{"id":1241,"date":"2018-03-12T10:38:39","date_gmt":"2018-03-12T14:38:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/?p=1241"},"modified":"2018-03-12T10:38:39","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T14:38:39","slug":"disruption","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/2018\/03\/disruption.html","title":{"rendered":"Disruption"},"content":{"rendered":"

Life is full of small pleasures, and I do my best not to undervalue them.<\/p>\n

For me, many of life\u2019s pleasures are solitary.\u00a0 \u00a0Writing music, for example.\u00a0 Or reading.\u00a0 Or just thinking about things.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, though, events capture my attention, pull me out of my self and away from my solitary activities.\u00a0\u00a0 Last spring was such a time.\u00a0 Like many others, I found national and world events disrupting my routines.\u00a0 That disruption was a good thing: it forced me to reexamine many of my assumptions and engage in actions that weren\u2019t quite in my comfort zone.<\/p>\n

But composing was still central and finding a way to address this experience through music was bound to happen \u2013 as with pretty much any composer, it\u2019s really second nature, unavoidable.\u00a0 So, a year ago, I wrote a brass quintet called Disruption<\/em>.\u00a0 It\u2019s short \u2013 maybe six minutes \u2013 but it recreates the feeling I had of being jolted out of pleasure by something more important than pleasure.<\/p>\n

Disruption<\/em> will be premiered tomorrow night by the Watson Brass Quintet \u2013 details here<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

I should add that popular music styles have seldom been in the foreground of my thinking, but one thing I\u2019ve particularly admired about the popular music of my lifetime is its ability to express defiance.\u00a0 It\u2019s a recurring attitude in much of the music of the past half-century, a challenge to authority, as if to say, \u201cYou can knock me down, but I will get back up, and I will be stronger.\u201d\u00a0 I like that.\u00a0 Sometimes it\u2019s disruptive — and often it needs to be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Life is full of small pleasures, and I do my best not to undervalue them. For me, many of life\u2019s pleasures are solitary.\u00a0 \u00a0Writing music, for example.\u00a0 Or reading.\u00a0 Or just thinking about things. Sometimes, though, events capture my attention, pull me out of my self and away from my solitary activities.\u00a0\u00a0 Last spring was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":874,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1241","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1241"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1242,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1241\/revisions\/1242"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}