrace wholeheartedly the things we can.

"And how does that make you feel?"

“And how does that make you feel?”

My Reverie on the Misplaced Conflation of Art Music and Psychotherapy

        Years ago, I stumbled across one of those portrait posters of Albert Einstein--one you might find next to Johnny Rotten and The Sex Pistols on an edgy teen’s bedroom wall.  The caption on the poster, featuring a quote attributed to Einstein, seized my attention:

Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking, and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science.

Engaged as I was, even as a teenager, with the increasingly vivid possibilities of creativity before me, I have never forgotten this discovery.  I owe something of its persistence to the notion that its message was entirely unexpected.  At the heart of the issue is the way in which new and experimental music has found historically greater resistance (at least in recent cultural memory) than that of its sister arts, namely literature, theater, and the plastic arts.  Our culture seems better equipped to handle the abstractions of these other media far better than with music.  Music, on the other hand, seems to occupy the same place in our brains as comfort food.  Yes, as a civilization we tend to like our music deep-fried, crispy on the outside and soft in the middle. If life is a a fair, then music is the reason we pay the exorbitant entrance fee and stand in all of those interminable lines on a sweaty summer day with their accompanying odors.  Trouble is, this expectation rips music away from its home as an art of sonic exploration and places upon it the burden of emotional deconstruction, squarely in the psychotherapist’s chair.

This would all be less complicated if music weren’t at times such an effective emotional escape.  The benefits of so-called music therapy are nearly unassailable. Specialists are trained in the use of specific types of music that can help lower blood pressure, decrease stress, and console those wading through profound grief.  In fact, music is so good at this role that one can become conditioned to expect this metaphorical drug every time they listen.  If the goods don’t deliver, that listener is rarely indifferent and nearly always bewildered at the betrayal levied by their most trusted Dr. Feelgood.  Listening with these ears compels one to locate the intimately familiar within the sonic strains.  That tendency defiantly resists the sense of discovery that is endemic to true art.

In order to illustrate further, I will comment briefly on each component of Einstein’s statement:

“Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes” 

I admit that this first statement blindsided me when I read it.  After all, I had been taught that my life was entirely about the pursuit of personal hopes and wishes.  We tend to call those “dreams.” Everyone has a dream, right? We are supposed to. It is our dream of success (in whatever endeavor) that compels us to turn in our homework, apply to college, or get that date with the object of our affections.  We get so involved in the noise of our dreaming and desiring that we are not quiet enough to hear the universe/nature/God speak.  Maybe Einstein is suggesting that the first step to truly knowing the world is to let it speak to us on ITS OWN terms, not on ours.  If we accept nature to be an entity as alive as we believe ourselves to be, we would engage it inquisitively, asking it to reveal itself to us.

“where we face it as free beings”

Have you ever composed anything just for the money?  Something that you would probably not be spontaneously interested in?  I have.  Nothing is more ‘fettering’ to an artist at times than binding yourself to somebody else’s vision of beauty.  Maybe your patron doesn’t care about beauty, but just wants something useful.  This is the danger that awaits the successful composer churning out an abundance of commissioned works. It is so easy to simply remanufacture the same work--for that is often the thing purchased by the patron in the first place.  Art requires us to approach the world free of such obligations, so that our questioning is entirely our own.  If we are to accept commissions, they must be accepted with the kind of courage that is willing to reject any unusable prescription as needed.

“admiring”

If we do not admire the natural world, the very source of the vibrations and hues that give us sound and color, there is no reason to create.  Creation is a perpetuation of nature.

“asking”

The first expression of curiosity is to pose a question. I have often found that the most interesting people I know ask the best questions.  Why are these people so interesting?  Their asking is symptomatic of a probing mind that craves the unanticipated answer in addition to an adaptability to whatever that answer might be.  Are we willing to adapt to whatever nature might tell us? In a practical sense, can I hear a combination of tones as an entity unto itself, and not another vehicle for my ego (compelling the tones to unfold in a way that I will them)?  I believe that tones have an inherent propensity, thus my goal as a composer is to uncover that propensity and allow it to develop accordingly.  I cannot do this if I do not first figuratively “ask” what that is.

