8. "Always remember, your focus determines your reality." (January 2025)

People who know me well know I’m squeamish about money. A child of two divorces, I grew up believing the world could be yanked out from under you without warning, so it was best to prepare for catastrophe. I save compulsively. When I’m gone, my dog will be rich.

The weird flip side is I’m not particularly motivated by making money. Even as a child, my life expectation was simply to have a sturdy house, a dependable car, and healthcare (with a dog). For that, I’ve always known I needed a regular job with salary and benefits. I have a love-hate relationship with that job, to be sure, but that’s my income and it’s enough. It took me a long time to name myself “composer” equal to “teacher” because I never wanted my relationship with my music to be corroded by external pressures. It’s tortured enough by imposter syndrome.

I realize that’s not how all composers think. On the far other side of the spectrum, I once visited a well-known band composer who happened to live near me. Fresh from a life-changing artistic experience, I wanted to unpack some big ideas with a colleague. This person listened kindly enough, then led me to the studio in their expansive home. Every inch of wall space was taken up by the covers of their published scores. “I can get up at 8 AM and write a Grade 2 piece by noon,” they boasted. “Then I fax it to my publisher and play golf all afternoon, knowing the day it’s released it’ll sell 800 copies. I know it’s junk. But look around. I live well.”

For me, the surprise in that conversation wasn’t their rejecting my idealism, nor even saying that their work is junk. It was the naked avarice coupled with disregard for the many band directors and young musicians who will embrace that junk. People assume if you’ve risen to a high position in your field, you embody quality and seriousness of purpose. Specifically, if you are famous and sell well in the band world, then clearly you must also be a model of the profession’s ideals and standards, right?

That’s simplistic, of course. A big part of why that situation exists is professional peer pressure, coupled with the longtime tendency for the band world to elevate a few composers to royalty status – a phenomenon that doesn’t seem to always be for the quality and consistency of their work. There are plenty of other factors, too. The music education degree is already so jammed full of requirements, it’s no wonder universities can’t train future teachers all that well to critically discern quality in the repertoire. Further, the ridiculous expectations on public school teachers, those who make up the majority of the profession, are such that capitulating to junk is easy to do and sometimes even necessary.

However, all of that is exacerbated by composers themselves who may come to feel their work is less about art, depth, and quality and more about what will sell quickly and in quantity.  Then if they also reach a certain level of reputation, even if they speak unwisely they inevitably seem to speak for the profession.

That’s too bad. When I was a young composer, the advice everyone gave was, “Do good work, treat it earnestly, and the rest will follow. Be patient.” To that end, I surrounded myself with serious musical thinkers: mentors and peers in tune with the artist’s inner life and struggles. When we were together we lit up discussing orchestration or performance or creativity. Just by proximity, they challenged me to become my best. In our every interaction, which virtually never broached how we made a living or how to make a better living, I came away feeling richer, inspired, and ready to brave a kind of Work that is always messy and challenging.

Maybe it was only an impression, but it was a compelling one that the music and the experience of being an artist were the most important things. Your words become your focus and your focus determines your reality, to paraphrase Qui-Gon Jinn, so we talked about those things, shared them on social media, wrote them in our letters to each other. It was so good to be alive then, with a future of creation, exploration, and yes, high expectations of each other stretching out endlessly ahead.

Still, every spectrum has two ends. At a recent band conference, I attended a session led by a leader in the profession. The topic was how to write faster (the title of the session) but once we were in the room, it was also quite openly about how to use writing faster to take more commissions and get paid more. It was pointed out to me later that I should’ve known better than to go since “everyone knew” what kind of session that was going to be. I sort of knew. I went anyway because I hoped this leader would rise to the responsibility of their position and speak wisely, as they have mostly done in the past. I went because I don’t categorically disagree with helping younger composers get their ideas down more fluently to avoid frustration over notation. I’d hoped there would be something pedagogically useful in the session. After all, I implore my own students all the time that “composers compose,” and they should be producing far more music for lessons than they typically do.

But there’s faster and then there’s rushed and then there’s inadequate. The nuggets of genuine wisdom in that hour were overshadowed when the clinician also said, “I get months to work on a commission but the truth is I only need one day to do the work. That’s right: I do the work of a commission in one day.” The clinician went on to say that orchestration, which is to my mind the essence of what separates band music from orchestral, piano, or any other kind of music, was little more than a craft that could be done while watching television. This was all delivered half matter-of-factly and half bragging, but why would anyone say that as if it’s a good thing? I wondered if the conductors in the room winced. From the intake of breath, composers were impressed.

In fact, that room was full of younger composers who are themselves part of a new generation that in my experience isn’t all that interested in building a career or artistic maturity over years of small gains. Instead, NOW is the name of the game and most everything is transactional.

