Matthew Schoendorff's Music

Check out my SoundCloud page!

I now have a SoundCloud page. I’ve uploaded recordings of some of my personal favorite compositions. Check it out! Have a listen! Leave some comments! Happy listening!

http://soundcloud.com/matthewschoendorff

About a year ago, I was a guest on a fledgling new music podcast called SoundNotion, created by the remnants of what was once the Folio collective of composers (and the like-minded) at Michigan State University. It was great to meet up with my fellow former Folio mates, get a chance to talk about writing for winds and youth ensembles, and discuss all the contemporary music news of the day. (I know, that last phrase reads like an exercise in tautology, but I assure you, it is not. Read it again.)

Since that time, the SoundNotion network of podcasts (which has expanded to include a weekly film music review called Streamers and Punches and an audio-only cast titled Music Is Hard) has become a recognized weekly destination for all things contemporary in music. Guests have included the likes of Alex Ross, Daniel Felsenfeld, and a whole host of heavy-hitters on the new music scene.

So, naturally, I was delighted (yes, delighted - don’t judge my word choice!) when my good friend and SoundNotion host Dave MacDonald called me up to ask if I could appear on the show again. The result was the 60th episode of the podcast, “I Dare You Not To Cry.” Great title, right? Want to know why it’s called that? Well, you’ll just have to check out the episode for yourself! Here’s the link: http://youtu.be/AsvEdILjIK4

Enjoy!

Matt

“Distance Imagined” Score and Recording now available

Hi Everybody!

So, it’s been a busy several months. Between my teaching schedule at Wayne State and my writing/arranging schedule, this blog has kind of fallen by the wayside. (As evidenced by my not getting past Part 2 of the “How Music Works” series…it’s coming! Eventually!)

Anyway, I wanted to alert you to a couple new offerings available on my website. Since I last posted, the Grand Rapids Symphonic Band premiered by latest work for wind band Distance Imagined at their February 5 concert. Under the WORKS tab of my website, you can find the piece listed first under Other Compositions. There, you can hear a recording of the premiere AND view a pdf perusal score at the same time. Imagine that!

I have several other projects in the works right now, so further bulletins as events warrant. Happy listening!

Matt

….and we’re back!

Hey everybody!

The website is back up and running! It’s been transferred to a new server, so hopefully all the old issues have been solved (or at least minimized).

And there was much rejoicing!

*yay*

So, this is how it is…

Ok, I know it’s been a while since my last post. That’s mainly because I’ve been poking my current project with a proverbial stick for a while. I’ve made some progress, but now I’m stuck again. Perhaps writing this post will help “un-stick” me and get me back on track. Besides, writing blog posts is a great way to procrastinate! So, this is how it is…

Yesterday started out as the most awful thing ever. I was in a pretty bad way; woke up with a migraine, was irritated that I wasn’t getting anywhere with the piece I’m writing, had no decent way of distracting myself from either situation except for an NCIS marathon on USA. Let’s be honest here—NCIS is not a *great* show even when I’m in the best of moods. It is a tolerable waste of time with familiar enough characters going about as one would expect from the usual variety (or lack thereof) of a TV procedural. I’ll settle for it when House isn’t on, but it’s hardly fulfilling or compelling drama. It’s Taco Bell at 3am because everywhere else is closed. Anyway…so, I’m sitting on the couch with some Excedrin coursing through my veins and bringing some subtle relief from the migraine while DiNozzo says some craptastic supposed-to-be-humorous line while Gibbs gives him the look of death (I think that is Mark Harmon’s default acting skill, btw), hating myself for feeling miserable, hating myself for the compositional impotence that seems to be plaguing me recently, hating myself for wasting precious bits of waking life on NCIS yet again, when my phone rings. It’s my friend John. I’ve known him since high school. He has a strange way of knowing when I’m at my worst and forcing me to hang out with him until I feel better. He also looks a lot like Jonathan Silverman (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001738/ in case you are unfamiliar), but that is neither here nor there. The main point is that I heard the Bach C Major 2-Part Invention, which happens to be my new ringtone on my new cell phone that has a battery that does not die after ten minutes of phone conversation (hurray!), and immediately think, “Dammit! What now?! I can’t be arsed to deal with anybody today.” But I see that it’s John calling, and I know that if I don’t answer, I will acquire a generous catalog of text messages. So I answer. He happens to feel like hell, too, and we agree that misery does, indeed, love company. A quick shower later, I am on my way to his place, armed with a fifth of Bacardi for him and a six-pack of Bell’s Oberon for me. (Bell’s Brewery, if you are unfamiliar, is located in Kalamazoo, MI, where I spent five years at Western Michigan University as an undergrad. Yes, there really is a Kalamazoo. I lived there once upon a time. I also became fond of the local brewery’s version of Oberon.)