“and observing”

We begin to understand an object by seeing how it behaves.  Again, to truly learn the inherent characteristics of an object is to view it without preconceptions or expectations.  We must have the courage to withhold those things in order to comprehend its independent will.  We cannot be threatened by a nature or an object with a will apart from our own.

“there we enter the realm of Art and Science.” 

Perhaps the most surprising statement of all to the unsuspecting: the likening of art to science. If you have carefully assimilated the foregoing points, this is not at all a mysterious or inexplicable connection.  You will know that the discovery of true art is an act of non-egotistical engagement, inquisition, and observation.  We see that accepting nature according to its own distinct will offer us the sense of discovery only that kind of detachment can provide.  I am not a scientist, but I know that conclusions may be drawn only after the acquisition of essential data.  Any scientific enterprise undertaken with a preconceived agenda ought to be held in suspicion, if not contempt, by those who seek honestly to know the veracity of a thing.  Why not levy the same contempt for artists who would impair their work with the same limitations of preconceived agendas?

At the outset of this exploration, we saw how the therapeutic component of music resisted the kind of discovery demanded by true art.  Therapeutic music relies on familiarity and reinforcement of a preconceived world view in its perpetuation of one’s ego at the expense of locating one much more vast.  Herein lies the greatest paradox of all respecting art music: in the embrace of only the familiar, we are not listening, only speaking.  If music is not to be listened to, then what purpose does it ultimately serve?

 

Saying the Hard Things

I will never forget the scene: it was an undergraduate music history survey course, and the mood of the class grew increasingly tense as the professor handed back graded exams.  Frustration and indignation were palpable.  As the professor began to justify himself and his liberal use of red pen, he descended into a touching, but almost pathetic and slightly uncomfortable, soliloquy on how everyone loved music.  With impassioned tones he spoke of his fervor for teaching and exploring the material.  He spoke of how the evaluative process for teaching was a necessary evil, but a kind of evil nonetheless.  It was the part of his profession that he detested the most.  Than it happened.  The unthinkable.  He burst into tears and fled the scene--an emphatic rhetorical climax to what had been an increasingly surreal seven minutes.  

Evaluation is a necessary evil when teaching in the arts.  Almost by definition, those of us drawn to creative pursuits start by deliberately placing ourselves at odds with the academy.  What could be more befitting the portrait of the artist as a young man or woman than to question tradition and attempt to overthrow the authority of his or her teacher?  Yet, in one of life’s cruel but appropriate ironies, the young upstart finds a willing patron in the academy.  In accepting our teaching posts, something of our youthful idealistic fire is quelled by cool institutional enticement.  In the vernacular, we abandon the 99%--the unruly and indignant; the impassioned and undisciplined.  We become judges, critics, and gatekeepers with a hand in our students’ professional creative destiny.  We yearn to give praise where it is deserved, but must at other times levy criticism.  Sometimes we have to break with our creative childhood of indiscriminate acceptance and say the hard things.

I developed late as a composer.  Although persistent with my teachers, forcing them to defend their assessment of my work and potential, I withstood significant criticism (sometimes in the form of indifference).  I understand the depth of what such criticism can do when such seeds are planted in young minds.  At the same time, I knew things about my own ability to hear and conceptualize and imagine that my early teachers could not see.  That ability was not initially apparent in my work as I lacked the technique to make it transparent.  As semesters wore on and I moved on to two different graduate schools, that kind of criticism came less often.  My technique grew sharper and what I was able to do with notes and sounds more clearly depicted the landscape of my aural imagination.  I suppose that made the criticism sting more--as I could no longer hide behind the smoke of sloppy technique.  Always the pain of these confrontations would linger for a few days.  The thought process would unfold in stages:

Stage 1 (Reeling): This is humiliating.  I have no talent and have been lying to myself about this for years.  I have always known that I can’t do this.  Dear self (or god): why did you let me do this?  How could I do this to my family?