To be fair, I’ve seen that sort of “if you’re doing it right you can compose while watching television” stuff from other composers, so this was not new. It’s galling every time, though. Further, I do believe this particular clinician was speaking their truth from their own longtime professional experience, yet that context matters. Their career was for many years focused on incidental music secondary to a visual. In that world, faster is both obligatory and rewarded, compared to concert music where the priorities are (and should be) self-expression and innovation. Nevertheless, I could hear the wheels turning all around me in that clinic: If I go faster I’ll write more music and I’ll sell more copies, and the more copies I sell the more reputation I’ll have, and the more reputation I have the more people will commission me, and then I’ll be famous and rich just like this person, so faster faster faster!

There was no caveat that working in that way too soon in one’s artistic life is likely to result in stunting the very introspection and personal growth necessary to produce a quality of music that is truly worthy of reputation and pay. “First learn stand, then learn fly,” as Mr. Miyagi would say. Treat your work earnestly and be patient, as my people would say.

Upon further thought, I wonder how much that slow, careful growth of quality still matters today. We all know Bach and Handel were businessmen as much as anything else, so it’s not like composers, even very good ones, being fixated on money is new. I expect that clinician would say their advice was genuinely aimed at dispelling writer’s block, or at least that they assumed the composers in the room had already reached their artistic maturity and were doing top quality work. Even that composer who plays golf all afternoon must’ve started from a genuine love of composing and a desire to do high quality work.

Ultimately, the issue is too complex to be binary, meaning it’s not a matter of either you care about art or you care about money. Balance is the key. Also, I certainly wouldn’t say that all composers who exclusively write for a living are superficial, rushed, or inadequate. In fact, that’d be pretty ironic since it wasn’t that long ago when Stephen Budiansky excoriated the profession for embracing repertoire (“That Piece”) created by people who were full-time teachers or conductors rather than composers.

But it does seem more and more that cynicism about why we write for band or the mindset in which we do that writing is much more up front in the profession than it used to be.

Regardless of being a part-timer or a full-timer, younger or older, writing smaller works or larger ones, don’t we all have a responsibility as professionals – and especially so our leaders and “royalty” – to at least say that we care first and foremost about the quality of our music, which is ultimately our lifeblood? Shouldn’t that conviction resonate far more often than and far above how much and how often we are paid?

I once asked a mentor how he decided what to charge for a commission. He said he figured out how much time it would take to do the work, based on the scope and depth of the commission and calculated (genuinely) in months. Then he’d figure out what a reasonable annual salary should be considering his experience and ability, and divided that by 12 months. Finally, he multiplied the monthly salary by the number of months he needed to complete the commission. That’s the fee. He asked me how I’d been doing it and I said I charged a flat fee based on grade level per minute of music. There was a pause, then he muttered about commoditizing art and reducing the composer to a salesclerk.

That made an impression I’ve tried to live by. An emphasis on money influences a composer’s relationship with their Art, with their Work, capital letters. It influences the work itself. It influences how composers see themselves. What gets lost, then, is the truth that creativity is not transactional and music is not a commodity. This increasingly open discussion that our raison d'être is something that can be done faster or created while watching television is becoming a factor in its creation that cannot be underestimated. No wonder we’re still so unhappy with the quality of our repertoire.

When people ask me what I make in a year on my music – and they do, which seems weird in itself – I shrug and say it varies hugely, so I always think of it as a windfall. I do with it what anyone might do with a windfall. Often, those people wince, especially if they themselves make a lot, and they invariably advise how I could do better. The implication is that I should be doing better financially, should want to do better, and it is some level of failing if I don't. I can hear the thoughts behind their eyes: maybe my music isn’t very good because it doesn’t make me as much as they assumed it does, or maybe I’m not a serious composer because I'm not thinking that way.

Actually, I like my relationship between Art and money. It keeps my focus where I believe it should be … or just as accurately, keeps it off what would alter and diminish my sense of it and of myself as composer.

But this is easy for me to say because I came of age when it was still possible to get a day job that pays enough to live on. I don’t begrudge anyone their livelihood choices. Things are harder now. Where I grew up believing that full-time composing was too impractical and uncertain to attempt even if I’d wanted to (although I didn’t), maybe the newer generation figures freelancing is no less uncertain than any other path. What naturally follows is, “If that’s how I’m going to make my living then I want to make a good living at it.”

Still, I dislike this open cynicism about the composer’s role and responsibility in our profession, and I dislike reducing the creation of our music to speed and sales. Yes, of course, we all have to make a living, but when that is the goal, if that's what we talk about with each other rather than the creation of art, are we still artists?