Heartlands: A round on "When We Sing"

In preparation for the GALA choral Festival 2012 in Denver, an email went out to composers who have been involved with GALA, or who have been commissioned in the past by GALA choruses, artistic directors, and other interested composers. At every Festival there are evening concert blocks, with volunteer mass choruses made up of the members and delegates. There are always sing-along moments included in these events, and during the opening and closing ceremonies—this is a choral festival, after all, so sing-alongs are likely.

This year, there was a new idea, and this is where the composers come in, and I quote:

Why not create a body of simple, songs that could be taught on the spot in a sing-along setting and then taken out into the world by our choruses?

As a GALA friend and composer, you are invited to create a short round/canon or chant for GALA Festival 2012. All songs will be taught from stage by rote, but delegates will be able to download the complete collection of songs to take home to their own chorus to be shared, copied, taught, sung and performed without restriction all over the world. We want to get this music OUT there!

The call was for rounds, canons, chants, simple enough to be taught by rote from the stage in a few minutes, should include multiple voice parts not restricted to any particular voice so that men, women, and others could all join in, and be unaccompanied (a capella) vocal music.

So I joined in, and wrote two short pieces, a round and a canon, and sent them off. Hopefully they'll be part of the Festival mix. If the response is overwhelming, there won't be time to do all the pieces submitted, so they'll pick and choose.

But I thought this would be a great way to both join in, as a composer, and present my work to the GALA members. After all, it would be nice to be commissioned again to write music for a GALA chorus, as I was last year. I wrote "Heartlands" on commission, both words and music, and selected movements will be performed at the 2012 GALA Festival in Denver, in July. Participating in the GALA round/canon call would be one good way to get my music known by others, and also be a bit of free advertising for "Heartlands."

So while I wrote one completely new piece, I also took a refrain from the finale movement of "Heartlands," titled "When We Sing," and arranged it into a two-part a capella round.

Here's the music for it:


(Click on image for larger version.)

One group of singers will read through the first line, then go on to the second line while another group of singers does the first line. You go around and around till deciding to stop, which is how rounds are constructed. It's a very old musical form; if you think about it, you know some nursery rhymes and campfire songs in this form, such as "Row Row Row Your Boat." For this piece, I also opened it up to free harmonizing on the repeat, after every group has gone around the form once or twice.

I wrote two pieces in two days for this call for compositions, and sent them off right away. As I said, one was completely new, and this one was taken from "Heartlands." That ties it to the larger work, and hopefully makes connections and gets people interested in the larger work. And in my work as a composer in general. Nothing would make me happier than to have to do it all again.

Writing in short forms can be challenging. It's like writing haiku: you have to compress as much as possible, to get in as much information as you can into a very small space. Short forms such as rounds are technically challenging, as well, for needing to be circular and layered. You can think of a round as a variety of musical Moebius strip, with the musical line constantly turning back in on itself, each layer interacting with other parts of the music to add up to a larger, synergistic whole. Each line has to be checked against the others for effect, contrast, and similarity. So you end up thinking in circles, as you're writing in circles. Or at least I do.

This was quite a bit of fun. A fun challenge, and a good occasion for which to write a new piece. We'll see what develops next.

Process of Writing 4: Lightning

A few days ago, rather than drive home through a fierce thunderstorm after chorus rehearsal in Madison, I went with some of the guys to a local all-night restaurant for awhile. One example of a restaurant chain I often frequent, but don't feel like giving free advertising to by naming it here, it's one I know I can reliably find gluten-free food at. The night was windy, the moon was high in the sky, and off to the east and south a bank of restless clouds was continuously and relentlessly lit from within by lightning flashes. I would have to drive into that, if I left right away. So I spent a good hour or hour and a half at the restaurant with the guys. We ate, we chatted, we laughed, we told jokes, we told stories. It was a good night.

By the end of our gathering, only three of us left after the others had gone, we evolved a discussion about what it's like to live as a gay man in the Upper Midwest, and other aspects of personal story that lie at the root of the new music commission I am undertaking for the chorus. It was a very good discussion, and some real insights and terrific anecdotes came forward. Meanwhile, throughout our talk, the restaurant's music system was playing 50s and 60s novelty and nostalgia pop songs; songs I hadn't heard in a long time, but which seemed apt for our walks down memory lane. Those songs lingered in the back of my mind throughout our conversation.