Unfortunately, when I get to John’s place, he is not there. His mother is out-of-town, and he suddenly remembered that he is responsible for making sure that his mother’s cat and bird do not die over the weekend. Dammit. I didn’t want to go out in the first place. Now that I’ve held up my end of the bargain, he’s not even home. I try to call his roommate to let me in, but I didn’t have high hopes for that working out. (His roommate is also named John and also an old friend from high school. This particular John has a fondness for unusual work/sleep hours, letting his phone go uncharged and rendered useless, and being completely unassuming except for the rare instance when he says something so incredibly simple and profound, that it completely changes your take on a situation. He could’ve been a philosopher, if he ever bothered to put down the X-Box controller long enough when he’s not at work to write anything down.) Of course, my futile attempts get me as far as John #2’s voicemail. When John #1 finally shows up, I’d been sitting in my car for well near an hour and in even less of a great mood than when I woke up. But he does eventually show up and apologizes profusely. It’s cool. No harm done. The stillness in time I experienced while waiting in my car was actually better than the time I had spent previously, watching shows I’ve already seen.

And, let me tell you, am I ever glad I decided to meet up with John! After about an hour of drinking and complaining about life in general (a not uncommon Friday night activity for a lot of people), getting ourselves to the point of feeling vented and well ready to move on to other topics, we do just that. We move on to our favorite topic: music. In another lifetime, John could’ve been a great musician. He has a phenomenal ear, but doesn’t have the training to know what to do with it. He does, however, have a VAST (and I do mean VAST, all capitalized!) collection of music saved on about 10 terabytes of disk space. He’s like the Library of Congress for music. He also has an electric piano that sits in the corner of his apartment until I come over and give him a reason to turn it on. Through the course of the night, we listened to all kinds of music. Some Nine Inch Nails led to some Samuel Barber, which led to some Billy Joel, etc., etc. It was EXACTLY what I needed to do at the time to drag myself out of my funk and remember that music is not supposed to be so damned difficult! The best music revels in its most basic simplicities, no matter how complex the veneer may be (Bach *cough*). NB: I believe this is one main reason why Schoenberg and his dodecaphonic Second Viennese School of chromatic 12-tone composition never quite took hold like it was promised to do at the time. Tonality has order and hierarchy to it. It is beautiful in its simplicity. A democracy of chromatic pitches never lets the ear orient itself, and the over-riding complexity compels the music to collapse in upon itself like a dissonant house of cards in a wind storm. Tonality works. It seemed to be all used up by the time Wagner, Debussy, and Stravinsky came along, but it has since been rediscovered in various ways throughout the past few decades, mainly thanks to the prominence of popular music. Modern composers grew up listening to the radio like the rest of society, and the old tradition of art music sitting high above the huddled ignorant masses in its ivory tower seems almost laughable these days. Tonal hierarchy gives our ears reference points from which we can deduce forward motion, tension, and resolution. It derives right from the harmonic series (well, kinda….that’s actually what my *next* blog article will be about, if I ever get around to writing it), so it has natural tendencies that just…feel right.

Anyway, finally, around 5:00am, I feel myself rejuvenated. It had been a few hours since my last beer, so I was well enough to drive back home, wind down with the season finale of Merlin (seriously, check it out, if you haven’t already), and pass out. Today, I wrote a minute of brand new music. It’s not perfect. It’s gonna need a lot of tweaking, especially once I figure out how it fits into the context of the piece as a whole. But I wrote it. I broke the impotent spell. And it felt good. Really REALLY good. So good, in fact, that I was compelled to write about it. And now I’m un-stuck! I’m gonna go fix a chord progression, and then see if the DVR has any new treats for me.

