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.

In which the universe, in its eternally convoluted and cryptic way, speaks to Daniel.

The Guild of Book Workers’ Horizon Book Arts Exhibition sits in front of the reference desk of Collins Memorial Library, and it had been sitting there for two weeks before I even took real notice of it last week.  My sophomore spring semester had begun rather poorly, just as my freshman spring semester had, and for almost exactly the same reasons – I was restless for change in my academics, I was worn out from the previous semester, and more than anything, I was fretting over the upcoming applications I would be turning in for opportunities in my junior year.  I fear the future, the unknown.  I fear instability and I fear being unprepared for challenges ahead, and I fear disappointing others, or worst of all, myself.  Applying for future opportunities is, therefore, an act that I find terrifying.  It was with these fears and worries, then, that I entered the library to print a paper last week and, for reasons that I could not identify, decided that I had to take a closer look at the exhibit.

Each piece of artwork in the exhibit was either fashioned from or in reference to a book, and dealt with the literal and figurative idea of horizons.  This was the first thing that struck me as a remarkable coincidence, because I have long been deeply fascinated by the many meanings of the word and idea “horizon” – fascinated by the fact that a vanishing point in a painting contains an infinite section of the universe, by myths stating that the gods sewed the heaven and the earth to keep the world together, by the idea that, no matter our mistakes and shortcomings, the world is so much larger and more beautiful than we could possibly imagine.

Playing upon the delightfully whimsical and clever plot of one of my favorite books, Edwin Abbot’s 1884 satirical novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, there was an edition of the book from whose flat cover a part of a sphere literally stuck out, in reference to its story wherein a denizen of a two-dimensional world encounters, to his complete chock and bemusement, a sphere.  There stood a beautiful edition of Dexter Palmer’s tragicomic steampunk novel A Dream of Perpetual Motion, with a beautiful illustration of a floating airship and a man peeking behind the curtain of the sky to see the spinning sapphire gears of the universe beyond.  This I loved not only due to its beauty, but also because I later found out that the novel is a literary variation on my favorite Shakespeare play, The Tempest.  Strangest of all, however, were the multiple art pieces that mentioned the San Francisco Bay Area – where I spent most of my adolescence – and North Carolina – where my family moved several weeks after I left for my freshman year of college.

There have been rare few times in my life when I have ever really truly felt as if everything fell into place, that for a brief moment, something truly mysterious had happened to me.  But how strange and wonderful it was, seeing those pieces of art that I’m sure hundreds of students have passed without second thought.  How strange and wonderful, to feel such hope.

One of my greatest fears is that I will struggle and fight to get by, only to look back on my often meaningless, trivial hardships and realize that it all meant nothing, that it was a foolish dream that I should have thrown away long ago.  Perhaps it is true, and sometimes I have the sudden and violent realization that, more likely than not, nothing that occurs in my life will really affect the world.  But the words of an art piece upon which was written the Sanskrit proverb Salutation to the Dawn still ring in my head, like music from something glorious I do not yet understand, as if to say that the people and things that make my short little life happy are all that matters:

“…For yesterday is but a dream,

And tomorrow is only a vision;

But today, well lived,

Makes every yesterday

A dream of happiness

And every tomorrow

A vision of hope…”

In which Daniel attends the opera and leaves dissatisfied, yet inspired. 

It was the first Friday of the second semester of my sophomore year, and after nearly two hours filled with soprano arias, baritone laments and the rhythm of early classical orchestrations, I sat alongside the other members of Dr. Geoffrey Block’s music history class, watching the final moments of Giuseppe Verdi’s renowned opera Rigoletto at an opera house in Seattle.  It is a famous tale of a deformed court jester – here set in Mussolini’s Italy – that, after insulting a father seeking to redeem his disgraced daughter, is placed under a curse that ultimately causes him to lose the only thing in life he truly loves – his own daughter.  There is something Shakespearean about the plot, what with the star-crossed lovers meeting once and pledging eternal devotion, the enraged fathers declaring vengeance, and the ironic twists of fate guiding the protagonist’s tragic life, but something cold and hard felt – to me, at the very least – to be hiding beneath the glimmering veil of warm, beautiful voices and lush orchestration.

It is not a tale of a deranged lunatic, but a man that has repeatedly been rebuffed by a world that finds him repulsive, and had his heart undoubtedly broken countless times – broken over his deformity, over his beloved late wife, over the cruel courtiers that he works for, and so many other things I’m sure.  After his daughter is kidnapped and raped, therefore, his anger is terrible to behold, and he swears bloody vengeance upon the Duke of Mantua, the man he incorrectly believes is responsible for his daughter’s rape, and incidentally the man with whom his daughter is in love.

Yet, if one were listening to the music alone, and not looking at the translation of the words the actors were singing, it would sound happy, almost chipper, despite the dark and appalling nature of the meaning, and this was to me something of a problem.  As the daughter flits around – but never quite touches – the subject of her rape, the music dances along in sweet bassline arpeggios, as if a waltz were about to begin, rather than a traumatized scream, and as the father declares vengeance, his cries are heralded by happy strings and woodwinds that float and soar most merrily, and to me, this is not what I wanted to hear.  The subject of rape is not a joke, or an interesting plot device or a character flaw.  It is a terrible atrocity committed upon another human being, and should be treated in art as such.  Had I written this, perhaps the daughter’s traumatized fragility would be shown through delicate minor chords, like tiny flowers, and the father’s anger through crashing dissonance, his melody cutting through the texture like a knife, but either way, I would not have portrayed the subject as Giussepe Verdi did.

I am not, of course, saying that he was wrong to musically handle the text the way he did.  His culture’s musical vocabulary was, of course, far different from ours, and what was considered worth dissonance then is not the same now, but all the same, the musical illustration of these dark themes – isolation, vengeance, rape – did not satisfy me personally.  I did not feel that moments of clarity came into focus through the story, nor that a truly honest moment arose between any two characters, and this absence did not compel me to feel for the characters in any moment.  My music history professor described the father’s character as evil due to his vengeful nature, and the daughter’s character as tragic due to her willingness to sacrifice her life for that of her love, but I did not see it as such.  The daughter was sad, yes, because of the injustice of the sexual abuse committed upon her, but not because of her ridiculous and completely illogical notion that she should sacrifice herself to save the irritating and sexist Duke of Mantua.  The father was vengeful, yes, but so too would I be if I had lived a life that was so full of bitter disappointment and cruel people that hurt me without me being able to hurt them.  If I had a daughter and she was raped, I would not say I was evil because I wanted to murder those responsible.  I would say that it was long overdue justice.

This is not, of course, to say that the opera was not beautiful and wondrous to behold – it truly was, with gorgeous costumes, masterful voices and wonderful melodies – but it was this sense of dissatisfaction that clung to me as my classmates and I left the opera house to return to the school.  I cannot help but wonder why so much great art feels this way to me – beautifully constructed, but with little sense of honesty and empathy toward unhappy people, and with too much idealization of them.  Women are not made of melody and metaphor; men are not made of vengeance and lament.  But I must give due thanks to Dr. Geoffrey Block, Professor of Music History, for giving my class the opportunity to see this opera, for without it, I would not have been given this reminder of how much I prize sincerity in art, how little I see it, and how much I need to put more of it in the world.