So, yeah… seven months has been a blur, and I don’t exactly know what happened to the first half of 2024. I certainly haven’t been blogging, and I mostly, until the last week or so, haven’t been composing.
So… it’s a hot night and it’s pushing 3am, and I already did some composing, so it must be the perfect time to blog.
Here’s why I haven’t been:
Spring 2024 was not my favorite semester at work. The inevitable happened in a long slide that reached a tipping point during the pandemic: I taught only one in-person class (plus orchestra) at Lakeland, and the rest of my full-time load was online and administrative.
I would say that I don’t know how I felt about that… but I know exactly how I felt about it, and it’s the same way that I feel about Slipknot.
I’ve been teaching online in one way or another almost all of my college teaching career. It has never not been a challenge. It has never not been frustrating for me, and certainly for my students. I like to think that I’ve gotten better at it, but it did not feel that way this last year, and it especially didn’t feel that way this Spring. I will spare my readers all the gory details of student underacheivement and the resulting instructor soul-searching and course revision: suffice to say that I’m trying some new things this summer (I’m a week into that term), and we’ll see how that goes.
But on top of that, work this Spring was all staring at the computer, implementing my planned course, seeing what students did (or didn’t) do, and putting in my rubric scores and comments.
Of course, having had all the screen time I could handle in my 9-5 work day, I just wasn’t all that keen about opening up good old Sibelius 6 and moving notes around. I gave up my 6 to 7am composition time during COVID, and I have to say, I never really got back into that groove. It’s too easy to stay up late with Becky, then read for a while and even with the best of intentions, not be energized to get out of bed with the first alarm, especially on those winter mornings. (Ahh… give me some winter mornings right now, please as we deal with the first heat wave of the summer).
So, the last couple of years, I’ve tried a different plan: get the kids on the school bus at 7:45am, have a shower by 8:15 or so, and have most of an hour before I needed to get to Lakeland. This broke down last Spring as well, as out of the shower crept later and later, and answering email took up most of the time leftover.
At one time Fridays were a time I could devote to composition, but between the demands of the online classes and Friday laundry day, that time slipped away from me.
But all excuses: because if I had really wanted to blog or compose, I would have found them time.
I haven’t been all that busy… I just haven’t wanted to.
I completed two pieces in the first three months of 2024: a one-minute fanfare for the Cleveland Composers Guild collaboration with Factory Seconds Brass Trio, and my usual contribution to the Guild’s Junior Concert, a piece for a young pianist about dragons. Nice little pieces, neither of which took much more than a few hours, total, to come up with. Then, not much of anything, when I should have been writing a trumpet piece for Matthew Swihart–I got the first two minutes in, but I couldn’t get back into it.
I missed the deadline, which was May 1.
I got a start on it over winter break, then set it aside, telling myself there was Spring Break, then telling myself there was the whole month of April, and then telling myself there was no way it would get finished in April, and sending Matt an email explaining myself.
Meanwhile, it was a fairly good Spring for performances, which was heartening: Composers Guild in January, April, and May–a total of four premieres; a fantastic trip with Becky to Williamsburg, Virginia for the William & Mary band to play Mysterious Marvels; my first performance in Nebraska, of I Live With the Fiction that I Never Get Mad by Andrew White; the premiere of my string piece for the Wake Forest Youth Orchestra; a second performance of my cello piece at Dennison University… I mean… not bad at all, really. Makes one feel like a real composer, as usual.
It’d be nice to have more of that–as always, it ebbs and flows, and lately it’s been an ebb. The News page on the old website is looking pretty thin, but I can only blame my slump as a composer for it.
But only now, a month after my mostly-online Spring, am I starting to get back to writing music. My summer section of Popular Music is small, and leaves time for writing, and Becky is home for the summer, so there is some coverage for me, and the kids don’t need me to be right downstairs with them anymore, and we’re not doing swimming lessons–I miss the poolside reading time, though. I find myself thinking about projects again that might work–would this person collaborate, or how could I make this happen.
In the last week, I took my SATB choral piece Christmas Eve and turned it into something that the Lakeland Civic Flute Choir can use, and I’ve started cutting down my organ cycle Seven Last Words into a suite that I can submit for the Guild’s collaboration with the American Guild of Organists–I’m trying to compress it to about 25% of its original size, and it’s been interesting to revisit that piece. Next up is the trumpet piece–I watched this video from my former student and collaborator Maria Finkelmeier, who wasn’t a composer when I first met her, but has now really taken the ball and run with it: one of her suggestions really hit me as a solution to this trumpet quandary, and we’ll see where it takes me.
And from there?
- I listened to the symphony again last week. I think I still want to finish it.
- I want to write a piece about the eclipse in April–I don’t care how cliche that sounds.
- Some reading I did led me to a musical motive that I want to carry around and think about and make into the kernel of a piece.
- Again, thinking about collaborators to approach.
And I’ve been tromboning again. This spring I had eight students in my studio–more than ever, and Wednesdays at the Fine Arts Association got long, but having some older students in the mix has been good as well. On top of that, fellow Guild member Cara Haxo has written me a trombone and piano piece, and we’re wrapping it up and starting to think about performances. It’s good to have different gears to switch into.
Not long ago, Becky remarked that I didn’t seem to be as interested in composition as I once was. I’m not sure that was quite correct: it’s just easy to get away from something that isn’t your job and that takes you away from other commitments. And I think I did need a break–more screen time wasn’t the answer this term. But my past experience has taught me two things: 1) that a week or so of being back at it doesn’t mean that I’m permanently back at it, and 2) it will be there when I’m ready to come back to it, even if there are long stretches where I can just think about it.
Tags: Cleveland Composers Guild, composing, composing routine, deadlines, Factory Seconds Brass Trio, hiatus, late-night, Maria Finkelmeier, Matthew Swihart, performances, taking a break, teaching, trombone, trumpet