SoundNotion podcast, episode 8

First, I know that “How Music Works, Part 3” is about a week overdue. I have not forgotten! But I have been exceptionally busy with other activities. I referred to one of those activities in my last post about the SoundNotion New Music Podcast. Earlier today, I was a guest presenter/panel member on SoundNotion episode 8 - “Seventeen Alto Saxophones.” It can be found here: http://www.soundnotion.tv/2011/03/soundnotion-episode-8-seventeen-alto-saxophones/

This week’s episode covers the usual laundry list of topics, including news about the Detroit Symphony Orchestra situation, the National Endowment for the Arts, etc. The podcast does a great job of condensing the week’s new music news into an hour of wholesome informational goodness. But since I was a guest in the studio today, the first half of the episode was dedicated to a discussion of my compositional work with wind bands, especially young bands. The panelists had some good questions for me, and it was a great discussion! I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and would jump at the opportunity to do it again in the future.

To follow the weekly SoundNotion podcasts, be sure to visit http://www.soundnotion.tv/

Subscribe for future episodes and be sure to check out any episodes you may have missed!

SoundNotion New Music Podcast

Are you a fan of new music? Want to keep up on all the latest news and events in new music, but just don’t know how? Boy, are YOU in luck! SoundNotion is a new new music podcast (yes, that makes sense, read it again) brought to you by some good friends of mine and fellow graduate composers at Michigan State University—Dave MacDonald, Sam Merciers, Nate Bliton, and Patrick Gullo. Each Sunday, they release a fresh hour-long discussion about the latest in new music coupled with some discussion and witty repartée.

The podcast is only six weeks old, with the seventh installment due to be released this Sunday, February 27, but it already has garnered some national attention. Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker and author of the best-selling book The Rest Is Noise about music in the 20th century, tweeted the podcast on Twitter. Since then, it has been mentioned in and reviewed by various other new music blogs, including Tim Rutherford-Johnson’s blog The Rambler (http://johnsonsrambler.wordpress.com/2011/02/24/soundnotion-weekly-contemporary-music-news-podcast/).

What those other blogs do not know, however, is that this podcast is the latest project from the Folio Collective, a new music group I helped found with the SoundNotion panel members some years ago while completing graduate work at Michigan State University. Folio originally began as a new music ensemble made up of mostly graduate composers (and one intrepid percussionist, Ty Forquer). Our ‘piece de resistance’ was a mashup of Steve Reich’s Music for Pieces of Wood and Smells Like Content from The Books. Later projects involved some guerrilla artwork in the style of Banksy (wait…that might still be a secret…oops!), a new music concert series at the (SCENE) Metrospace art gallery in downtown East Lansing, MI, and a submission for the 2010 Detroit 48-Hour Film Festival.

Since graduating from Michigan State, I have not been able to keep up with all my fellow collective members’ projects as much as I would like. But I’ve been a big supporter of this latest venture into the podcast world and am glad it is finally getting some national attention. If all goes as planned, I am scheduled to join the panel on the March 6 episode, where we will talk about…I don’t know, we’ll find out! Stay tuned to http://www.soundnotion.tv/ for the weekly podcast to see what happens, and keep up to date on all that’s newsworthy in the world of new music!

How Music Works, Part 2

Welcome back! When we last left off, we (yes, we…c’mon, be an active participant here!) came up with a working definition for music:

Music is sound and silence, organized through time and designed to convey an aesthetic experience to the listener.

Now, I should note that this definition was not made up on the spot, pulled out of thin air while writing Part 1. No, this is a definition that my brother Ed and I have been working on for nearly fifteen years until we deemed one suitable. Ed is a music educator in the Manchester Community Schools in Manchester, MI. He and I have worked closely on MANY projects, some of them musical. For ten years, I consulted with his middle school bands and helped implement an ongoing composition project, producing a brand new composition for his 7^th grade band on an annual basis. Many of them are published, some are not. (Some are a bit too out-of-the-ordinary for a publisher to consider them a profitable investment.) They are listed among the works on my site:

http://www.matthewschoendorff.com/works.html

Ed and I also co-wrote a warm up method book for band that specifically targets the warm up needs of young bands. More information on that here:

http://www.matthewschoendorff.com/warmup.html

Ok, enough with the shameless promotion! Back to the topic at hand…

So, now that we have a working definition of music, let’s pick it apart and see how it all works. (That is the point of this blog series, last I checked.) Let’s start at the beginning: sound. What is it? Where does it come from? Well, when a mommy note and a daddy note love each other very much, they hold each other in a special embrace called a fermata and….no, wait. That’s not right…

Sound! What IS it? There is a whole science dedicated to it called…say it with me…acoustics. According to the science of acoustics, sound is produced when molecules in a medium, usually air, vibrate. Without a proper medium, there is no sound. Vibrations that produce sound must propagate through something. One cannot vibrate nothing, which is why no one can hear you scream in space. If you ever find yourself screaming in space, take a moment from the immediate horror that is causing your screams to consider that you are wasting time and energy with each shriek. Then feel bad about yourself for being so wasteful as the alien comes writhing out of your chest cavity.

