Commitment. Passion, personal drive, resilience, and perseverance. Consistent pursuit of excellence, initiative, and ownership of one’s personal failures. Showing up, following through, developing self-reliance and flexibility, the willpower to get up after a takedown. My father passed along to me these qualities, along with congenital heart disease, a diathesis for depression and diminished self-esteem based in past trauma, where the ego serves as a protective shield.
Both my parents worked incredibly hard. He was a lawyer; she was an artist turned advertising executive. I observed in them the self-respect and increased self-esteem that came with overcoming obstacles, accomplishment and pride in meaningful achievements. During my crucial fourteenth year, the age at which I began to figure out who I was and wanted to be, I found comfort in promising myself that what I lacked in talent I would make up in hard work. It stuck. In work I found dignity, and I have worked hard all my life. It is so ingrained that, even after all these years, I cannot sit idly in a room where someone else is working.
My folks believed in committing to something outside of, and larger than, themselves. My father believed in the Law; my mother believed in Art. I understood why he found the Law beautiful, but the fact that Justice’s scales relied on the feather of the human heart to balance them led me to take after her by committing to Art — the language of the human heart.
Once I began to spread my wings as a young composer surrounded by luminaries whose names were known for their work, not for being liked, at a famous music school where the extraordinary was taken for granted, I encountered for the first time musicians whose native talent appeared to be so far beyond my understanding that it seemed effortless. I learned how hard they had had to work, and for how long, to foster the illusion that they were “playing.”
I learned then that artistic eloquence that is for the moment beyond our understanding is what we deem magical, that subjectivity renders opinion irrelevant, that “nobody cares” is both true and false; true in that nobody cares how hard one works, and false in that the yearning for and receipt of magic are the whole point.
In time, I was taught how to focus on results, how to find freedom in distrusting external validation; how to be a professional, how to sort out as a musician, as lawyers do, the “poisonous fruit” from the trustworthy; in short, how what seems to some as arrogance is to artists the essential conjure.
For Music and the Law rely on performance, on human interpretation, to live and breathe. The Law has precedents; Music has the repertoire. A lawyer aspires to “write Law” the way a composer learns to “write Music.” My understanding of this came long after I left conservatory. I wouldn’t understand it if I hadn’t put in the work.
Only after being one for decades did I finally begin to understand how little being a composer has to do with being popular or liked. That said, as a person, I love the people with whom I make art; and I am profoundly grateful to be loved in return. The tie that binds is that, together, we are all in the work. In that way I am truly blessed. We are all dedicated to something outside of, and larger than, ourselves. Together, we work to fashion the feather in Justice’s scales. We work to play; we play to work.