The Grand Experiment (or: How it Started, How it’s Going)
Commissions are great but they are incredibly inefficient.
(I hope this doesn’t sound ungrateful.)
As a composer you spend months obsessing over a new work, riding an emotional roller coaster, never quite sure if the piece is going to come together in time. Countless hours crafting the work and trying out countless experiments, convinced that this your latest GRAND STATEMENT (whatever that means) will be a success, or at least more modestly, that it won’t fail miserably.
Rehearsals start and of course there’s never enough time. You live on the knife edge of insecurity, hoping what you wrote is clear and compelling, and that the players will share your vision on a deeply personal level. It is solitary work, an intimate series of acts producing a piece you are now asked to share publicly. With time one gets desensitized to the process, but the essence remains the same. If you are fortunate, maybe, just maybe the stars will align and the performance will move and transform everyone in attendance for those one, two, maybe three performances that are scheduled.
And if it happens, it is a magical experience like none other.
But then, what next?
Performers move on to new projects because they must – in a gig economy, everyone has multiple jobs. If your own career is thriving, you too move on to your Next Big Thing. And where do those next performances come from? Who is your advocate? Who is invested in the project now that the terms of the contract are completed and your performance is archived under the dreaded ‘Past Performances’ section of the website?
It was nearly 20 years of ‘positive’ experiences like this that led me to devise ways to secure more performers and performances on the front end, at the point where the excitement is highest and investment is at a premium.
I’ve been blessed to take part in multi-year composer residencies, but my first experiment finding a new consortium model materialized in the mid-2000’s, as I somehow parlayed a commission for a one-act comic opera from a small summer festival in Houston into a project comprised of two additional opera workshop programs at small California community colleges. It was my first self-produced consortium experiment and it was a success.
Life happened in the intervening years but in 2017 I revisited this idea, taking the next logical step by removing all commissioning fees in exchange for public performances.
It was a bold choice, one that could easily go wrong.
What if nobody took the offer? What if I didn’t finish the piece in time? What kind of reaction would I get from performers? Would the approach appear desperate or cheap? Is crowdsourcing a new work a good idea? One never knows how people will react to new ventures.
It was a complete leap of faith, and I prepared myself for the possibility of abject failure. A career in the arts is truly a gamble.
Scored for baritone and piano, my song set Here, Bullet has been my most successful work to date.
In 2018 a consortium of some 30+ singers on three different continents signed up to perform the work during the 2019–2020 season (about two-thirds of the committed performances materialized before covid shut down concert halls). The work went on to win First Prize in the 2020 NATS Art Song Composition Competition, was the subject of a published doctoral dissertation, was featured in major media publications, yielded multiple podcast interviews, resulted in new commissions/projects/performances, and will enjoy commercial recording releases during the 2022–2023 season.
There’s no way I could have anticipated any of this.
Performers often want to work with composers, but don’t know quite where or how to start. Money is an issue because it’s always an issue in the arts.
Our model provides the infrastructure, the incentive, and takes away the financial barriers by providing an easy entry point for the uninitiated.
Commissioning should be beneficial to everyone, composers and performers alike.
If you’d like to join the Seventeen Minutes and Twenty-Two Seconds Commissioning Consortium as a performer, a presenter, or educational member, click the link below to read more and sign up.