Getting Commissioned—Part I
Getting commissioned: it could happen to you
This past year, I’ve been lucky enough to receive two commissions from colleagues at UofT for compositions. The wonderful Jacob Valcheff and Britton-René Collins were both gracious enough to solicit works, and I’ve been chugging along on them since about April of last year, completing Jacob’s piece this past January and currently in the finishing phase of Britt’s.
(Unfortunately Jacob does not have a website, but you can follow all of Britt’s amazing adventures on her website at brittonrene.com—I am so lucky to be a colleague and friend of hers!)
These are my first major and paid commissions to date! So it was a big deal to me as a young artist still getting his footing to have two of my peers whom I both respect so much to ask me for music. I have to be honest, perhaps the first thought I had in my head was, “are you sure???”
After getting over this initial shock, it was time to get to work! The process of creation starts (for me) with a big ol’ chat with the commissioner. What are they hoping to get out of the work? What themes are to be explored? Is there a narrative? This step sets a broad frame of what the commission will achieve. Usually, this is pretty big picture, but sometimes it verges into some techniques (extended or not) that a commissioner wants to check out. In Jacob’s case, he was graciously non-specific! He, like myself and surely many others, had been struggling with isolation, loneliness, and silence where music once was. The goal was to explore that vibe (no pun intended), which sounded really good to me!
I like to think of myself as a somewhat organized person, but for composition work like this I like going above and beyond to keep all my papers immaculately organized for future reference… and a little bit of personal satisfaction. After meetings like the above, I end up with a notebook page or two filled like this:
After digesting all these ideas, I decided to skip the step of research, which I’d call a little unusual. In the earliest stages of writing pieces like Jacob’s, I like to spend a bunch of time on repertoire and score study, however here I elected to dive right in. This was mostly because my percussive (ouch) background gives me a much more intimate knowledge of the vibraphone than something like a string quartet, for example; I felt like I was not especially limited by my technical knowledge of the instrument.
I still listened to a few classics, ruminating and marinating, hoping for some good vibraphone juju to rub off on me—but alas, it was time to write! We settled on the name Stillness, and it was off to the races.
Writing music… and other vices
The actual ‘writing part’ of composition is a pretty elusive, hard-to-essentialize thing for me, I guess. Unlike some composers I know (lucky, lucky people), my process is totally non-linear and fairly sporadic, making it hard to simply ‘book out’ time in a day to get writing done. There are a couple finicky things I’ve kept myself to that give a modicum of structure to what is usually a pretty chaotic ordeal.
I always write drafts at the keyboard on manuscript paper. It’s a little indulgent of me to use ink and quill, I guess, but I find that when entering music directly into Sibelius from an instrument, something always gets lost in translation. Especially in pieces like Stillness, scrambling around to figure out how to best cheat the software to notate a vexing extended technique wastes time and creative capital. In some cases, writing by hand is slower, but to me it’s a little more intimate and grounding than sitting with a laptop.
When possible, I way prefer to write at the instruments in question, especially for percussion pieces. Even as a university-level musician, I sometimes find myself writing passages that end up being…not especially possible. Having mallets in your hands and piecing things out raises the idiomaticity of the music significantly. Not to say that writing away is impossible; I obviously don’t have access to the majority of the instruments I write for most days, but when you have a five-octave marimba at your disposal, may as well use it!
I keep a very strict cataloguing system for drafts that lets me compare revisions and make sure edits and engraving changes line up. For each major revision or addition, there is a version ‘alpha’ that gets saved in my work folder. For example, the fourth pre-publication version of Stillness is saved as VA4 (version alpha 4). A minor revision or update adds a .1 (ex. VA5.2), and that numbering system continues until a final draft is struck, when the number changes to Version 1 (V1). From there, the system continues with revisions; minor changes add .1, major changes add 1 (the final version of Stillness is V2.2). This is… the extreme of my organizational capacity, but it has proven to be eminently useful a number of times when I’ve needed to track down old copies or look through old drafts.
Despite my aforementioned schedule not really being built around ‘composition blocks’, I usually went into school with the mind of writing for an hour or two at the instruments while I was in. Usually after getting my performance work done, I’d head to the instrument (for Jacob, a vibraphone) and try out some ideas I’d been playing with, and do some improvisation. From there, I notate any quality improv ideas or expansions of current material on manuscript, ending up with 10-20 sheets of paper like the one below. These would be entered to Sibelius, where the engraving and notation would be cleaned, forming complete ideas to be worked with.
