Famous last words, as any working composer will tell you!  Fortunately, as someone who is privileged to make my living in music,  I eventually do get my satisfaction when flights of fancy long incubated in the creative blender that’s my imagination are finally given flesh-and-blood form by my performer colleagues.  The wait can be months, and often years — Imagine asking an important question and not receiving even an echo of an answer for such a length of time… Agh, agony!  But a good kind, a good kind…

I’m currently in this moment of anticipation and limbo with my new concerto for violinist extraordinaire Robin Sharp and the SFCO… It is a very ACTIVE sort of limbo, I should say, because the days are long now with me at the composing desk, sifting, fashioning, discarding, and sometimes rescuing.  My tendency has always been to work until I drop and so I use a timer to force myself to take breaks to ward off foolish decisions: “Dios, Robin would have to sprout an extra finger to reach that chord…”  or “Ben would kill me if I really make him conduct SIX contrary rhythms…!” or “Tod’s gonna pass out if I don’t let him breathe after THAT hellish passagework…” or “Colleen will probably fire me on the spot if I request the percussionists be suspended from the ceiling…” Ha!  Us crazy composers, trying to spin a beautiful narrative in sound, just so we can move you…

Over the years, the basic process for me has remained the same, and what is both thrilling and oddly humbling is observing the continual mastery setting in — Mastery of craft but also a more elusive mastery of imagination where unusual and oh-so-beautiful connections are made that are discernable by performer and listener alike.  As the days count down to the fateful first rehearsal for any piece I’m working on, I start preparing in special ways. For instance, listening to pieces of music that are as different as possible from what I imagine my work to be in an effort to really hear with fresh ears: Are those effects, those ideas, those sounds, those musical plotlines that made sense to me in my little hermit monk’s cell all really going to be palpable to others?

Ah!  And so it goes.  I look forward to sharing this experience with you over the coming months leading up to our premiere in May.  The countdown has begun!

–Gabriela