If perception is any indication, we determine ourselves, our perceptions of ourselves, our work and our success. We need to maintain a healthy perspective on our limitations and our subsequent strengths.
One of my early weaknesses as a composer (perhaps still one) was a development of formal structure in my music. Formal structure in music is, like physical structure, necessary to hold a composition together and render a certain amount of intelligibility to a composition through repetition of ideas, development of recognizable motives, migrating tonal structures (moving a composition around tonally so that it doesn’t stay centered on one tone), etc. Folk music relies on simple structures where a melodic line, or phrase, is repeated with a contrasting phrase following for contrast. One phrase might be devoted to a repeated chorus with repeated words and the other with words that aren’t repeated. This structure helps the listener to retain the main material of the composition in their ears.
There will always be deficiencies. There are technical deficiencies that I have now at the age of 61 that I may or may not be able to rectify. Some of these center on my work in electronic music - there are some things that I want to do that I don’t know how to do. I’ve even hired students to help me with these skills. It’s important to maintain a sense of humility in your work and to realize that there may be others, sometimes your own students, who know things you don’t.
The thing is, if, in your work, you are banging your head against your limitations, you’re doing your job. Admittedly, I sometimes hit a technical wall and back off. Historically, electronic music was created on tape and, if a live musician was involved, the musician was required to play along with the tape, the tape being an inflexible medium. Now, computer programs are created to be triggered by the musician in real time; they can record and play back what the musician is doing immediately in a manipulated form (backwards, two octaves higher, slowed down, etc.). The medium is no longer inflexible.
I wrote a few semi-successful compositions in this medium, but even then, found myself in the position most every composer finds themselves in where, in live performance, something goes wrong and the hapless composer must run up on stage and try to fix the problem in front of an audience that one can easily imagine is impatient, sniggering, and rolling their eyes. I flew to Australia in 2007 and brought my gear with me - an expensive foot pedal set up, a small mixing board, and blew $200 on a gun case modified to carry this stuff. For a performance run-through I plugged everything in and immediately blew the equipment. I thought I’d compensated the change in voltage but had not. We were able to salvage the performance by substituting a young student for the foot pedal and there were mixers there attenuated to the Australian voltage.
At another festival in the U.S., I set up all of my gear and . . . nothing. Nothing, for whatever reason, worked. And there was an audience waiting. Finally, with the concert delayed already by 15 minutes, I pulled out a CD with a fixed version of the interactive music I would have done, asked the sound engineer to play it back and played the piece in the classic, “fixed media” manner - “fixed” because it was fixed on the disc and couldn’t be triggered or mixed by the performer. No one knew the difference. All my equipment was still in place and, even without pretending to trigger anything, it seemed as if I was playing interactively and the piece received a nice review referencing its interactive nature.
I don’t write interactive pieces anymore. It was too much of a pain in the ass. At some point, it’s okay to decide whether or not you’re going to challenge those technical deficiencies or not. The important thing is to try and then, barring success, to move on.