Problems that can (and will) arise
Even at the best of time, when the creative vibes flow freely, the weather is warm, and the cares are free…I find composition pretty grueling. As stated previously, my approach is totally non-linear, meaning that much time is spent splicing drafts and ideas together into a coherent whole. As well, I suffer from the least opportune spurts of inspiration—usually, when I have tons to do and am up against 20 deadlines in school, I feel the urge to write and write. Yet, when I have nothing but time and the ability to work away on a future deadline, my brain vacates the building…
Thanks for nothing!
However, the largest problem I face is writer’s block, for sure. Not necessarily the classic head-bashing-against-the-wall hopeless writer trope, but just the inability to get anything meaningful down (often for large swaths of time). Some of this is natural blockage, but I would venture to guess that being a student with a (over)full course load doesn’t help, nor does being a student with said course load in a pandemic.
From about March-August of 2020, I found it eminently difficult to write anything, let alone work on deadline-driven commissions. It was hard to place a finger on what exactly it was, but I think Pete Meechan said it best when he came to a University of Toronto Wind Ensemble rehearsal virtually to speak—he said that he was having trouble because everything felt… futile. It was hard to dedicate yourself to a score or pour your heart into a work because nobody knew if it would ever be heard, if it would ever make it out of the Sibelius file. That resonated with me quite a lot—especially the second half of 2020 when we really didn’t know how bad the virus would be, when or if we’d ever get back to normal, everything felt pretty meaningless.
This is not a plea for pity at all—I just sit here reflecting on the past year and remember a number of times coming home after a long day or even being home after 8-10 hours of ZOOM classes and having all motivation and creativity deserted. Working in that environment is not super fun, to say the least.
What can be done to help?
Talk to teachers! More than once I was in real mental pickle not knowing what to do or what avenue to take, but having sessions and lessons with mentors was one of the greatest motivators and instigators of writing (thank you Gary, Aiyun, John, Gillian, Uri, and Bev!!).
Listen to music you love! By nature, I find the compositions we work on at a given time get really tiring to listen to eventually, which sounds kinda weird, but at least for me it presents a problem when you’ve heard playback of a given piece so much that it starts to lose meaning. Having music you love both as a palate cleanser and source of inspiration is really useful! Don’t get lost in your own sauce!
Take a frickin’ break! Just by their nature, commissions are deadline-driven and require attention and regular work. This can obviously be hard to square with school, other work, etc. as mentioned above. That being said… take a break! Go for a walk! The times I’ve felt most overwhelmed and overworked have been the times I was least connected to my music. I consistently find that having some approximation of space between yourself and your work always makes the product better. This also means getting work done early, far before the commission is due, to free yourself up from any rushed or missed work in the closing period of the contract.
Takeaways from the first commission
Maybe it’s dumb, but the first thing that Jacob’s commission taught me was to really get back into my love for music. I think for me and many others the summer of 2020 was one of the hardest times to be a musician and be creative, and having a performer and friend I trust ask me to write something meant a ton. Beyond that, the actual collaboration process was so wonderful to be a part of!
I remember being a little stuck on the piece in December of 2021, and Jacob dropped by the practice room. He gave me the blessing to add some auxiliary instruments into what was originally supposed to be a solo vibe piece. The next day, after scavenging some almglocken, I mention that whistling while playing the instrument might be a cool effect. Jacob, excited, suggests glissando-ing the whistle between notes—and a funky extended technique section was born :^)
Slow and incremental work is good! Even though my progress usually comes in (inconvenient) bursts, planning on getting work done each day and slowly whittling away at ideas over a long timeframe is the best way to go. This commission length was unfortunately a little short for how long the piece needed to be, but it set my timeframe for future commissions. Look at all that learning!
If you didn’t catch the premiere on Jacob’s excellent recital, we managed to sneak into the UofT Electronic Music Studio to record an archival copy, which turned out really great! You can check it out below.
Next time, ‘The Making of Endless Ladders, Distant Stars’ before we wrap up with ‘Getting Commissioned—Part II’. Stay tuned :)