Stage 2 (It’s not too late to change course):  This has been an important learning experience.  What else would I have chosen to pursue back when I made this choice? It made sense then.  Although I have spent a lot of money in pursuit of this, it is not too late to try something like law school.  I am still young, and the opportunity cost has not exceeded what I'm still willing to pay.  Musicians make good lawyers: we are creative, disciplined, inclined to find patterns in complex objects, we diversify the law school class.

Stage 3 (Thoughts of law school are making me sick): I have weighed the pros and cons of applying to law school, and now I have lost my appetite.  

Stage 4 (Siren Songs): Like a soothing cup of chamomile tea, I need music.  I need to make music.  I am a composer.

Stage 5 (Even though it sounds like it, I do not have Stockholm Syndrome): I am grateful for that criticism.  I will never make that mistake again.  I will redouble my efforts to: project better orchestral balance; avoid triadic harmony; inject more gravitas into my work; stop writing pops music; write darker music with darker themes; be experimental; imitate Ligeti; listen to Stockhausen; comprehend George Perle’s essays.

Stage 6 (Confession: I am not a cerebral composer): This musical exegesis of ___ philosophy is boring.  I want to watch the entire first three seasons of Scrubs on Netflix again.

Stage 7 (So I have a weakness for well-written show tunes, #@$% you!):  I have lyrical gifts.  I have things I do.  I will use them with impunity. 

Remarkably, after going through these various stages of grief, pathos, and recovery, I appreciated the intentions of my tormentors.  Moreover, I was in a position to implement useful advice and discard the inapplicable.  Through it all I experienced a rejuvenating cycle of resilience.  The absence of which makes life in the arts impossible.

These days, I get little of the experience of approval or disapproval from artistic authority figures.  I often miss it.  My place is now on the other side of that desk.  From week to week I meet with nearly a dozen young composers that I attempt to encourage and inspire.  I offer advice and speak as candidly as I can about how I believe their attempts at music making are working.  Still, the most difficult moments entail my laboring to tell a student consistently that the work they are producing is not working.  How do you gently tell someone that their work lacks even the most fundamental grasp of musical narrative, their musical intellect apparently devoid of an aural imagination?  One cannot but tell them.  Either he or she will recoil and pursue avenues more attuned to their talents, or I will have planted the first seeds of essential resilience--and thus the beginning of my overthrow.

Portraits of a Composition Studio: Faces that only an Ardent Postmodernist could Love

Episode the First

           Admittedly, I am pretty young in my career as a teacher of young composers.  Nevertheless, call it the time of year—the wistful (read: seasonally-affectively-compelled) reflection on the past year and past years—I find myself assembling a collage of faces and personalities before my mind’s eye.  I scroll through the memories of those faces from the recent and distant past—faces of young composers that passed in and through my studio at some point in their formation as artists, adults, and citizens who will hopefully spend their mature years voting, picking up after themselves, and yielding the right-of-way.  Each face conjures an impression replete with accompanying reminiscences.  Oddly, the depth of recollection pertaining to each former student has nothing to do with any innate talent they had or didn’t.  Perhaps this supplies further evidence that teaching composition is ultimately about more than forming a complete artist, but rather a guided exploration of one’s most intimate creative self, writing music being more than about music.  One might ask: “what could be more intimate than creativity?”  Alas, that is a topic for another day.  No, at this writing I embark on the first of several intermittent entries recalling students I have had (names will be changed to protect the unsuspecting) and my impressions of our time together, and maybe, the broader archetypes they represent as composers taking their first steps toward Parnassus.

