Fewer Imperatives or None

 I just learnt that the eye of the ostrich is larger than its brain: just like the President!
— Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

Of all the artists recording at CBS Columbia Square in Hollywood, the Firesign Theatre understood best of all what it meant to make futuristic records in the context of Vietnam and the setbacks of 1968 in a studio that had been built to broadcast antifascist radio propaganda during World War II.
— Jeremy Braddock, Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums (2024) p. 18.

As I may likely have alternately hinted or documented on this blog, I was highly fortunate in my composition instructors, who while doing their best to help me improve my practice of composition and at once to expand and focus my aural attention to gems in the Literature, did not adopt either a Procrustean method nor an inflexible authoritarian air. They treated me as not merely a person but as a colleague-in-training. Very rarely was there sharp critique, and well, that’s just part of the experience. I survived  (in the first place) and how much better to receive such a rebuke from a fellow musician with whom one has built a relationship (in the second.) Even Charles Wuorinen, whose stern reputation preceded him such that a colleague at Buffalo breathed a sigh of relief at having been assigned to Louis Andriessen’s studio instead — I found much less “forbidding” to work with than one might expect.

The environment contrasted in an illuming way from our first-year Music Theory sequence, in which there was more of a "this is the way things must be done” tone which both fitted the disciplined study of Theory and (honestly) harmonized, to to speak, with the instructor’s tendency to a dictatorial mien.

Overall, no complaint, as I learnt me my Music Theory but good even as I reserved a sense that the creative practice of Composition would perforce not be any slavish adherence to The Rules.

I’ve now been writing music for some 40 years since my graduation from the College of Wooster. Some thoughts, looking back.

Every artist probably finds inspiration in whatever musical sources he pleases. Others may or may not share his enthusiasm.

If any other artist tells you there is something or other you must do, it may well be their trip, and not yours.

My ears spend time both in listening to music completely new to me, and in revisiting pieces I  already love and know well. Those pieces have not changed, but my ears have.

Over time I have generally become more attuned to internal imperatives. The latest external imperative which I obeyed was the need to reorganize the April program at King’s Chapel as a trio.

Preoccupations at home have meant that I have not been composing. In the back of my musical mind I am gearing up to compositional readiness, although I have not absolutely settled on the next project.