In 2019, I decided to write a symphony. I have written that symphony.
Over the next few months until the premiere, I want to blog about it, so here’s the first of a series of posts.
This was something I’d been thinking about for a long time, since the 1990s when I first started to figure out what a symphony was beyond a name that some classical pieces had. I considered naming the orchestra piece that I wrote at the conclusion of my doctorate “symphony,” but in 2006, I didn’t feel like those sketches were getting much of anywhere. I’m embarrassed to say that even as a doctoral student, my approach was usually to just sit down at the computer, open Sibelius, and start at the beginning, assuming that the ending would take care of itself. I knew that there was more to the writing process from my time writing for English classes, and I had a sense that there was a certain amount of pre-writing that could be done, but it didn’t seem like pre-writing was something I could have brought to a weekly composition lesson: I needed drafts, and so pre-writing tended to be something that happened in my head, not something worked out on paper or the computer screen. I could have learned from my study of computer music and synthesis about the importance of pre-writing: using MaxMSP or some other tool to build a virtual instrument and the workspace to use it in are certainly a form of pre-writing. I did produce an orchestral piece in 2006, Five Rhythmic Etudes, but those five pieces are distinctly not a symphony, and they are studies more than they are fully fledged movements. I stand by them: they work well enough and have a certain appeal: they just aren’t a symphony.
And so I began in 2019 with a clear idea, and a timeline. I wanted this to be a 45th birthday present to myself, and I knew that I worked best with a deadline, so I decided to commission myself with a formal agreement. In the spot describing the work, I wrote:
a symphony for full orchestra in four movements of 30-40 minutes’ duration based on the Doxology (“Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow”)
Commissioning Agreement, May 29, 2019
This idea had been bouncing around my head for at least a couple of years at this point. We had attended Shoregate United Methodist Church, and on most Sundays, after the offering was collected, we would sing #96 in the United Methodist Hymnal, a song I had known all the way back to my childhood. The idea was one movement for each line of the four-line hymn, resulting in the classic plan of the symphony, with the hymn and the ideas behind it serving as a unifying element.
The timeline called for a performance in November 2021, and by the end of 2019, I had planned, sketched, and mostly drafted the first two movements. I felt well on track to complete the work, even if things were moving a little more slowly than I wanted them to. I had moved quickly through the first movement, and got to something I liked, if it wasn’t perfect. I celebrated my “golden spike moment” in a blog post in October 2019. The second movement seemed trickier: I was trying out a very different language than the first movement, and I wasn’t quite as sure that where it was taking me was the right direction. Then I made the mistake of going back to look at the first movement again, and was immediately convinced that it was a disaster. I declared in a second blog post in November that I was “in a stall,” and I wasn’t sure how to proceed.
I probably don’t need to detail what was going on in the world in late 2019, but suffice to say we were starting to hear about a new respiratory virus in China, even as the Democrats were attempting their first impeachment of President Trump, which sucked up all the news about the threat to world health. In those days, I was still active on social media, especially Twitter, which was good in terms of maintaining connections, but not always in terms of those connections being healthy. I’ve written about this before as well. I stopped composing the symphony for the remainder of the year, which led to further breaks: I have a tendency to slow down in the winter months this way that I’ve documented on this blog many times over. The second movement was planned and sketched, but the full draft remained somewhat incomplete: connected to itself at times by tenuous single threads, and yet I let it be, planning to return in the summer.
But as 2020 became the COVID year, I found myself teaching completely online, including my private trombone students, and with the Lakeland Civic Orchestra on indefinite hiatus. Without an orchestra, it made little sense to work on a symphony, and I was already spending far too much time at the computer just to complete my teaching work. I was also helping Melia and Noah adjust to virtual schooling and supporting Becky in her work, since she was brought back to her job in retail as soon as it was deemed possible. We were lucky in our COVID experience: we didn’t get sick, and no one close to us died. Our livelihoods were never seriously in question, and lockdown and the summer after were honestly wonderful family times in many ways.
