What to do during The Dark Night

No, not Batman movies.

In my playwriting class, we talked about "the life of the project." One step, sitting just past the center point, is:

The Dark Night of the SOUL!

Ah, such a fitting description. The steps, in order, were:

• This is the best idea ever.
• This is harder than I thought.
• This is gonna take some work.
• This sucks, and it's boring.
• DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL
• It'll be good to finish because I'll learn something for next time.
• It's done and it sucks, but it's better than I thought.

It's a pretty good description of the life of a creative project. But what happens when you hit that DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL!

In a project, it can just die away. How many unfinished projects do you have laying around? Happily I don't have too many, but there are some, hiding in the corners of my room. But this stage hits more than just in a project.

What happens when it's your life?

It's that funk. It's the moment after you've been unable to get motivation beyond flipping on the TV or XBox, and sitting for a couple hours, before shrugging and just going to sleep. That moment when sleep won't come, laying in bed, lights off, wondering there's a bat in your room. No, not Batman, but a real bat.

And you start to think...what's the point?

That's the Dark Night of the Soul. Most of us have been there. Some of us live there for extremely long amounts of time. I'm one of those people. In life, and in creative projects.

So, how do I get out of it? If I stayed there all the time I'd either be dead or never leave my room. 

I start with setting a nearly unattainable goal. Say, re-orchestrate an entire piece in roughly 24 hours. Actually, it was closer to 36...from Wednesday afternoon to Thursday evening. This included not just the notes, but having a completely clean and wonderful score, ready to print and bind, and send off.

Then, I do it. To accomplish the task, I had to work. And I mean WORK. In those 36 hours, I spent about 25 of them working. Wednesday dinner and Thursday lunch I worked while eating. Thursday dinner I took off because I had all the notes in place, so I could take an hour off.

Ah, 25 hours of work in 36 hours. If we push it from 8am Wednesday to 12am Friday (40 hours), it would have been 29 hours of work, as I started after being in class and teaching on Wednesday.

Now, for some, that's not a huge amount of work. for others, used to a roughly 9-5 day without a family, it seems like a lot. For those with multiple kids and jobs, well...you're probably laughing at how much relaxation time I had during those times. And probably a bit envious that I had that much time to work on a single project.

But the point isn't to compare. The point is to say I stick with a single project in a near obsessive manner for a short period of time. And I accomplish that project.

If I don't, I stay in the Dark Night of the SOUL! If I do, it helps break up the funk. It's a job accomplished, not something sitting on my desk in the "to-do" pile.

The only way to break out is to complete something. anything. So, I do.

That score has been sent to June in Buffalo. Will it get in? I hope so, but this has been a year of losing in those matters...but that's a different matter. 

another one bites the dust...

When last I wrote about all the strikes, I mentioned Minnesota was up next on the chopping block. And here they are, locked out. They face a similar dilemma as what struck Detroit- not just normal costs, but they started a costly building process, got donations to cover it, but many are calling into question if they should have done a fierce campaign for that over building up their general fund. I don't have enough info to make a decision, but generally I feel like building any operating funds is more important, unless the building is in really bad shape.

And it looks like Atlanta took a deal. from the intro reading, it looks bad. It looks like musicians took a 16.5% pay cut from the base starting salary. What that means for veteran players, i don't know. And top management brass, who were making in excess of $300,000, took roughly a 6% decrease (that's 6% total, not from each person, so however that works out). They also decided to leave vacant posts vacant, not give backpay, and make no alterations to anyone else's pay. They also cut 10 weeks from the season, cut 5 full time positions, and require payment into benefits (which means the pay cut is, in reality, more than 16.5%, depending on how much they pay in). Yep, good deal. Here are details from the management press release

Atlanta musicians gave in too early. But there isn't a safety net for musicians. Management across the country is betting, hoping, that musicians will cave. And it looks like they are.

These are major problems- everything facing the orchestras effects all classical musicians. Hell, it effects all musicians. These fights decide what people feel the arts are worth, as a society.

Whether or not I am an orchestral musician doesn't matter. Whether or not I'll ever WRITE for orchestra doesn't matter. My opinion of the orchestra being little more than museum matters slightly, since I view it as one of the issues they face. But even that doesn't matter as far as being a reason to not look at the problem. It's something we need, as a society of musicians, classical, pop, or jazz, have to examine.

And that's the issue.

Since these lockouts have begun, I've never heard anyone say anything in my music course.

The teacher hasn't said anything.

When i brought it up to some students, they had no idea any orchestra was locked out. How can you, as a violinist getting a doctorate, actively looking for audition opportunities, not know?

I'm seeing the Ivory tower acutely these days- little music students locking themselves in their practice rooms, in their studios, in their classrooms, blind to the world changing around them.

We need to talk about it, keep talking about it, everyone in this wide society in music. We need to talk about why these groups are having the financial problems- identify the problems, see what their answers are, analyze their answers and come up with our own. Because while there are unique challenges to groups that large, some of the issues translate to a single person, just trying to make a name for himself.