A New Semester Dawns

The Hartt School

As I finally got around to updating my website and this blog, I was reminded of a particular xkcd comic about “the least interesting man in the world,” a spinoff, of course, on the Dos Equis commericials about “the most interesting person in the world.”  (The poor guy in the xkcd comic only has a few posts in his blog, all of which are apologies for not writing more.)

But I digress...

Tomorrow, my first semester at the Hartt School begins, as does my career as a graduate student.  To (under)state the obvious, this is a pivotal moment in my life.  I have chosen to follow my passion for music, leaving behind—for now, at least—the relative security of following my other passion, physics.  To be sure, I am not committing myself exclusively to music for the rest of my life; nevertheless, I am following a trickier path to success.

Looking back, I can’t seem to remember ever sitting down and consciously deciding to apply to graduate school in music.  There was a point by which I had made up my mind, but—to borrow from the field of relativity—the decision was not limited to a single point in spacetime.  There were concerts I attended that helped provide the spark, so to speak, like the Boston Musica Viva concert I attended in November 2008.  I was there to hear the premiere of a piece called Rilke Songs, by Peter Child, whose composition seminar I was in at the time.  In my subsequent concert report I wrote the following:

This was also one of those concerts that made me proud to be studying music, and I wouldn’t be surprised if after I continue as a composer that I look back on this concert as an inspirational and captivating moment.

Still, it was not for another several months that I had made up my mind to go from MIT to a graduate program in music.  But the fact that my decision just sort of “happened” to me suggests that it was a natural progression of events: I was happiest writing music, therefore I would continue to study music composition.  That’s just how my mind has worked.  I chose to go to Boston Latin and MIT because I felt I could be comfortable being both places.  In the case of MIT, I really wasn’t thinking about getting a good job after college—it was simply the school that matched my interests, both then and now.

The next couple years themselves will arguably be even more pivotal than my initial decision of where to spend them.  Either my fervor for composition will be confirmed and strengthened, or I’ll decide that my career will lie elsewhere.  Either way, I’m not worried about this program being a “waste” in any way.  Had I followed a more conventional path from the stage at MIT commencement, I know that there inevitably would have been times when I wondered what my life would have been like as a composer.  Now, even if I don’t end up in music, I’ll have a pretty good idea of what life as a musician would be like.  Of course, should I continue in music after my masters program is complete, I may be wondering what life would have been like as some kind of physicist.  But in that case, I will be curious about what has come to be a secondary hobby.  No matter what we choose to do in life, there will always be an alternate outcome (just ask any quantum physicist).  It is when we give up our most cherished pastimes, though, that we will wonder “what if” most often.  Life is short, so we might as well spend our time doing what we want to do whenever we plausibly can.

My task now is to fully immerse myself in this composition program at the Hartt School, to take all the classes I can (reasonably) take, to write as much music as possible, and to do everything else I can to make the most of the next four semesters.  Because the least desirable outcome at this point would be feeling like I did end up wasting two years.  But if I make the most of the next 21 months or so, there will be no major regrets.  Either I’ll be in a great position to continue on in music, or I’ll be confident that my calling in life is somewhere else.  Anything in between runs the risk of feeling stuck.

The hour of registration approaches, and so I must head to bed.  Since this post turned rather philosophical, I think I’ll finish with a well-known selection from Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.”  Cliché it may be, but I feel it sums up where I am mentally at the moment.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.