When Fall 2020 rolled around, there were decisions to be made about how the ensembles at Lakeland would function. Full in-person rehearsals were deemed impossible and unsafe, and the result was two virtual concerts–one each semester of 2020-2021. Better than nothing, but not ideal, and certainly not the place for a 40-minute symphony. Between the two concerts, there were about 30 minutes of orchestra music, with each person recording their parts independently, and then stitched together Zoom-style.
I stopped composing completely at first, and then in Summer 2020 began to write a few things, but not the symphony. I didn’t know what to do with it, and resolved to come back to it, even though it meant reconfiguring the timeline and missing the deadline. I didn’t know if the Lakeland Civic Orchestra would ever return to what it had been in March 2020, or when we might meet in person again. That turned out to not be until Fall 2021, and over the next few years, we worked to get back to where we had been in 2020: it wasn’t always easy, but the hiatus really brought a renewed sense of purpose and community and an understanding of how precious our Monday night rehearsals are.
We also aren’t quite the same orchestra as we were in 2019. Musicians come and go all the time, but we had more than a few who ended up leaving permanently, some of whom were long-time stalwarts who had been with the Lakeland Civic Orchestra longer than me. One, tubist Ken Hughes, passed away as we were preparing to return to in-person performance, and there is more than one passage in the first two movements that I wrote with him in mind. We’ve found the successors we needed, but not their replacements.
In Fall 2024, we were back in full swing, and I think our 2024-2025 season saw us back to the place we could have been in Fall 2020: good-sized sections, relatively few ringers (which the dean likes), going after challenging repertoire. It also saw Lakeland in a difficult moment, with budget cuts, declining enrollment, and a new college president whose stated goal was to balance our budget and right-size the college. I wasn’t sure what this would mean for the music program, although we lost our Art Gallery and our Civic Theater program early on in the process. I decided that if I were going to write a symphony for the Lakeland Civic Orchestra it had better be sooner, not later.
I pulled out my old sketches to remind myself of how I had been proceeding. The kernel of the third movement had been in my mind for a while: I often remember Russel Mikkelson’s dictum that “composers are like poker players who like to show you their cards at the beginning of the hand,” and the third movement behaves that way: three notes, from the bassline of the third line of the hymn, repeated. As for the first two movements, I took Nico Muhly’s suggestion and made a one-page picture of the piece, lining up sections of the music with the structure provided by the hymn tune and its bassline, while also planning out a six-minute scherzo. By the end of September, there was a continuous sketch, and by the end of October, a draft for orchestra.
In some ways, it was going back to the way I composed in 2019: I had used Muhly’s one-page idea for the first time in Channels, the Pierrot-ensemble piece I wrote for Margaret Brouwer’s Blue Streak Ensemble, and having a sense of the ending when I was at the beginning, or even the freedom to begin in the middle has been very helpful. It seems utterly naive of me now to have thought it might work otherwise for a big piece.
Then, my usual winter-into-spring down time. I worked on a few small pieces and some arranging work, but also had a teaching schedule at Lakeland that didn’t have me in the classroom: a full slate on online classes, which hadn’t happened since COVID. I felt disconnected from the College and the things–bad for many of my coworkers–that were, usually of necessity, happening there. Unlike the lockdown, I was still on campus for office hours and the occasional meeting. As I type this, I haven’t been in a classroom since December 2024, and it feels strange and wrong. I am slated to be teaching in-person in Fall 2025, but I wonder if I will ever be back to being a mostly in-person teacher.
This symphony has been an act of discipline, but also an act of faith and an act of worship. I am almost certain that I have faced spiritual warfare types of challenges on the way: the fear of COVID that led me to put all my composing on pause in favor of extra sleep for my immune system; the uncertainty of whether there would be a good moment to program this piece; the doubts as to whether this piece would be too explicitly Christian for some members of the orchestra to bear; the self-doubt and hesitancy to bring it to completion. The last year has been no exception, and the route of attack was through my son, whose social and academic struggles led him to some desperate decisions, although thankfully not irreversible ones, that have had our family in a fair amount of turmoil and worry. I will perhaps detail these at a later time, but it took enormous resolve to come back for the fourth movement.