When I finally left to drive home, I was tired but content with the day. I had indeed given the storm enough time to pass by, and didn't have to drive through it. The drive home was smooth and relatively easy.

About halfway home, driving down the interstate through the dark, a melody came into my head. Just a simple solo voice line, something mostly positive in feel, with a little bit of poignance to it, but an upbeat tune. I sang it to myself enough times to memorize it, building a longer line, making some chords around it. Ideas for chorus and piano parts to accompany the solo line. Then some words started to appear. A phrase or two, based on one of the life-stories we had been talking about at the restaurant. Just a few words at first, but by the time I got home, I had three short verses of lyric.

I was one
gay son
in our family
Mother disowned me

Then my brother
made two
gay sons
in our family
Mother did not know
what to do. . . .

I prefer subtle rather than blatant rhymes, and I like internal rhymes. Nothing chimes more clumsily on the ear than obvious and predictable end-rhymes, especially when the line is as short as it often needs to be for a good song lyric. Easy end-rhymes make things way too sing-songy, way too easy to make inappropriately ironic. So slant-rhymes, off-rhymes, and internal rhymes are going to appear a lot in the lyrics for the commission—many segments based on the stories I have gathered, as this was—but not more than a few telling end-rhymes. Where you place a rhyme can create dramatic tension, and can itself be a musical effect, like a canon or leitmotif. I also like to use structural rhyme, forms and melodies that recur in separate stanzas without being too blatant. This song has a few rhymes across each stanza, which the listener will take in and interpret as unifying structural points, even if they're not really conscious of the technique of it.

Poetic craft is meant to serve the poetry, not serve itself. Craft is meant to be invisible, or appear easy. It's too tempting to pull out all your poetic chops and over-write song lyrics; just as it can be equally tempting to pull out all one's musical tricks and over-write the music. Most poets who come to songwriting overwrite their lyrics at first, trying to show off every crafty trick they know how to do. Simpler is usually better, though, in song lyrics.

The rest of the drive home, I was singing or humming words and music to this new song in my head, sometimes out loud. When I got home, I went into the house, and immediately sat down and notated in score what had come to me on the drive home. When I was done, I had a complete song sketched out, whose theme and elements were based on some of the stories that the guys had told me earlier, about their own lives. I've written down the essential parts now, enough to shape the overall form of the song, and need only to fill in the bones of the accompaniment. The words and the music came together, this time. A phenomenon I've heard about, from singer-songwriters, but haven't often experienced myself. I added a little bit more tonight, while just sitting and thinking it over.

So, lightning strikes, and you get a full piece out of it. That was a good night's effort.

New Music Commission: Texts

In addition to being commissioned to write the music for a new music commission, I am also commissioned to write the texts. When I composed in 2009 my "try out" piece on spec, Weavers of Light, I wrote the words as well as the music, then. Weavers does incorporate a well-known Wiccan chant as one thread, in one section, and I gave credit where credit was due. Nonetheless, I wrote most of the texts. So the artistic directorship of the commissioning chorus knows I can do both words and music.

Notes on the writing process (I intend to learn from the process as it goes forward, and make notes as I proceed, tracking the process mostly for my own interest):

I wrote two new poems in the past two days—Gates of Sleep and Meditation at Pescadero—a surprise to me, as I was not expecting to be writing any poems lately. One poem is clearly a reflection on memories from the recent roadtrip out to California and back; that's typical, that a poem emerges a week or a month after a moment in life, taking time to percolate or develop in the subconscious. The other poem is more directly tied to what's happening right here, right now.

I can see, however, where some lines of these poems could become part of the fabric of the new piece; there are lines that are topically relevant, and thematically connected. So, like many poets and composers, we cannibalize our own existing materials to make new works. It seems that the poems were part of the lyric-writing process for the new music.

I find I am more able to get my head into lyric-writing mode if I leave the house, get away from my usual distractions and orbits, go to a coffeeshop or restaurant, and write there. I wrote a lot of lyric material, and some melodies, when I was on my last roadtrip out West and back; and almost nothing since I got home. (Granted, the moment I got home I had Things To Do, and dove right into them.) It seems obvious to me, at this point, that to really be able to focus on the work, I'll need a change of venue. Fortunately, there are two or three good coffeeshops in town, within a few minutes drive. I can always find a place to sit and write.

