For a brief shining moment tonight--and this was sometime soon after I'd gone into the computer lab in the music building to work on my 20th century fugue--I started pondering new pieces to write for various instrumentations that covered instruments my friends played, so that they could be performed at my upcoming senior composition recital sometime during the upcoming school year. It has been kind of a rarity because I've been focused primarily on my writings for my counterpoint class, as well as my job as a tour guide this past week and reflecting on my life to date (really, is there a time I don't reflect?). So while I've been learning quite a bit in my class and writing project works to demonstrate said understanding, I feel like all of my actual energy has been used for it. Not that it's a bad thing, but I know I'm fully capable of expanding it to multiple areas all at once (see last semester: GPA-wise it was my best semester at Olaf).
I haven't really been feeling all that composerly lately. Outside of class projects, I finished writing a choral piece that I started back in March or April and entered the choir part into Finale, and barely started kind of a rock piano song (quasi-Ben Folds style, but doing my best to not imitate it). That brief shining moment that I mentioned at the beginning was really the first time since about May 22nd that I felt excited about composing and had some sort of half-assed inspiration within me. Part of it could be thinking ahead to my comp recital and trying to decide what pieces (both already written and yet to be written) will go on the program (max. 40 minutes). But since then I have returned to my room and checked my email (and ESPN.com news) for the almost-umpteenth time, and through as much quasi-reading as I can muster I haven't been able to put together a coherent idea.
This is not the first time I've undergone a compositional drought. I spent much of the year 2004 wallowing in a dearth of inspiration and motivation, probably because at that time I was fresh off losing my church, and--really--my social and spiritual center. An odd thing that happened during that time was I "composed" a piece early on in the year where I copied and pasted bits and fragments of damn near every actual piece I'd written up to that point. There was absolutely no form to it; it was all transposed to one key (more or less) and in some cases dramatized to show the overflow of musical emotion found mostly in Romantic-era or Neoromantic-era pieces.
I'm not sure what my coming-and-going excitement for my comp recital will inspire. I know of several friends who will want to play something in it, so it will be a bit easier for me to write something for them (if I don't already have a piece suiting this particular purpose). But I feel I've hit yet another dangerous crossroads, one where, if I decide/realize theology or religion is where my heart is, I may have to risk a difficult process for crossing over into yet another field where I did not have too much experience in the recent past.
This is not to say I feel like doing the music major was a waste. In fact I'd argue the opposite, in that I finally received some thorough education as to what to consider when composing, as well as basically going through the experience of having hands-on criticism of a piece both in progress and in its completed state. But at the same time it bugs me that I have to keep changing directions to find out what I want to do in, and get out of, life.
I have a meeting with my counterpoint professor tomorrow right after class, in which will be his first look-through the beginnings of my 20th century fugue. Unfortunately it's been a much tougher task than the Renaissance counterpoint or Baroque fugue projects so I've accomplished only three more measures to bring my total to seven for the piece.