aging gracefully

In the many 100th-birthday interviews with Elliott Carter, I hear the same slowing and openness in his speech that I've heard in his recent music. But there's always been an elegance and a lyrical impulse in Carter, even as he's spent his life defining (or co-defining, along with Babbitt) American modernism.

Most people spend less than half of their years really focused on their 'life's work.' Working artists arguably spend a higher percentage since we don't retire per se. But Carter -- if we define his undergrad years as the time when he started identifying primarily as a composer -- has kept the same focus for more than 80 years, or more than 80% of his life, and that percentage is only increasing as he keeps working. He says he doesn't define his career by eras or decades, but he has felt an evolution from larger to smaller scale: "I finally have done all my adventures and great big noisy pieces. Now I write simple ones. That’s a new adventure."

I'm a year into my 30s now, and I'm thinking of this as a decade of focusing, especially in material terms (much more focus on actual composing; much less focus on multitasking, volunteering, saying "Yes!" to anything inspiring and Renaissance-Womaning beyond all logic). And it does still feel early to me, partly because I've always guessed I'll live for a long time. (I'm 'slow' and 'cool' physically -- low blood pressure, low body temp -- and I'm flexible/relaxed/optimistic in the ways that reportedly extend lifespan in less-measurable terms.) It's been really interesting watching myself aging out of most Young Composer competitions (and squeaking in under the wire to win a few :)). Those lines are necessarily arbitrary, but I can easily see the reasons for drawing them.

And I'm always curious about the negativity and anger with which some composers respond to competitions that have age limits. A given competition is just one opportunity in a sea of opportunities, most of which we create ourselves by being willing to imagine new projects and organize things and build relationships and treat performers with total respect (both in human terms and by giving them perfectly clear, perfectly correct, cue-filled, beautifully laid out parts... something every composer, myself definitely included, can always devote more time to).

Carter's an ideal model: quiet passion that's kept him working (and, probably in no small measure, kept him living) for an 80+ year career; total devotion to clear, logical notation; and an increasingly gentle, open way of meeting the world. Respect and positivity keep careers alive as much as they keep humans alive. May we all grow up as lucky and as openhearted as he has.

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.