the most wonderful time of the year

The spring thaw has set in here in Minnesota...and not a moment too soon. Anybody who says that the holiday season is "the most wonderful time of the year" has never had to drive in blizzard conditions. Here's a picture of the cool ice formation right outside the window.

Since I started this blog to keep people informed on my latest compositional nonsense (a lot more is coming down the pipeline...March is busy), I thought I might include a cool quote I found while reading Ned Rorem's diaries (they're published...I didn't steal them or anything):

Artists and the agonizing midnight brainstorm that keeps them awake and constantly turning the light back on so as to notate notions in notebooks by the bed, mind on fire and far from sleep, prey to the ugly necessity of inspiration.

But the pang of no inspiration! How do we change? Need we? Each new work is undertaken not from experience but from scratch. The last work, like the last love affair, teaches us only what not to practice in the next; too late we learn that precisely the new avoidance of what then went wrong makes things go wronger now.

He hits on both aspects of being a composer. I had a great conversation with Stephen Hatfield a few years ago about this same thing. As a composer, you sometimes feel like a fraud when you have to start on a new piece. You jump at the commission, of course, but when it comes time to actually put the pencil to paper, you can find just about anything else that needs doing. It's a terrible risk to start on a new piece of music and you feel every bit of that weight as it starts.

Here's some more ice.