I worried about the Christian theme of this piece, intended as it is for an orchestra sponsored by a public institution. We have done plenty of music on Christian themes over the years, of course, and a certain amount of Jewish music as well, plus music inspired by pagan mythology. The Doxology is an invitation to praise and a hymn of praise, and is nearly as ecumenical as a Christian hymn can be: if you acknowledge God, you acknowledge that He is worthy of our praise. But the last line, “Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,” marks it as specifically Christian.
There are, of course, versions of the hymn text that tone down its Trinitarianism, and they usually center on changes to the last line. I rejected these in the end, because it would be dishonest to pretend that it wasn’t the text we sang every Sunday at Shoregate that was the inspiration for this music. It would be bringing a lie into this call to praise and community that I was working on, and would only deepen the imperfection of what could only be an imperfect work from an imperfect composer. The text that stands is Thomas Ken’s 1674 lines:
Praise God, from whom all blessings flow;
Praise him, all creatures here below;
Praise him above, ye heavenly host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.
United Methodist Hymnal, #96.
I made my Muhly-diagram of the fourth movement in December 2024, but didn’t return to the music until April 2025 and completed the sketch on April 10. In that week, on April 8, there was one beautiful hour of creative flow. We had been attending Willoughby Bible Church since the new year, and Noah had an activity there. Normally, I bring a book or my phone, but I wanted to make some headway on my sketching. I let myself into the sanctuary and helped myself to the baby grand piano. The setting, the instrument, or just my preparation for the moment led me through a large chunk of the fourth movement, sketching development that I would eventually score in a flugelhorn solo with accompaniment. I was sure at that moment that I would finish the piece.
With four complete movements in hand, I returned to my drafts to turn them into full orchestra scores. My drafts had one staff for each type of instrument, plus notes on percussion, so it was a matter of adding staves–moving wood, as I like to think of it. There was still plenty of creative work: the matter of fleshing out the second movement, and making some decisions that I hoped would make the first movement more practical for the performers. I have long gotten out of the habit of writing notes only with no dynamics in the first draft, but there will still many decisions to be made in that department as well, along with decisions about bowings and other articulations. May was a busy month with online teaching as classes wrapped up, but by the end of the month, I had full scores for three movements, with the fourth following in June.
When to call it done? June 12, 2025 is plausible, and on that day, I exported MIDI files from Sibelius, converted them to mp3s in Audacity, burned them to a CD, and took the long way to pick my daughter up at daycamp while I listened to all thirty-six minutes in a row to make sure it was good.
But that still wasn’t the day: someone could take the score I completed at that moment and create materials for performance, but as I am not rich or famous, that someone needed to be me. I took another week to create staves for the individual parts, plus some staves that would make a more plausible MIDI playback than the way the parts would need to look in the first and second movements. The third week of June was editing the scores of the individual movements, and editing the parts lasted into July. I exported the final PDF file–Percussion 2–on July 4, 2025, just before Becky and I went to pick up Noah and Melia from a week at church camp.
I have written a symphony.
It took a little more than six years, although a lot of other things happened in between: a pandemic, a lockdown, an election, an insurrection, two wars, another election, my son’s middle school years, my daughter’s elementary school years, a change of careers for my wife, my forty-fourth through forty-ninth birthdays, my father’s dementia diagnosis, my brother becoming a citizen of another country, two Summer Olympic Games, many changes in my job, my concept of who I am, and my concept of what the world is. There is no static, single person that wrote this piece, and no single moment that it depicts, but I believe that it expresses values and ideas that are at the core of my being.
I have written a symphony. I didn’t know how to write a symphony until I wrote one, and if I had known just what it would take, and how long it would be until I could say it, I might not have started in the first place, but it was time then, and over the next few months, it will be time to let others hear it.
I have written a symphony: S.D.G.