Ideas come to me better when I'm outside, or driving, or just getting away from home. My creative output is almost always higher than usual when I'm camping out in the woods somewhere; I write a lot in my journal, make drawings, etc. It might even be worth it to take a short roadtrip again soon, just three or four days, drive up to the Upper Peninsula, check into a hotel for a couple of days, and write. I wish I had friends who had a remote cabin I could borrow for a week at a time.

To write music, as I've indicated before, I don't need to be at the piano. I hear melodies and chords and musical forms just fine in my head, with my inner ear. What I usually do when writing choral music, as a process, is write away from the piano; then bring the material back to the piano to finish it up, refine it, polish it, make it the best it can be. The piano is for finishing and polishing, and making sure it all hangs together musically.

The only kind of music that I must sit and write at the piano is, honestly, piano music. I'm sure there will be some improvisation time at the piano which will turn into a part of a piece. I do occasionally improvise and notate a piece while sitting at the piano, working it out as I go along. I have been working on a more abstract solo piano work, off and on, for a few months now; it's the kind of piece where I find sounds I like by improvising them, then quickly write them down. That's a slower process than writing lyrics, as it consists of compiling and refining scattered improvs into structured notation.

There are two issues with writing at the piano: If you are a good pianist, it's too easy to over-write, to write something showy or difficult, just because you can. Or, if you are not so good a pianist, you can get stuck in your own habits, your patterns of playing, and everything comes out sounding the same. Both of these tendencies can be freed up when you write away from the keyboard. It can give you a chance to hear things differently, and write outside your usual box.

Over-writing is the same problem poets have when they turn to writing song lyrics. A song lyric is never going to be heard separate from the music. It must synergize with the music, and isn't designed to stand on its own. That's not to say that some great lyrics cannot stand on their own, as poems; but that happens a lot less often than either poets or music fans believe. The problem most poets have, when turning to lyric writing, is that they want to show off all their chops, find great metaphors, really express themselves at the top of their craft—and all of that makes for really bad lyrics. In a song lyric, simplicity and clarity are paramount. Less is more: you need to say it as cleanly as possible, and not get lost in flights of technical fancy. Poetry and lyric-writing are not the same art. Even the best singer-songwriters get bogged down in this error, some of the time.

Some composers I have heard do get stuck in their musical boxes, and their music all starts sounding alike. During the application process for this new music commission, I was shocked when I heard some samples of the other composers' music all sounding very much alike from piece to piece. As if the composer only had one style in which they wrote. At that moment, I convinced myself I was not going to get this commission—and I am now very grateful to have been utterly wrong. I found out later that I was selected for this music commission because I am able to write in diverse styles; the desire for the finished piece is that it have several different moods and styles within it, that it have an arc, a journey, and not all be in the same style all the time.

Regarding sameness of style, I have the opposite "problem": most of my musical compositions sound different from each other. To be more specific, within a body of work, there are often similarities, ways of doing harmony and melody that I can hear as characteristically "mine." But I have more than one style of writing, more than one body of work. The same is true of my visual art, in particular, and of my creative writing. I've recognized several discrete and diverse bodies of visual art since I first became a visual artist: "pure" photography, especially outdoor photography; visionary and shamanic digital art assembled in Photoshop; and, now, a couple of distinct styles of drawing; and, more recently, three-dimensional visual such as the papier-maché work I've been doing, even though it often draws on both the photography and the visionary digital artwork for source materials. In my creative writing, I also recognize different bodies of work, each self-consistent and internally logical, but the style "rules" change from body to body.

I don't care if I have One Dominant & Recognizable Style, yet that is something galleries and critics ask you for—in fact I've been turned down by art galleries for having "too diverse" a portfolio—but rather, I'm interested in constantly exploring. One reason I am drawn to maverick artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe and David Hockney is the restless nature of their art, their constant development of new materials and styles of work. I've tried to edit my presentation portfolio to present only one style at a time to submit to an art gallery; but that hasn't helped me get in the door, either. I guess my art is still too far outside the box for most galleries and critics.

I accept that. I no longer try to edit myself to conform to outside expectations. Life's too short to do anything but what you really most want to do.

