When inspiration knocks…
An update with my ADHD—I’ve seen a doctor a few times, and I did get officially diagnosed with ADHD, or, rather, ADD, since I don’t have a problem with hyperactivity, and we tried this and that, and arrived at something that has been working for me. Yay. I am also experiencing a sort of a renaissance where it comes to my composition after a couple of slow years, which is also exciting, and so I am working on two new pieces, putting finishing touches on another and revising yet another. Between that, traveling to Budapest to take care of family business, doing my best to spend quality time with my son, taking an online class to improve my English pronunciation, contemplating future repertoire for both Tulane Orchestra and NOCO, trying to keep up with grant application deadlines, and whatever else I am forgetting, it’s been a very full summer. I am looking forward to going back to work so that I can relax. Not really, but sometimes it feels that way.
But all that is apparently not enough, and so I decided to update my website. So far it’s going slow—more than anything else, I need to revamp my works page, add several videos and piece descriptions, and this has turned out to be too much. So I’m trying to get professional help with that, but, in the meantime, I figured that at least I could add to my blog. Now, in my files, I have a bunch of blog entries in various stages of (in)completion, but I’ve been struggling to pick one to focus on. That is, until I came across this fragment below. It is, in fact, five or so years old, but I feel it’s still relevant. Not only did it require minimal editing, I thought I could still use the reminder of the lesson learned here, and if it turns out to be useful to someone else, so much the better.
“Here’s something that feels a bit personal and I had some doubts whether to share this story, but here goes—I was sitting in front of my computer that one morning a couple of months ago, and I had a big agenda for the day, and composition wasn’t a part of it. I mean, I was going to get back to composition the next day or possibly the evening of that same day and I had very concrete plans for what I’d be working on, but this morning was dedicated to the administrative kind of work, emails, Zoom meetings, etc. Very little was set in stone though, I just decided that those were the things I was going to do that morning. OK, so I am doing this kind of stuff and I am really getting things done and I am feeling good about myself. Groovy.
While this is going on, I get an email from my collaborator on one of my projects with the next installment of the text for the project we’re working on. And I think “Great, I’ll get on that tomorrow.” But, of course, I have to take a look at it, right? So I glance over it—just to see what happens next in the story, I am not reading it with an eye to structure, not really taking in every word yet, just glancing over it with the intention to put it away and get back to the busy work. And as I am doing this, I am starting to hear music that would go with it. And it seems good. Should I drop everything I'm doing and write it down? But then I think I have all these other plans for the morning and I am in the middle of this important email, and I need to really think about the structure of the segment before I start composing and I need to make sure that this segment is coherent with the preceding one that’s already written… in short, I talk myself out of it and get back to my busy work.
Only later in the day I remember how great it felt to just spontaneously hear this music and how it doesn’t happen to me that often and I realize that I blew it. I mean, it was a good text, and I knew that when I’d get to it the next day, I’d do fine—and I did, but it wasn’t the same music I heard that morning, it was something else, and whatever I heard is gone. It was as though a lover had come to me and wanted to make love, and I wanted it too, but decided that other things took precedence, and said no and went back to all this drudgery which, while necessary in principle, really could wait. And this special moment that might’ve been is lost. There will be others, but this one is not coming back. I will do better the next time.”