Well, yesterday I worked on this new piece for over 6 hours! Finally sat my ass down at the keyboard/computer and got the thing finished!

Let me explain. I am the coach, leader and composer/arranger of a group of young people at an arts magnet high school. The students come from many area towns during the regular school year to concentrate on music after their regular academic classes are finished at 12 noon. I actually write for and direct three jazz ensembles.

Since the student personnel (and therefore the ensemble instrumentation) changes, sometimes rather radically from year to year, I am forced to compose custom-made arrangements for the bands each year, each semester. Rarely am I able to recycle older arrangements. It is actually a blessing in disguise to be able to write music for challenging instrumentation – and still have it sound like jazz.

The standard high school big band is comprised of 4-5 trumpets, 3-4 trombones, 5 saxophones, piano, guitar, bass and drums, with optional percussion. My group this year is: 2 flutes, French horn, 2 trumpets, 3 guitars, 3 saxes, 2 basses and 5 percussionists! So to write for this ensemble I have to think very carefully about how to sketch melodies and countermelodies, how to voice harmonies so they sound clear and strong, how to create solo choruses with backgrounds, especially when the students are all at such different levels of both ability and experience.

There is a fantastic notation program out there, perhaps you’ve heard of it: Finale music software. I’ve been using it nearly since its inception, about 10-12 years ago (maybe longer), and I’ve gotten quite good at creating new music with it. You use a standard MIDI keyboard to input notes, rhythms, articulations, text cues, etc. into a document which has your “score” set up to accept the data.

The resulting computer files are amazing repositories of information, and furthermore are extremely malleable. You can move things around from part to part, take chords and explode or implode them, transpose everything to a new key with the touch of a button, etc. You print out professional scores and parts. Everything that used to be done by hand is now done in cyberspace. One cautionary word is that while many tasks are automated and sped up, in order to write a good piece of MUSIC you still have to think it through as thoroughly as if you were using a pencil and paper. There is no substitute for composing “chops.”

But I digress: yesterday and into the night, I finished the last piece I’m going to write for my school ensemble this year – a rather difficult, explosive jazz-rock piece. Especially for my guitarists. But it should be a piece of music they’ll enjoy playing as kind of an end-of-year blowout.

Writing a new piece of music, and waiting to hear it played has got to be a bit like having a baby. It is the composer’s baby. The anticipation of the witnessing the newborn, with all its screams of agony, its awkwardness, its inability to stand on its own two feet.

Today there will be a new birth at 2:00 pm in Room 107.

Hey! I just spent a half hour composing! Actually revising a previously composed piece. That’s one of the funny things about writing music: if an idea has some substance to it, some musical meat, you can keep working on it until all the parts of the puzzle are in the right place. And then, later, since it’s an “art form,” there is still more to do. And then you wonder to yourself: is the new version any better than the old one? And frequently, you don’t know until it gets played in public, often many times. After all is said and done, it’s still evolving!

Blockage Alert! Well, THIS then is the reason I’ve started this blog: to deal with the kind of blockage I’m feeling right now, sitting at my computer on this fine, sunny, warm early spring morning. The doors to the deck are open, the breeze is wafting in, I have my cup of coffee and have read the Sunday paper…. Geez, it would be a great morning to go for a bike ride down by the beach, ummmm… let’s see, what am I forgetting?

Oh, yes! I have a piece to finish by Tuesday! And it’s a complex arrangement of one of my guitar pieces, “Rush Riff,” which I composed back in the late 70’s. Now I’m trying to bring it to my Large Jazz Ensemble as a feature for the 3 excellent young guitarists I have there. The wind parts will be kind of easier than the guitar parts, like R & B backing lines and block chords, but those guitar parts – wow! They’re not going to be easy to notate.

Truth be told, I have started this piece already, and most of the heavy notation has been done on the first section. However, if you’ve ever started to do an arrangement for a jazz ensemble, you realize that there is far more to it than just playing the head and sketching in the harmonies. The whole thing has to be a kind of show of its own – with intros, transitions, backgrounds, formal “tricks” and such, a bang-up ending, and adequate space for creative soloing. This kind of big band chart is really equivalent to, say, composing a string quartet movement, or writing a short story, or doing a research paper.

