debriefing & balancing acts

I'm doing my usual self-debriefing after I've finished a piece and the dust has settled. (Right at the moment, there's still a dust storm whipping around my head for other circumstantial reasons, but I also have enough distance from the piece to think about it usefully. :))

I finished Stunning Sun under deadline pressure, as usual, and amid unexpected chaos of a few kinds (material and human). I think the piece as it stands has some beautiful content and is a very solid start on what the final piece can be... but it's not the final piece yet. That's not perfectionism or self-questioning talking; I know I have the ability to realize this piece in the form in which I originally planned it. I just didn't do that by my deadline.

And why not? Well, I keep ignoring the act of composing itself in favor of administrivia and applications and, most broadly, the comically inefficient mechanics of my life at the moment... still not having found my next place to live, mixing couchsurfing and housesitting and brief sublet blocks in three boroughs, often extremely last-minute. (Just as one easy-to-articulate practical example: I own very few heavy things, but it really eats up time and money to be away from them. Always deciding which is better for a given batch of new materials -- the short but punishingly expensive trip to Kinko's, or the half day spent on the subway visiting my laser printer and my score-punching/binding device.)

I've been having great luck with external recognition and performances this year, and I've composed more and faster than usual, but some of the circumstances have been pretty experimental themselves. In June, for the first time ever, I wrote a piece specifically for a competition (which is one of the behaviors I was most alienated and disillusioned by when I saw it all around me at Eastman). In other words: I wouldn't have been moved to write that piece at that time without the dangling carrots of good prize money & outstanding performance & travel to the ensemble's city.

And I did feel disconnected from that June piece as I wrote it, but I considered it a useful experiment... and then I won the competition. And in most ways, this is no different than having spent the same amount of time researching and writing a complex grant application and then happening to win, but it felt different because of the connotations. (In school, some of the guys around me were so focused on competitions that they would only refer to their pieces in those terms: "Check out this kickass piece I'm doing for BMI" or "How's your piece for the wind ensemble prize?" Their conversations circled around which characteristics make pieces win, who was winning what, and obsessive speculation about judges' cronyism and favoritism and prejudices.) And more broadly, I know effort towards one opportunity can't be measured just by one's success in that opportunity. In many contexts, an application might be rewarded for the sum total -- what the composer has done, won, and made happen -- as much as the submitted pieces alone. So it's not just the prize money in this or any individual case, but the utility of the win as another layer on the surface of my rolling snowball.

I still want to carefully identify and minimize competition-specific thinking, especially where it directly affects my choices about work and time. And I *really* want to be working on at least one substantial piece, at any given point, that has no connection to a performance or application deadline. It's such a joy, and such a luxury, to write for specific performers... but I also clearly need more abstract, 'purely for its own sake' composing time in my life.