Anyway, when these vibrations reach our ears, our brain interprets them as sound. Human ears are surprisingly sensitive. They can detect the smallest differences in air pressure as the molecules oscillate back and forth against the eardrums. They even can detect the rate, or frequency, at which air molecules vibrate. In fact, the human ear can detect several distinct properties of sound. I will address the five I consider to be pertinent: pitch, duration, intensity, envelope, and timbre.

First, pitch. Clumsy wording aside, the pitch of the sound is how high or low that sound sounds to our ears. This is determined by the sound’s frequency. When molecules in a medium vibrate slowly, the sound is low; inversely, a high sound is produced when the molecules vibrate quickly. And when the vibrations are at a medium pace, the sound is just right. Goldilocks would approve, apparently. The vibrational frequency of sound is measured in a unit called Hertz (Hz), which is simply the number of cycles per second of the vibration, or the rate at which individual sound waves are hitting your ear drum. The lowest sound the human ear can detect vibrates at about 20 Hz , or 20 cycles per second. (Quick aside—I just had a mental picture of watching the Tour de France in fast-forward. 20 cycles per second is a fast race! Nevermind, that’s stupid, moving on…) Any vibration lower than 20 Hz is not heard as a distinct pitch, but as a series of beats. 20 Hz is pretty low, lower than the lowest note on a piano, and even lower than Hans Zimmer’s oh-so-spooky “bwaaAAAAAMP!” from the movie Inception. The generally-accepted highest pitch humans can hear is around 20,000 Hz. If you can hear higher, consider yourself talented. Or a dog. Bonus points for being a blog-reading dog.

In general, higher pitches are easier for us to hear (up to a point), which is a useful consideration if you ever find yourself orchestrating music. (It may also come into consideration if you are orchestrating something more devious, like a jewel heist, since you’ll want to know who can hear what while pulling off your caper.) Most music we know uses pitches within the approximate range of 30 Hz to 4000 Hz. The standard tuning note in an orchestra, the A above middle C on the piano, is known as A 440, because it vibrates at 440 Hz. This was not always the case, however. Throughout history, the standard tuning would vary quite a bit. For instance, during the Baroque period, a slightly lower A, A 415, was in standard use.

Pitch is affected further when either the object producing the sound or the listener (or both) are in motion. When the sound-producing object is moving towards your ear, the sound waves get scrunched up. (Yes, scrunched. It’s a technical term.) The sound waves are pushed closer together in the medium, which increases the frequency, and the sound appears higher than it actually is. If the sound-producing object is moving away from your ear, the exact opposite occurs; the sound waves are elongated, stretching the frequency and lowering the sound’s apparent pitch. This is known as the Doppler effect, and explains the familiar variations in pitch as a car speeds by, even though the pitch produced by the engine does not actually change. It depends on the listener’s vantage point, a principle Einstein relied on heavily while developing his general and special theories of relativity. (Look it up! Even Wikipedia explains this one decently.)

Incidentally, the Doppler effect is a phenomenon that also effects light. Rather than pitches emanating from a moving source appearing higher or lower than they actually are from a stationary vantage point, colors of light can be shifted either towards the opposing red or blue ends of the spectrum. These red and blue shifts are actually how the astronomer Edwin Hubble proved that our universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, lending credence to the big bang theory of the universe. (No, not the TV show. Ratings alone lent that credence.) It was such an important discovery that Hubble got a fancy space telescope named after him, resulting in that super cool background of the Orion nebula on your desktop right now. Or maybe that’s just me. But I digress…

The next two properties of sound are pretty straightforward. Duration is simply how long a sound lasts, anything from that short annoying chirp your cell phone makes when the battery is dying to the incessant wail of the noon siren. Got it? Good. Moving on…

Intensity describes how loud or soft a sound is. (There’s a bit more to it than that, involving fancy terms like sound pressure levels. But I’m going to keep this as simple as possible for now.) The loudness of a sound is determined by the sound wave’s amplitude. When a sound is soft, the molecules vibrating in the medium will not move very far. Conversely, vibrating molecules will move at greater distances back and forth in a louder sound. Now, here it is important to make a clear distinction between frequency and amplitude. They are mutually exclusive properties. For example, a high sound with a fast frequency may have any range of amplitude, making that same pitch appear louder or softer.

