Life and Meditation

As you may tell from the nearly four month gap between now and my last post, school has been my first priority since I started my second year. It is amazing how you realize the true value of your regular sites (Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, etc…) when you stop using them; in my case, I didn’t miss them much. Of course I still don’t have loads of free time either, but I’m learning to cut down on unnecessary stuff, and get the best of my time on the web: I’ve trimmed my RSS list to the point that I can not check it for a week and get it down to 0 items within an hour, as opposed to the usual 399 or above; this has really left me with time to actually be productive and I highly recommend it to anyone.

So that’s life. Recently, I have been practicing a lot and thinking about my directions for the future, and discovering that I would be better off pursuing an extended career in music, rather than a teaching job at a high school. I’m not discussing that here, but I am referring to it because it is the inspiration of a composition I recently made for my Introduction to Composition class.

Life and Meditation is essentially an outline of the process of stopping your activities in the world for a minute, thinking and wondering about possibilities, and going back into the world with a fresh perspective. It is significant for me because I have never had my own music performed before; this is not especially noteworthy when considering that I only started composing two months ago, but it’s cool to me, so there. The performers are Tristan Durie (Flute), Alex Goodman (Guitar), and Peter Grant-Mackechnie (Piano); I was conducting. The recording is below, along with the sheet music and an obligatory album cover (because there shall never be an album with no cover in my iTunes library). There’s also information about the individual parts of the piece if you are curious.

Life and Meditation (Recording)
Structure
Score