When the flow is there, it’s there... when it’s not, you just have to put your nose to the grindstone. Tuesday comes around awfully fast. I guess I’m going to go ride the bike for a while…

Well, let me get right to the point. The biggest problem for me to overcome as a composer is inertia, “a tendency to do nothing or remain unchanged,” as defined by my laptop’s dictionary. In all the ebb and flow of daily life, the hardest thing is to get myself focused on composing, to put other things aside and create that calm space in which you pick up that musical thread that has been perhaps running through your mind all along. Then to commit those thoughts, that thread, to paper and let further musical operations and ideas flow into the mix.

Look, everyone has basic things he/she has to do in life: sleep, eat, bathe, dress, exercise, love, care for, be cared for, relate to others, etc. “Music composition” doesn’t fall into as basic a category as these. And I didn’t even include: make a living, pay rent, insurance and taxes, buy and maintain a car… and all the other trappings of modern living.

I find it’s all these basic things that get in the way of composing music, that deflect me from my task and journey, and make me wonder how seriously and/or passionately I’m actually pursuing it. Doubts? Oh, yes. Many. Motivational doubts, clouded by the multi-channel, multi-tasking lifestyle of an active professional performer and teacher.

You see, music is a HUGE part of my life – not just composing it. I play bass, and as such have many opportunities to play gigs (approx. 4 – 5 per week). I am also a teacher, teaching 4 days a week in an arts magnet high school, one night a week at a neighborhood music school and 1 – 2 afternoons/week privately at my home.

In order to survive and earn a living as a musical professional in the region of the country where I choose to live (the Northeast United States) it is necessary to be involved in all these activities. All of my professional colleagues must do the same, or they will not remain professional for very long. It costs a lot to live up here in Connecticut, and I estimate that an average workweek for me is about 50+ hours. May not sound like a lot, but it is a strenuous workweek.

Teaching dominates the early part of the week (Mon.-Thurs.) and gigging takes over from there (Thurs.-Sunday). Teaching is the early part of the day, and gigging usually is at night. Driving to and from gigs takes up a lot of time (and $$), and in between these activities comes: food, bookkeeping, catching up on contacts’ phone calls, e-mails, etc. Planning and scheduling for the future in order to keep doing what I’ve been doing.

Exercise and dieting, and… whoa! What about having some fun? Reading a book, going to the movies? Well, you get the picture, at least in my case, precious little time is left for COMPOSING.

Music became a primary focus in my life when I was quite young – around 5 or 6, when my father bought an old upright piano and set it up in our TV room. He showed me quite a few tricks even at that tender age, mostly chord voicings and chord types. But I can also remember myself yearning to become a composer and wanting to emulate the great composers even from an early age. I would spend what seemed like hours at a time at that piano, just improvising and making things up, much to the consternation of my older brother for whom the piano was purchased so that he could take piano lessons. It would be several years before I was given the opportunity for piano lessons of my own.

Somewhere amidst all the papers I’ve kept through the years are some crude early drawings of music – staves, clefs, notes rests and the like – which are my first compositions. They were written on plain paper, so I used to have to draw in the staff lines myself. I was fascinated from an early age by how printed music looked on paper – the weird codification of lines and symbols and curvy things that made up the ‘look’ of music, plus the fact that all this visual stuff somehow magically turned into sound at the hands of someone who could decipher the code! Someday I’ll have to dig my earliest ‘manuscripts’ out of the piles of paper in my basement. I HAVE seen them within the last five years!

I am starting this weblog as Composer’s Journey, or some such title, in order to document, write about, muse over, rant, detail, etc., the ongoing struggles I have experienced in order to become a practicing composer in this modern world. Through an entire lifetime of human activity -- academic, professional, emotional, relational and avocational – I have striven, dabbled, flirted, toiled, been inspired, been elated, been on contract, been obliged, been rewarded (and even paid!) to become a composer. It is my life’s journey and my goal to define myself as a composer, and herein I propose that this blog serve as a source of enlightenment, inspiration and motivation for myself and perhaps others who might see themselves on a similar path.