I haven't updated this in over a year.
Bear with me.

I am undergoing the most pronounced stylistic change - or non-change - in my compositional voice, and this has been taking place for at least a few years.

I am simultaneously torn between the melodic/rhythmically-driven music I wrote as a student; the breathing, living, organic music of mine that is heavily influenced by Takemitsu that I have been writing since about 2005; and a third way, a way yet unexplored, where I focus only on color and shape, moving into realms that are divorced from melody and motive, separated from rhythmicization and pulse, and only obliquely involve the worlds of gestures... This third way also includes verging into unfamiliar places - using video as a propagator of sound; creating installations and mechanical music; departing from the realms of notation and equal temperament.

This third way intimidates me. I have to reconcile this with my current projects - a highly-tonal choral work with a number of "21st-Century" features; a work for tuba and marimba that is to be performed by performers who aren't enamored of most post-1945 trends; two song cycles that, by nature of the poetry and content of the poems, must necessarily be melodic and gestural; a solo clarinet work entrenched in serial processes (more Dallapiccola and Berg than Boulez or Schoenberg, but, still)...

I want my music to reflect the paintings of Rothko. The movement of ice, the colors of a glacier. The emptiness of a leafless forest. A nook along a bend in a river. Maps of Detroit and central North Carolina.

I know this has been done before. Feldman knew Rothko. Henry Brandt and John Luther Adams knew the arctic. Etc.

I just haven't done it.

I think back on the experimental streak in me from a dozen years ago that was stilled by "proper" composition study... A streak I'm finally regaining. I owe a lot of this to a healing of the epistemological break: I can indeed compose what I want now. I'm not getting any younger, and prizes and big-name recognitions continue, all of it, to elude me. Publishing a few pieces isn't exactly getting a high-profile New York performance, but, what of it?

What I need is the freedom and time I had as a master's student, and the knowledge I hold now about who I am as a musician. Maybe it's all closer than I think.