Composer Notes

I was one of those students who went straight from high school to college, and then straight from there to graduate school. It never occurred to me to take time off from academic life. I was serious about being a composer, so why not just put the pedal to the metal?

So I buckled down and got good grades and learned everything I could about composing music, and hardly ever took time off. And lo and behold, like most other excessive strategies this one worked out well for me until it didn’t. The stress of constant striving began to bear down on me. By the time I completed my doctorate in the summer of 1990 I was completely exhausted. All I wanted to do was have a cup of tea, take a nap, take a walk, take another nap, and maybe have another cup of tea.

I didn’t compose anything else until right before Christmas when I wrote a set of five tiny piano pieces as a present for my husband. They were the opposite of the whoppin’ big orchestra piece I had written for my doctorate. These little pieces felt friendly and right-sized, like the piano music I learned when I was young. I named the movements after fairly ordinary, unimpressive things: twilight, cogwheels, fog, shadows, and squirrels. These things weren’t bright and shiny; in fact they were all sort of gray, blending easily into the background. But as these modest pieces began to take shape under my fingers, I felt twenty years of academic pressure start to lift from my shoulders.

Of course that wouldn’t be the last time I got swept up into the single-minded compulsion to produce and achieve. But whenever I take the time to sit down at the piano and play Shades of Gray I am reminded how lovely it is to simply pay attention to things that are simple and small.