            My first job was a visiting appointment at a small regional campus in a large state school system.  The student population in the music program (numbering about 50) was an unusual mix of local kids with few other options, extremely bright kids bemused with the ironies of conforming to the requirements of larger institutions, the financially strapped, and older students with sordid and sometimes tragic pasts attempting to re-script a new future.  Juxtaposed with this mix was a group of largely international students studying piano in a widely renowned studio—the true standout program on our campus.  Yet, the beauty of it was that ALL the students, regardless of background or talent, banded together without stratification, bound to each other like one compact island in a stream.  At the core of this unity must have been the shared sense that each was a stranger in a strange land—whether that “strangeness” was a function of language and culture, or that America’s institutional culture could not resonate with hearts and minds tuned to a different key replete with unknowable histories and indiscernible memories.  Here we all were together, teachers and students of art music, an alien discipline indeed. We refused to hear the paternal voices warning us that making music was not a useful way to contribute to society.  Not once did I receive a visit from a suspicious parent, wondering what their child would be able to “do” with a music degree, much less a degree in composition.  No, none of us were predisposed toward any kind of ‘usefulness.’  Neither were we a haven for society’s exiles, marooned to the arts building as a last resort.  We rather embodied the essence of desperation for substantive conciliation with the forlorn choreography of modern life, music becoming a means to that end for so many. 

            There is no question that the world needs its major conservatories and universities to provide the technical training for the gifted and facile.  One cannot underestimate the wonder of a perfectly wrought phrase propelled by efficient voice-leading and counterpoint.  Those of us who love this art form demand the rigorous construction and articulation in our music, and I hope it will ever be so.  At the same time, let that not thwart the nourishment of the spiritually hungry as they study the placing of one note beyond the other.  If to such an individual construction is ultimately artifice in the erection of sonic Towers of Babel, then let them come and revel anyway in the experience of laying the bricks—as workers in the discerning throes of compositional labor, ever exploring and unearthing.  This is a work for laborers irrespective of talent, indicative only of an ethic to live more deeply, more profoundly. When the air clears and the last note decays into oblivion, these are the tunes I will be humming, the lingering alien anthems discerning the gulf of experience between those who have souls that hunger, and those who don’t.  Those are the portraits I will remember most.   

Embracing Your Inner Theorist

Almost invariably, young composers join my studio with little to no formal training in composition.  Occasionally they had the good fortune of going to a high school that offered a theory class.  More typically, they simply possessed a predilection toward creativity, a will to invent, and an ear that did its very best to assimilate and reconfigure the music they had already heard.  Composing, at this stage, is an often enchanting, usually mysterious, and nearly always intuitive process.  Sometimes I think of Sesame Street’s Don Music as a patron saint of composers at this stage.  You remember Don Music, don’t you?  He was the shaggy-haired, short-tempered composer often given to head-banging tantrums when the final notes of a piece were just beyond the grasp of consciousness (apparently, Don Music was discontinued after reports surfaced of very young piano students bludgeoning themselves with their piano keyboards). 

There is a part of me that maintains a tremendous affection for Don.  I mean, on the one hand, Don is an enormously benevolent character.  His ambition does not comprise imperialistic exploitation, political office, or the Dark Arts.  Don is relentlessly in search of what Plato might call “The Good” or “The Beautiful.”  Had Don surfaced as a cultural phenomenon in another era, we might say that his pursuit yearned toward his own “Immortal Beloved.”  I daresay that having spent most of my life in pursuit of seductive, and often fugitive, sounds that there is a bit of Don in me that shall ever remain—the trace of a tendency toward visceral abandon in the throes of the creative labor.  Problem solving? Hardly! Structural deconstruction? Never!  Sometimes, one must simply thrust their head against the keyboard and allow the tears to freely flow.

