In which Daniel looks back at this year from the three-quarters mark.

If college was marketed to me as anything growing up, it was as a life-changing experience – not necessarily in a way that meant a single moment blatantly and dramatically altered the course of one’s life, but rather in a way that meant that the act of going through this educational system more or less independently would change the way one approaches work and life.  Yet as I consider life thus far, I am debating the validity of that statement.  I don’t think that it’s necessarily true or false across the board, but that it may be true for me only to a degree.

Let us consider the changes in my life since my first blog post that was posted on the twin side of last semester – during the fall break that divides the fall semester in half.  Once again, the time is immediately after midterms (although then the fall semester, and now the spring), and once again, I am sitting in a Starbucks as I write this (although it is now the Starbucks on 6^th Avenue, rather than the one on Proctor).  Once again, I am listening to Katy Perry (although then I was listening to my favorites from her Teenage Dream album, and now I listen to my favorites from Prism), and I am still wondering what on earth I am doing writing about my life (as if it is of interest to anybody).­ I still spend almost all my time in the music building, and am taking almost the exact same classes, just increased in level and subsequent difficulty, and am involved in the same extracurriculars and student activities.

Yet a great many things have also changed.  My house, Rat Sking Thong (see Blog Post #1 if you are confused by this title), lost Isabel Chae as a housemate due to her decision to withdraw from school.  I became a codirector of Underground Sound, my a capella group, alongside my good friend Lisa Hawkins, and became the chorister (director of musical activities) of my fraternity, Beta Theta Pi.  I helped the Residential Student Association change our Director of Sustainability position to that of Director of Publicity. My family moved from one house in Raleigh, North Carolina, to another, larger and more wooded one, and my dog had her 10^th birthday.  And I did not sleep through a single midterm!

It’s funny that people can so easily live in circles.  Maybe they’re just easy to become comfortable in, or maybe it’s easy to forget that you live in a circle at all – not that living in circles is necessarily a bad thing.  But I feel as if I keep coming back to writing about me writing.  Is my life really that uninteresting?  (I’ll give you a hint: The answer is yes.)  Every time I’ve watched a Puget Sound theatrical production, I feel as if I focus on the gender studies related aspects of it.  And I keep listening on other people’s conversations as I write these posts, as I am always in public places, just as I am listening to a woman I don’t know describing her friend’s two-and-a-half-year-old daughter comforting her in times of stress.  Even my mood and temperament seem to repeat across the year, as they have done every year – beginning with confident optimism in summer, increasing desperation in fall, exhaustion and despair in winter, and an almost inexplicably powerful, sentimental hope in spring. Maybe it’s the fact that school years have such a similar format each time, or I am just deeply affected by the weather.

Still, I wonder if things ever really, really change.  Probably.  Who am I asking?  Does anyone even read these blog posts?  I genuinely have no idea.

In our last chapter meeting, the pledges of Beta Theta Pi were discussing one of our core principles, intellectual growth.  We debated and analyzed the statement “Betas are devoted to continually cultivating their minds, including high standards of academic achievement”, considering the parallels between cultivating a garden and cultivating a mind – the necessary work, the continual labor, the necessity of love for that which is being cultivated, and the joy in the fruits of one’s labor.  But what struck me most about the chapter meeting was when the person responsible for education played a video of David Foster Wallace’s 2005 graduation speech to Kenyon College, entitled “This Is Water”, which can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzFNh2_dSBg

Fish, he jokes, go through life ignorant enough to not even consider what water is.  This, he goes on to say, is not so unlike adults that go through the daily, boring, frustrating grind of daily life without considering the attitudes with which they perceive the world.  If we think beyond our automatically selfish attitudes, he says, if we have the imagination to see the world as an expanding place of possibility and the empathy to consider the hardship and kindred spirit we share with others, we are free to choose how to see the world.  We are free to decide whether to say that the world is a good place.  This, he says, is water.

I will say this about living in circles: I have done it for what seems like every year since middle school began, and it, in and of itself, is not what I am unhappy about.  I am unhappy that it is not my choice.

Maybe that’s what being an adult is supposed to be about.  Maybe I’m supposed to choose what circles I live in, and how expansive my world is, and how I connect with others.  But I’m just a college student three quarters of the way through his sophomore year of college.  What would I know, anyway?

In which Daniel attends the Society of Composer’s Conference and feels simultaneously terrified and relieved.