If there is a thread throughout all my music, that ties it all together, it's perhaps that I hear melody first, and tonal harmony last. I do not feel tied to tonal harmony or counterpoint. I am just as happy for my melodies to be heterophonic as homophonic. If there is counterpoint, it's usually modal rather than tonal. I am drawn to certain scales and effects, certainly. There are certain complex harmonic relationships between melody and root that to my ear sound poignant and emotionally powerful. (Some of this is always subjective and idiosyncratic.) Some would locate those within tonal music theory, and I suppose that's valid enough as far as it goes; but I don't think of them that way. I'm also aware that I have habits of using scales and modes that are perhaps idiosyncratic, but also perhaps add up to a personal musical style or language. How do you sort which building blocks are critical to establishing a style, and which are irrelevant? I don't think it's entirely subjective, but it is partially so.

To return to the writing of texts:

When I was on the road I filled half of a notebook with sketches for lyrics. One or two songs might be almost complete. I have to review them, and see if they add up to a finished shape. Then I'll need to sketch out the melody, and start filling in the choral arrangement, and piano accompaniment. Sometimes the words and music come at the same time; so the sketchbook has a few musical notes in it as well. Western musical notation is like my second language; I've been fluent in it for as long as I can remember, going back to early childhood. (I am competent if not fluent in some other notational traditions, to a greater or lesser degree.) So dropping in a note or two alongside the words is enough to mark how they will go together.

For the immediate present I am mostly focused on the words, the texts, the lyrics. I need to get a critical threshold of these down this month. If music comes forward at the same time, so much the better; but it's not my main focus this month. I plan to give this most of my creative time, for the near future. Once I have most of the lyrics, compiling the music will go relatively quickly. I'm learning from past experience how best to support my creative process. I'm looking towards a hopeful future of being able to do this again and again.

•

Update:

I did get out to a coffeeshop downtown this sunny afternoon, and sat and wrote in the warm corner of the venue for an hour. I read through some of the raw materials given to me by some of the members of the Chorus, and found a lyric inside it. I wrote that down, then I started to write some music. I got about a page and a half of score, before I needed to stop.

I'm remembering now something that I learned while writing Weavers of Light: I can only work that intensely for about an hour before needing to take a break, get up, walk around, take a break. Then I can get back to work. But I have to stop frequently. Some of that is that I get incredibly wound up and excited, and I need to calm down. Another thing is that I have to stop and let my mind work over what's to come next. In other words, I need breaks from the writing to mull over what to write next.

I can only keep going without a break after an hour when I'm in a stretch of a piece where I already know what's happening, and all I have to do is fill things in and connect the dots. The chant section in the middle of Weavers was like that: I knew exactly what was coming, as each layer built on the last one, and it was just a matter of filling things in, filling out the known outline.

So I got about an hour of work done before I needed to take a break. I had a great cup of hot chocolate, by the way, with whipped cream on top. I know I'll be going back there at least a couple of times a week to work. it's a congenial environment for this part of the process. As much work as I can get done, as quickly as possible, the better I'll feel about beating my deadlines.

Outside Research, inside Life

Some days, you feel detached enough from your social settings that you participate as though you were an anthropologist undertaking fieldwork: Participating, but with always part of you sitting back and observing, taking notes, observing the natives and the local wildlife, feeling like a non-native, an outsider.

Some people go through their entire lives feeling this way. I've heard more than one writer mention it: Part of them is always taking notes, knowing they'll recycle life into art, even at moments when it might seem ridiculously inappropriate.

But sitting back and observing at one remove, like an anthropological fieldworker isn't necessarily a good way to engage with actually living your life. I would say to more than one writer, or artist, of my acquaintance: While you're living your life, live it to the fullest. Don't keep part of yourself disassociated or abstracted. Live life with full engagement in the present moment. Write about it later. Make art about it later.

It's shocking to me how often that advice falls on deaf ears—often for no better reason than a failure of the imagination, or a lack of trust in one's own memory. Some artists can't stop taking notes because they're afraid they'll miss something—apparently they're stuck in college classroom mode, or grad school mode if you prefer, taking notes in seminar or lecture. For some artists, school does become a habit—but it's a habit that can also be unlearned.

I feel my own best writing is engaged writing, not observational writing. Dive right into the moment, in memory, and write about it. When I sort through photographs, I often find myself able to re-experience somatically what I was thinking and feeling in the moments I made the photograph. And ought of that often emerges a short bit of writing. Photographs as memories, photographs as reminders. Which in the imagination and recreation of memory and experience, become short poems, or prose-poems, or sometimes, longer poems, or poem sequences.

