Today is our 14^th wedding anniversary, and this year it falls on a Wednesday. A few times the 19th has fallen on a day I had to be out of town, and this year it falls on a day when Crystal is in tech week (rehearsals every day) for her show. We simply agree to celebrate on another day, if one of us is gone.

I leave town on Sunday for ten days for my ballet rehearsals and performances. Crystal will stay a few more days home and care for Oliver (left, in this photo, shown with his late brother Noah) who needs medicine twice a day, and then join me in South Bend to see the ballet on the weekend. We do have other friends who also cannot travel for more than a couple of days, due to their elderly pets. It’s okay. You love them and don’t mind. Oliver would be terrified in a strange place like a kennel.

One of our anniversary traditions is that I give Crystal a red rose for every year of our marriage, this year fourteen of them. The first few years, it was a dozen for every year, but that became impractical after five years or so! So with her permission I transitioned to just one more rose each year instead of another dozen. Imagine the cost of fourteen dozen!

Crystal and I do have a new favorite Italian restaurant in downtown Nashville, called Sinatra Bar and Lounge, at the end of historic Printer’s Alley, an alley so named because it was originally home to thirty-six publishers, including the city’s two big newspapers. It’s in a once-discreet alleyway (left in photo) as the home of once-racy Burlesque shows, dancing, and nightlife in places like “Skull’s Rainbow Room.” Yet it was posh, and respectable couples like my parents got all dressed up and went there!

Now that my ballet composing work is done, I must admit that my many plans for home improvements have been slow gearing up. There is a funny saying: “You can do any amount of work, provided it is not what you are supposed to be doing at the time.” For me, these past two weeks, the thing I’m not supposed to be doing has been the irresistible compulsion to work on my new symphony. Partly out of habit, I have found myself already creating players’ parts for the first movement, but also composing more of the incomplete fourth movement. I just can’t help myself. But it is true that the symphony must be done, parts made, and be ready to record in Europe on September 7 and 8.

However, I did get our fountain in the back garden drained and refilled and up and running again, and amidst temps in the 90’s. We have also been a few weeks without a working oven and await a replacement from our home warranty plan, which is due to arrive and be installed today! This oven can even be run from a phone app — Heaven knows why anyone can’t walk across the room and push a button on the oven itself. We will be looking for a new warranty plan from another company next year, because this company always takes too long and sends us on a wild goose chase of phone calls to their subcontractors to finally get the claim done.

The ballet publicity team has done heroic work, including promo reels, mailings, podcasts, TV interviews, and articles in major publications. We are looking to sell out several thousand seats for the two performances. I have given any number of interviews about being the composer of this ballet, as if I was some kind of big shot, which I am not and will never feel like, even if I were one. I would rather welcome such a status if I were no longer alive, so that my music can get keep getting played and keep on giving beauty. Not in any hurry for that, mind you.

It takes a certain temperament to be a classical composer, in regard to your relationship with people. You have to be an extrovert when it comes to the rehearsals and performances, publicity, and giving talks to the public about your work. But that’s only about 1% of the job description. The rest of the time you have to genuinely love to be all alone in a room all day for weeks, months, even years, like a hermit monk copying hundreds of illuminated pages for hundreds of hours.

I have taught many university composition students whom I knew would never really become classical composers, because, though talented, they simply couldn’t bear that much solitude. They loved the idea of being called a composer by the other students but did not genuinely love being alone long enough to write very much music. Or it was all clever modernist tricks, which can be written in an hour or two like a homework assignment done the night before their composition lesson. Admittedly, college is not where (or the age when) young people want to be alone that much, though I confess I already did love hours of working alone at that age, and so I knew I would be a composer.

Perhaps I should have told every composition student (but failed to) that writing classical music is not only about music. It may be just as much about living out some version of a cloistered, contemplative vocation, like a monk or nun, and music is only the byproduct of one’s solitude. If the contemplation is profound or beautiful, so will be the music, and vice versa. Before writing a note, I begin each composing day with silence. Silence is surely the most beautiful music, but I fear many people no longer take time to hear it. But to write music that is worth anything, a composer simply must hear it.