The academic experience, on the other hand, tends to educate the ‘Don’ right out of us.  Let me qualify that: while Don may ultimately disappear from the studio, he most certainly resurfaces in all of his befuddled and hotly passionate glory in faculty meetings and before students in high-profile guest residencies where truly there are no words to express what the heart and tongue are wont to proclaim in piercing decibels.  No, we teach our students to begin thinking like musical mechanics and problem solvers.  Cool under fire, because we in essence extinguish the fire.  Composition becomes in such circumstances a ‘Jeux de Cartes,’ as it were, with all motion premeditated to the extent possible, and each choice thoroughly rational based upon the ‘cards’ one draws (or is dealt) at the outset of a piece.  While we might favor a discussion of the ‘deck’ for another day, suffice it to say that the ‘deck’ could represent the arbitrary choosing of structural material, with its inherent probabilities.  We are no longer “composers” in such circumstances, but “problem solvers,” solving “compositional problems.”  I admit that I too am regularly seduced by this notion.  After all, it is much closer to diffusing a war through diplomacy, or “just talking things out” as an alternative to fisticuffs.

So, here are our student composers—ready to fight the good fight upon arrival, well accustomed to the impassioned search for just the right sonority.  How do we respond?  We as academics, historically skilled at repressing our emotions and the unquantifiable, hand them Schoenberg Op. 25, Webern Op. 28, Berg’s Lyric Suite and Messiaen’s Modes of Durations and Intensities.  We teach them about compositional transparency, the imposition of limitations, and the value of rationally defending every note.  Somehow, and maybe whether we intend it or not, we teach that value is ultimately decided through explicability.  After all, such things can be deduced entirely through the means at our disposal.  We teach Don Music about ordered sets, permutations, and time point systems—that the mysteries of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” might possibly be illuminated through inversionally-related hexachords.  

Let me be clear and propose that we do need to educate Don.  Don must understand that sooner or later all of that head-banging will lead to memory loss and hot flashes.  Student composers must begin to understand that there is a good kind of discrimination as the component parts of a piece are assembled.  There must be grounds for understanding which notes belong and which do not at any given moment.  The first partitions that a student draws in his or her work represent the first exhilerating brush of the hand of structure.  At first blush of this realization, the student experiences composition as a discipline.  The adroit student recognizes the inherent paradox that begins to emerge: the asymmetrical and irrational will toward invention and construction confronts the rational will to decompose and deconstruct.  A kind of compositional "Liebestod," it is at once a pretension to simultaneously bury and unearth.  I suppose that when my career as a composition teacher expires (or my bodily self--whichever comes first), the most common dilemma with my students will be this: how does one construct and deconstruct at once? How does one not knowing, know?

It is here, dear colleagues, that we will join hands or part ways, time ultimately telling who, in fact, took the "road less travelled by" that made all the difference.  I also suppose that our own creative biases emerge in the addressing of this question, as no honest or self-aware composer can avoid the 'unstoppable force' meeting the 'immovable object.'  In my own teaching, I try to cultivate in my students a harmonious duplicity between composer and theorist.  In my studio, the composer must lead and may in fact lean toward "not knowing" as the motives and gestures persevere into the darkness of the unknown.  The creative impulse manifesting itself in combinations of tones can often possess a will not of our making, and we are left to discern that will and pave its way forward accordingly.  If the process at this point invites struggle, so be it.  That is, as the dearly-departed Nicholas Maw once described, "the labor of composition."  

At the same time, while the Superego must restrain the Id, the inner theorist must give the composer pause.  New ideas and sounds, like a troubled soul, must find refuge in the brief psychoanalytical relationship with the theorist.  In my work, the theorist is rarely a prophetic or prescriptive agent, but rather a wise counselor, ever inviting the creative impulse to reflect upon itself and discover its contours--engaging its subject in a compassionate Socratic method of self exploration.  "No," it says, or "yes," it responds to what the impulse might be.  Never does it prescribe a path toward the future, but always a crystalline view of the past.  Having understood its history, the inner composer can forge ahead with renewed wisdom and confidence in its identity.  Here, Don Music is given license to continue on toward the darkness, until once again the theorist is invited to emerge from the shadows of the past and offer perspective.