I'm back to not doing much poetry writing again. It's been a slow year for poems, as I mentioned before, except for the surprising poems that emerged this past summer, when I was extremely ill. That series of poems doesn't feel like it ever ended—who knows? another poem can always emerge unexpectedly—but it doesn't feel, at the moment, as though there's any urge to write anymore. I'm back to writing short poems, haiku, and prose-poems, mostly triggered by photographs.

There's no abandonment in this. It's just, as ever, a change of emphasis, a switching of creative channels, an artistic crop rotation. I'm putting my energies where they need to be, for now.

The truth is, I am reserving most of my wordsmithing energies for the new music commission. I'm writing the lyrics as well as the music for this commissioned project, so I'm giving most of my word-oriented creative energy to the lyrics for the songs. I say most, of course, because things always spill over the edges of the container and splash onto other parts of the floor. I've been keeping a notebook of all the fragments, ideas, and structural notes for the commission in a single notebook. I keep it nearby at all times. More than once, when I was on the road last month, ideas for sketches and lyrics would come to me while I was driving, driving along and letting my mind roam over the work, over the landscape.

One of the core themes of the new commission is that Midwestern, heartland culture, really has something unique and special to offer> It has its own tone, style, and pacing. People here in the Upper Midwest do have a culture distinct from the rest of the USA, a certain attitude towards life, a certain way of being—and that will be reflected in all aspects of our lives. The commission is inspired by the living stories of the members of Perfect Harmony Men's Chorus—myself included. And one of the key themes that has emerged from those stories is our about what makes us uniquely Midwestern. It's a little hard to define, or pin down, in prose; and it has both light and dark aspects to it. I'm finding that the best way, so far, to get the lyrics to come forward, is to inhabit the stories, absorb them, become them, and let them re-emerge in my own words. One or two quotes from interviews and writings given to me by Chorus members are going to make it into the finished work; I'm already clear about two or three such fragments. The rest will be passed through my own sensibility—so much so that i feel I am living the stories, which in many cases are not too different from my own anyway, and re-telling them the way an actor does, or a bard does, by living them from the inside.

There's no theoretical framework here, no intellectualizing about what should be said. I do have a rough structural outline for the overall piece. But I don't want to overthink or overintellectualize this music. It needs to emerge via a living process of being inhabited, not merely didactically described. As with poems, I want the lyrics and the music to recreate an experience in the audience. The old dictum "Show, don't tell" is very relevant here. I don't want to create something artificial, an artifice. I want to make something essential, engaging, and gripping.

Stylistically, that means I'm not pushing the musical envelope too hard, so far. I want the music and words to be accessible (without being simple or shallow or clichéd), clear and straightforward (rather than too artificed or overwritten), and universal. GALA choral commissions such as this have an ambassadorial function: they are not only about preaching to the choir, i.e. the LGBT membership of the audience. If only one stranger, or friend, or family member starts to understand the lives led by their gay and lesbian friends and family, because of the music I've presented, I will be joyous and feel richly rewarded.

GALA choruses function as ambassadors for changing peoples' lives, changing peoples' minds, bringing people together, making connections where there may not have been any before. There are two reasons GALA choruses commission so much new music: to build the choral repertoire; and as educational outreach.

The music itself is a kind of activism.

That's how one can change the world, change peoples' minds, open new doors in their experience: by artistically, indirectly communicating with them what it is like to live our lives. Years ago, I was the kind of activist who did march in the streets, participate in protest rallies, and all that. Now I let my art be my quiet, far more compelling, far more subversive, far more viral, form of activism.

And that is about living life from the inside, rather than just intellectually describing it. I once saw an oversized button worn on a shoulder bag by a person met at random on the pedestrian mall along State St. in Madison; the message inscribed thereupon was:

This isn't a rehearsal, this is your life.

So mote it be.

New Music Commission 2012

I'm overdue to announce that I have been commissioned to write a new piece of music: for Perfect Harmony Men's Chorus, of Madison, WI. Perfect Harmony is celebrating its 15th year next season, and the commission is both a celebration of that anniversary, and to be presented at the next GALA Festival in 2012.

