Composing through the tears

On Friday I finally shipped off the score and parts of the newly completed The Unanswered. I birthed this baby for the National Arts Centre’s Composers Program, which will take place in late June.

The piece ended up being quite a struggle with a lot of hair pulling and cursing and moaning involved. It was one of those projects when you seem to be short on everything but complaints, a project that just makes you go “wah” and has you wallowing in the deepest anguish only an artist is capable of.

In addition to these artistic woes, our building was also undergoing a roof reno and having fiberoptic cables put in. For the last few weeks our halls and chambers have been steeped in the sweet fumes of boiling tar and echoing with the glorious song of concrete drills. And we’ve also been painting our living room (great timing). I’ve been feeling a little like a rat being fumigated out of my hiding hole.

So what did this experience teach me? Music is a very beautiful thing. Most of the time.

If you are trying to be a freelance composer, sometimes music is a job and it just needs to get done. If you want those opportunities to keep happening, you can’t rely on inspiration or your love for the art itself to get you to the finish line. Sometimes you hate it, but you lock yourself in that office and plough through, squinting through the tar-induced tears and doing your best to forget that you are not particularly enlightened that day.

There is a good side to this experience though. I usually discover that no matter how painful the composing process was, given some time and distance from the offending score, I usually end up liking the result when I actually hear it in performance.

Or at least I do a lot of growing. If the Muses are not blessing me with a torrent of ideas, I have to rely on skill and pure stubbornness to get me through that piece. I have to challenge myself to use every tool I have and try new methods of working. And sometimes, while fighting the beast that the piece becomes, I discover that I am actually more capable than I feel.

The Child (and updates)

I can finally share the recording of The child, bringer of light that Paul Dwyer and I did “in studio” (as in some room at Carroll Studios) while we were in New York. While editing this recording, I had another epiphany about its formal structure and ended up chopping out another section. I think I am fully satisfied with the flow of the piece now, though I added back a tiny phrase that got in the way in the mass chopping prior to the concert. We’ll just have to wait till the next recording to hear that one.

Since finishing the workshop at Carnegie Hall, I have been trying to squeeze out a piece for the workshop at the National Arts Centre. I thought I had a crystal clear image of this piece when I started, but the image has proven very difficult to translate into anything remotely musical.

I’m exhausted from everything I’ve done already and my body’s resistance to this new musical assault is so great I seem to have developed some sort of walking bronchitis. Or maybe it’s TB. That would be very romantic: starving artist wasting away from consumption…in her trendy Halifax condo. Woe is me! Khem, khem…

In better news, I just found out that I received my very first non-academic grant. I am collaborating with Moscow’s Ensemble Sonore and RUSQUARTET to organize a few concerts of contemporary music focused on Canadian and Russian female composers. Should all other funding come through, the “Women of the North” project will take place in Moscow in November 2012. I will be contributing a piece for piano quartet as an homage to Barbara Pentland, one of Canada’s first great female composers.