A sound’s intensity is measured in units called decibels (dB). The threshold of hearing (i.e., the softest a sound can be to human ears) is 0 dB. The softest sound is no sound. Who would’a thought, right?? The threshold of pain (i.e., how loud a sound has to be before it hurts our ears) is around 135 dB. After that, your ears might start bleeding…but at least aliens aren’t popping out of them…usually. (They’re more fond of chest cavities anyway, according to my scrupulous research of trusted sources like Sigourney Weaver.) But unless you have a habit of standing next to jet planes as they take off or attending Slayer concerts on a regular basis without hearing protection, you should be fine.

For more information on amplitude, frequency, and related matters, I recommend a cursory read-through of the following sites:

http://www.silcom.com/~aludwig/EARS.htm

http://www.tnt-audio.com/topics/frequency_e.html

A sound’s envelope refers to the specific parameters of intensity over time. In other words, it describes how the sound is packaged (hence the term ‘envelope’). There are four parameters that are measured to analyze a sound’s envelope: attack, decay, sustain, and release. Consequently, a sound envelope generally is referred to as the ADSR envelope. While trying to come up with a succinct explanation of these parameters, I found that the Wikipedia article on the keyboard synthesizer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADSR_envelope#ADSR_envelope) already did so quite nicely. (It also explains why each definition is in terms of pressing keys.) So, as stolen from Wikipedia:

Attack time is the time taken for initial run-up of sound level from nil to peak, beginning when the key is first pressed.
Decay time is the time taken for the subsequent run down from the attack level to the designated sustain level.
Sustain level is the level during the main sequence of the sound’s duration, until the key is released.
Release time is the time taken for the level to decay from the sustain level to zero after the key is released.

This partly explains why a note on the piano sounds so differently from the same note on, say, an oboe. It is packaged differently. However, that is not the full story. The other main reason why these two instruments sound so differently is because of the variation in timbre, our final property of sound. Simply put, the timbre of a sound describes its characteristic….hmmm….color? I guess? Ok, not so simply put. The problem with timbre, though, is that it opens up a whole big can of worms called

* drumroll *

THE HARMONIC SERIES

Timbre cannot be explained properly without first discussing the harmonic series. Coincidentally, the harmonic series is the next scheduled topic. Oh, lucky you! Stay tuned for Part 3!

How Music Works, Part 1

I recently found myself both a) bored and b) procrastinating on projects with deadlines not within the current month. Unfortunately, these two circumstances generally lead to an intimate familiarity with my DVR. While bemusing this prospect with my brother George, he suggested that I might find a more productive way for me to procrastinate. His argument went something like this:

George: Dude, you’ve got, like, how many degrees in music and how much time and money invested in what you know about it? Why don’t you write a textbook? (And yes, I am paraphrasing, since George’s lexicon rarely involves either the words ‘dude’ or ‘like’ as they are presented in the previous context.)

Me: Man, I don’t want to write a textbook. Then I have to come up with a workbook. And assignments. And questions at the end of the chapter. And chapters!

George: Well, what about that blog on your website that you never update? Why don’t you just start a blog series about music and music theory? Maybe someday, once you have enough blog posts, you can condense them into at least a book, if not a textbook.

Me: You think?

George: Dude…book = royalties.

Me: Oh yeah. Good point. * stroking of chin with cartoon light bulb shining over my head *

So, this post will serve as the first of what, I hope, will be a continuing series of blog posts on the nature and mechanics of music. Or maybe it will be a mangled history of music focusing mostly on its roles in Western culture. I haven’t quite decided yet. However, rest assured that any future publication concocted from these posts will involve a great deal of editing, since most people probably won’t spend hard-earned money on any text that has not had a thorough extraction of terms like ‘dude’ and ‘like.’ But at the moment, you are reading it for free, so it’s all as-is.

Now, being that music is an art and not a science, I may take liberties with material, gloss over certain aspects of a topic that do not readily add to a current discussion, or (most likely) imbue my own personal views regarding music and music theory. There will, of course, be disagreement among professionals regarding what I may say here. But that assumes that some god-like panel of music professionals are reading this blog. I think we’re safe from that here. Also, who is writing this? That’s right, I am. Again…take it or leave it.