I've been involved with PHMC now since 2007, when I joined after my Dad died, to find some social contact with other gay men, and to get back into choral music. I needed both musical and social reconnections, at that time. I am an alumnus of two other GALA choruses, the Twin Cities Gay Men's Chorus, and the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus. Perfect Harmony is a much smaller chorus than either of those, but it is full of men deeply committed to making music together, and to supporting each other. I knew from my previous experience with other choruses that I would find what I needed, in singing together with other gay men.

TTBB male chorus repertoire (tenor, tenor, baritone, bass) is my preferred choral configuration purely for matters of personal taste. I just like the sound of massed male voices. I sang in the Michigan Men's Glee Club when I was in college, a male chorus of some distinction at that time, and found many rewards there. I fell in love with male choral music, both the social and musical aspects, and for me, that changed my life. I'm a lifelong musician, singer, composer, etc. I've sung in every kind of chorus configuration that there is, and male chorus is still my favorite.

San Francisco is the flagship gay men's chorus. it was formed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, during the first phase of the gay rights movement. They did a concert tour of the USA in 1981, spending a long time on the road, giving concerts in city after city, town after town, after which LGBT choruses sprang up all over the place in their wake. Now the GALA movement has become international, with several hundred choruses around the USA and the world. Every four years there is a GALA conference held in a large city, where several thousand singers gather with their choruses to perform for each other, to share their stories, to enjoy life, to party, to gather together in music that binds us all together. I attended the last GALA conference, in Miami in 2008, with PHMC, and it was for me, as it is for many other people, a life-changing and life-affirming experience.

GALA is one of the most positive faces of the national and international LGBT communities in our time, in our culture—which remain oppressed communities: politically, socially, financially, in terms of civil rights, and in many other ways. Singing together, we function as ambassadors of culture to the world, spreading positive messages of acceptance, diversity and inclusion.

Before some cynic points out how my last statement here sounds like the "politically correct party line," let me state for the record that I genuinely know all of the above to be true. It is based on my experience, and on years of observation.

I have been singing in choruses, first in church, then in high school and college, since I was 7 or 8 years old. I've been playing piano since I was 6. I've played every instrument in the symphony orchestra except the brass instruments, which I have no ability for. I'm a composer, a lifelong musician, a performer, a creative. Music is central to my life.

I have seen the same story time and time again: Making music together, in LGBT choruses, singing together, has changed peoples' lives for the better. It's given people a reason to go on living when life has become hard and difficult for them. Lesbian and gay people often have to fight for their lives, for their very right to exist; the GALA choral movement has given many a sense of community, of life, of affirmation and validation, beyond anything they'd ever had before. I've seen people choose to live, rather than give into the pressure to remove themselves from daily life, go off into a corner, and die.

And that is source and purpose of the new music commission I am undertaking.

The nature of this 15th anniversary commission for PHMC is to tell the stories of the members of the Chorus. Through interviews, writings, and other means, I have been gathering their stories, to turn into a suite of songs that will be premiered in Madison in spring of 2012, then performed at GALA 2012 in Denver, CO. The nature of the commission is to tell the stories of the men of Perfect Harmony: what it is like to live gay in the Midwest; what it was like to group up gay in the Midwest; and how we, as Midwesterners, with our own unique culture, are different from the usual gay stereotypes, which are based on the urban gay ghettoes of New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and the other big cities of the two coasts. Our culture here in the heartlands, what some of the urbanities of the coast call the "flyover zone," is indeed from that of the coasts. Calling the Midwest the heartlands is accurate on so many levels. The music will in the end reflect its sources, and reflect, I hope, some aspects of what living gay in the heartlands is like.

As for my personal feelings about this new music commission:

I am gratified, grateful, and pleased beyond what words can say to have won this commission. I was not the only candidate for doing this commission, and it was not a sure thing that I'd be offered the work. My gratitude extends to the point where I want to do the very best job that I can do. I will go far beyond the usual requirements to make this new work be the best that it can be.

I am doubly, triply pleased to be working as a composer, actually being paid to write music. It's what I've always wanted to do, ever since music school. And I hope this is only the first commission of many, in the future. This is how I want to spend the rest of my career: earning my living from my creativity. Writing music. Writing choral music, for that matter. If this commission leads to other GALA choral commissions, well, nothing would make me happier.

More on this project at it develops. I'll keep you posted. I've already started writing, but it's still early in the process.