From March 7th to March 8th, amid the faltering late-winter weather of the Pacific Northwest, the Society of Composers – a professional society dedicated to the promotion, performance, understanding and dissemination of new and contemporary music – held their 2014 Region VIII Conference on the University of Puget Sound, featuring guest composers Steven Bryant and Joan Szymko.  While perhaps I should have prepared for this with bated breath, launching myself into any possible opportunity to assist with the conference, I most certainly did not, completely forgetting about the upcoming conference and being taken completely by surprise when it arrived.  Yet, magically, somehow, I stumbled into this weekend and managed to speak with both guest composers, Joan Szkymko and Steven Bryant, with the hope of stealing away just a smidge of their knowledge and wisdom.

Joan Szkymko was a tiny, silver haired woman of late middle age that wore brightly colored scarf and held a firm belief in the need for mature choral repertoire for all female chorus and enough energy to power the university alone.  Steven Bryant was a tall man in his 40s, with a somewhat sardonic sense of humor and a great deal of acclaim for his band and partially electronic works.  They were, of course, fascinating – and hilariously different – characters with a great deal to teach to the school ensembles performing their works, what with Joan Szymko teaching Adelphians and Dorians choirs how to approach her pieces and Steven Bryant doing Lord knows what to the bands performing his works (I wouldn’t know – I’m just a vocalist).

Regardless of my lack of knowledge concerning the university’s instrumental ensembles, I ended up at a Q+A held by my composition teacher, the brilliant and slightly unnerving Dr. Robert Hutchinson, as well as a little mingling shindig wherein all the composers and people that helped with the conference stood around near catered goodies.  Here is what I’ve learned:

-Have irons in many fires (money won’t come from composing; it may come from conducting or performing primarily)

-Self publishing is time consuming and is equivalent in many ways to a real job

-Use PDF-Pen-Pro to brand every page of a PDF document with your logo

-Writing for the educational market is one of the largest sources of income

-Earnings are primarily through commission, not through royalties

-Community performances of one’s work pay much better than university performance

–Face-to-face contact and travelling to gigs are the greatest forms of publicity

-Morten Lauridson got his start at a Chorus of America Conference, just handing out his music

-The most important thing Joan Skyzmo learned about composing is asking “What if?”, and comes to music from an intuitive view, acting as a vehicle of the text and its expression, listening for what’s next

-Steven Bryant writes because he wants to recreate and capture the enthralling feeling of being wrapped inside a piece of music, and feels that composition is like a drug wherein, once the pieces fit together and the piece turns out as it needs to, the euphoria erases all the memories of struggle and disappointment

-WRITE ON THE CRAFT UNTIL YOU HIT INSPIRATION

Although, let’s be real, I was mostly there for the free food.

But when I was speaking to these composers, just as when I first began studying composing under Dr. Hutchinson, the question that continually resurfaced was that of “Why do you want to be a composer?”  This, they and countless others have told me, is the most important question to ask myself at this stage in my life, as if I do not believe that composing is my ultimate calling, then it is not worth the struggle.  In all honesty, I cannot fully put into words why I want to be a composer.  It has something to do with some simultaneously compassionate and pretentious idea of giving others hope in the same way that other composer’s music has given me hope, and something to do with the joy of fitting together the elements of music into a piece like the parts of a puzzle, and something to do with bringing order and clarity to a chaotic world, but all together in a ridiculous jumble.  I can say this, however, despite how ridiculous and self-entitled it may seem: I was born to compose.  This is my purpose.  There is no choice.

And so, on this delightful and possibly misfortunate path down the road to Composerland, I have begun taking another step by applying for composition programs held over the summer, and in applying, I wrote and recorded what I consider my first two real pieces – awkward, fumblingly written, but undeniably there.  Here for your listening pleasure, you will find the following tracks:

1) “Remembered Music” – An art song for high voice and piano, here performed by sophomore soprano Lexa Hospenthal and junior pianist Brenda Miller, which was a setting of my favorite poem by 13^th century Sufi poet Rumi:

Daniel Wolfert’s “Remembered Music”

2) “Fantasia for Two Flutes and Two Cellos” – A fantasia performed by freshman flautist Megan Reich, junior Whitney Reveyrand, sophomore cellist Anna Schierbeek, and junior cellist Bronwyn Hagerty, inspired by Arvo Part’s Silouan’s Song and the film scores of Alexandre Desplat:

Daniel Wolfert’s “Fantasia for Two Flutes and Two Cellos”

So, what’s the moral of the story?  If I’ve learned anything from this conference, it can be summed up in these three statements:

Follow your passions.

Play nice with others.

EAT ALL THE FREE FOOD.

Is there anything else to life?  I don’t think so.  I know these things; I’m a composer.