Entering the World of the Hat

Stephen Sondheim wrote a love song to artists with the musical Sunday in the Park with George. There's something romantic about them, their visions, their work that appears lonely yet broadens our horizons at the same time. Some of us take pride in that no one "gets" us. Others want desperately to be understood and connect with the world we beautify. If only we could explain or show you the world as we truly see it. That is why we create, because we have a view so rich to our eyes that we want to share.

I have wanted for some time to start some kind of record of my thoughts as a composer. In school my fellow composers and I gathered to bounce ideas off each other and sort out our personal feelings of what it means to compose. Many influences have shaped my attitudes towards art, and more specifically towards music and that admired but under-respected world of composing. Most common are the questions of whether what I do as a composer really makes such a splash, and if not why do I even want to blog about them. I hope someday to collect my thoughts into some book, but in the mean time I will document them here where anyone with a computer mouse can copy and paste them and steal my thoughts that may have come stolen from someone else first, anyway.

My purpose is not to glamorize composers. Believe me, glamor is not one of my strengths. I've simply realized that composing has helped me to understand the world. Not only that, but everything I compose at any given time includes a shout-out to my friends and everything else that's on my mind. So from time to time I plan to write not specifically about music, but about my beliefs or relationships and how they influence what I compose. Maybe you'll want to take up music. Maybe you'll think a little differently about your world. And maybe I'll be the only one who reads my words. In any case, I will have fundamentally accomplished what composers like to do most: organize the thoughts in my head into something that reflects the world I see.