Months later, after I had stated a potential goal of blogging more about my experience with — and relationship to — music and music-making, I still find it hard to write about it. One major reason is that I am still coming to terms with this part of my identity at a stage in my life where I am pursuing other professional endeavors for building my career. The things that have led me toward pursuing my current avenues are fairly easy to write about: I have a relationship with someone I love and who loves me back, where we both are working to build a life together that is financially feasible for us both. I have a steady job and am going to school at the same time. However, the events and circumstances that led me to start moving away from music, to even begin considering pursuing something else, those things are still much harder to write about. The bottom line is that there are a few key things I learned from my experience as a professional musician, things I realized I liked and, more importantly, didn’t like, that even now I’m still trying to make sense of.
I don’t remember how old I was as a child, but at some point I recognized that I could someday compose potentially as well as the greats of the Classical and Romantic eras, that my piano playing (particularly improvisation) and composing was more than just child’s play and/or “only a hobby.” From as young as I can remember, I was jamming on the piano and writing musical notes on staff paper, and it wasn’t just “some kid banging on the piano” like it was with so many others my age that I knew.
I also was vaguely aware that many of the composers I studied and performed died young. In fact, at this point, most of them did not get to live to either of my parents’ current age. I didn’t think much of it at the time; I just thought it was sad and unfortunate.
Another aspect to my composing habits prior to my decision to pursue a career as a professional musician was that I rarely got my pieces performed (let alone trying to publish them!). Sure, in college I got many compositions performed, but those pieces were all products of techniques I studied and skills I developed in the classroom. Today, I likely won’t perform most of what I wrote in college, if at all.
At some point, when I was much younger, I had a sort of cursory thought: that my music might not get known or recognized until after my death. That thought has come back from time to time, but it hasn’t deterred me, due to another thought:
Given that most of my compositions were of choral music with sacred text (often from the Bible), until I shifted my focus to writing praise/worship songs and secular pop songs, I also connected early on the idea — which I later understood and recognized that it was the truth — that all the music-making I did, whether improvising on the piano or writing notes on staff paper, was for God, that it was between Him and me. I believe I’ve mentioned before on here that in the midst of my deepest-ever compositional drought in 2019, I reached out to God and repented, telling Him that I missed the days when it was just Him and me making music together. Since then, He blessed my music-making once again, which has yielded a bunch of new compositions, for which I am very grateful.
Now three years later, I am aware of two things: 1. I have forgotten somewhat what it’s like to need God once again for the gift of music-making. Note: I still very much remember intellectually what happened, what I needed to do, and the results of those actions. It is just that, with time, one can easily forget what it’s like to be back there. 2. I have once again hit a minor compositional drought, although I would say the reasons are primarily circumstantial: work has been crazy busy, and I’m taking a class.
Another reason was that, in 2020 and 2021, I embarked on this massive project of copywriting my work, including cataloguing everything into a system that I had created. Along the way, I also came across a bunch of older compositional sketches that were complete, that I touched up and added to the catalog. A few months before my official move date this spring, I wrapped up the project, put everything in boxes, and have since put those boxes aside. The place I am currently living is, for all intents and purposes, meant to be temporary. So I have some hesitancy about resuming any kind of serious music project, out of fear that I won’t be able to catalog it in the same way as I have all the others, and that anything I create right now might easily be lost.
One final point that I think pertinent to this blog post: due to an additional interest in music history, study, and analysis, I have been learning more about how truly difficult many of these composers’ lives were. Men like Henry Purcell, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn, Frederic Chopin, and George Gershwin all died in their 30s. At this point, I have already outlived many of them, and I soon expect to be able to say that about all of them. [A brief side disclosure: while I have indeed been blessed with good health for the vast majority of my life to date, a couple small things have cropped up over the last few years that require super diligence on my part to maintain that good health. I’m still blessed, but I also know that I cannot afford to live recklessly (relatively speaking) like I did in my earlier adult years.] As such, the thought that, at my present still-relatively-young age, of already having outlived a few of the greats is quite sobering, especially considering that I once (and still do, somewhat) aspired to do what they did, which was write music, write lots of it, and get famous for it.
But then I consider, not only how difficult their lives were, but also the question of how famous they actually were while they lived. Even Ludwig van Beethoven, who lived to the ripe old age of 56, lived a life full of pain and misery. I would hazard a guess that even to this day, he himself is still considered perhaps the greatest Classical composer who ever lived. All the greats from the Romantic era in the 19th century looked back to him. But I also get the sense that Beethoven may have been recognized more after his death than he ever was in life. The same could apply to, really, all the composers that I’ve listed so far.
So, where does that leave me?
Sure, I have quite a few videos of myself performing on the piano keyboard on YouTube, some of which are solo, and some of which are with other musicians. I also currently have 11 albums comprising 88 tracks on my Bandcamp site, as of this post. I have since lost count, but I have well over 100 compositions, spanning almost three decades, catalogued and (mostly) copyrighted, not including incomplete sketches, of which there are many more.
The point of all of this is to say that, yes, I believe that I know how to compose, and that I know what I’m doing. While there are plenty of genres and ensemble types that I may not have written for as of yet, I have great confidence that I could churn out quality work that would also be meaningful and powerful. Because, after all, I work with God, or at least I try to, an all or as many of these compositions as possible. And if everything comes from the God of the Bible anyway, then I would confidently say that all good and beautiful music comes from Him.
Meanwhile, I have a whole other career to build and a marriage to eventually prepare for, one that I hope and pray lasts for many years and for many decades. And more importantly, I have a relationship with Jesus Christ that I need to continually cultivate, because to leave such a relationship uncultivated leads to a gradual spiritual death. If I draw near to Him, He will draw near to me, and He will continue to cultivate all the musical gifts that He has given me. But also, if this means I spend the rest of my natural life here on earth writing music only on the side while I’m building this whole other life, and that leads to the music I write not being known while I’m here, so be it.
But I’m not gonna lie; it’s tough to think about. After all, why write if it doesn’t get known?
The flip side of this is simply that I continue to write for God, in which He supplies the inspiration while I notate and arrange it, but more importantly I end up writing music that honors Him instead of what will please the world. That’s the downside of being a professional composer in the world: you write for what the world wants. Instead, writing for God means that He and I both get to decide what we are going to compose, untainted and unfiltered by the world. The inherent risk that lies therein is that I may never be known as a composer in the world in my lifetime, perhaps never at all. But the inherent reward is that the music we write will not be tainted, and neither will my soul.