Before I go any further, it may be useful to define what, exactly, music is. So…what is music? That’s a pretty loaded question. The human race has thousands of years of musical tradition to contend with and a good 600 years or so of decent documentation of and on the subject. It is a facet of human culture that dates back pretty much to the beginning of the existence of humanity. No culture has ever been known not to engage music in some fashion, even if its cultural significance may stray among different peoples and time periods.

What most of us think of as music proper, i.e., the Western musical tradition, can be traced to the Middle Ages in Europe, where life revolved around the Church. Yes, THE CHURCH, with capital letters! Music involved the setting of sacred texts for the Glory of God. Oh, yeah….and there were some tavern songs and such for the glory of alcohol and troubadour songs for the glory of unrequited love (a.k.a., coveting thy rich neighbor’s beautiful wife), etc. (More on all that in some future post, I’m sure.) Fortunately the Renaissance arrived right on schedule along with its friend, the Age of Enlightenment, bringing with it science, reason, and the rise of a secular culture that valued art for art’s sake. This did not mean that sacred music suddenly was thrown by the wayside. In fact, many composers of sacred music during the Renaissance found ways to glorify God, alcohol, and lust ALL AT THE SAME TIME! The Church did not approve. This led to councils and a neat story about the composer Palestrina and…but I digress.

The point here is that music was considered an art in its own right. It was a vehicle for aesthetic expression, just as much as painting and sculpture. Like these, music had its own set of materials and structures. In the case of music, it was sound and silence. But music, unlike its sibling arts, had another component to it. Painting existed in two dimensions (even though it did its best to simulate three with the discovery of perspective). Sculpture existed in three dimensions. But these arts could be viewed and appreciated at one’s leisure; they were unchanging, they remained the same no matter how often they were observed or for how long.

Music, on the other hand, required a fourth dimension of time. (Notice that I am sidestepping the issue of cinematic arts entirely here. Or don’t. Actually, it makes it a lot easier for me if you DON’T notice that at this current juncture. I plan to address that later, if I remember…) Any piece of music is not the same at the beginning as it is at the end. Even if a piece IS exactly the same at the end as its beginning, the end has had the benefit of all the bits in the middle to give it context. Music is perhaps the most abstract of all the arts. Not only are its materials entirely dependent on context for meaning, assuming a particular meaning can be ascribed to its materials (often a key distinction between music and cinema…Hey, I remembered!), but they also are intimately intertwined with the unfolding of elements or events through the dimension of time. Music exists only through time, playing on our human expectations and the realization, or lack thereof, of those expectations. Will that dissonance resolve into consonance the way my ear expects it to, based on preconceived notions and prior experience with this particular piece’s style and construction? I don’t know, let’s find out!

Therefore, any decent definition of music requires that these aspects be addressed: the materials (sound and silence), the organization, the construct of time, and some kind of aesthetic expression. How about this:

Music is sound and silence, organized through time and designed to convey an aesthetic experience to the listener.

That should about cover it, yeah? Stay tuned for Part 2!

First notes, childbirth, and the composer as perfectionist

I have been writing music for going on fifteen years now. The degree of difficulty with which I begin a new piece is no easier than it was fifteen years ago, though. Every first note is a commitment, a step on what may literally be a long and arduous journey full of many bad ideas, a few good ones, and a lot of creative engineering solutions to make those sparkling few ideas become a whole. Yes, a lot of time, work, and effort goes into a work’s creation with the eventual hope that it will be birthed by a performance that is everything the composer wanted the piece to be. ’That is my child on stage, please handle with care.’ It is the closest I have come to fatherhood (as far as I know), and I have to imagine that the processes are similar. I created this, this is mine. Every facet of me and every flaw played out before my very eyes. Sometimes it works out.

Sometimes, however, things do not go as planned. Not every child can grow up to be an astronaut or a professional athlete. Some children are destined for a more commonplace existence. (Note that I am avoiding the “quality of life” issue entirely by making a quantitative comparison here.) Similarly, any number of a composer’s “children” will not be the best and the brightest. In fact, our flaws shine as brightly as our strengths in our music. Unlike actual fatherhood, though, we composers always have the opportunity to fix the flaw, usually in the next piece. It’s a never-ending battle against ourselves, but it takes a bit of a perfectionist to be a composer. In the end, you are responsible for the work in its entirety. Here is your next chance to be heard. Just got to start….that first….note…..