Greetings friends, supporters, interested souls. As I mentioned when I sent my first note from Substack last fall, I hope to do semi-regular, but not frequent, updates on my artistic work. Here we sit squarely in the midst of the first quarter of 2025 and much has happened since my last note. We all have events, and by themselves whatever has occurred in my minuscule nook of this vast created universe is unremarkable compared to the happenings in the world. However, for me creatively, there is a parallel inward journey that threads through losses and triumphs and weaves in to the music I create and share. That connection is what I believe is the proper subject for these notes. To business.
Artistic Journey
I have been navigating a material transition in the composition of my activities since the end of 2024 when I said a potentially permanent farewell to my work in technology. I cannot say with certainty as nothing future is certain, but I have crossed a threshold from a place where that work was generously remunerative and fulfilling to a place where it holds no appeal for me any longer. Into the vacancy it leaves have entered new opportunities to pursue beauty in concert with my Christian faith. The technical, corporate world was indifferent and sometime hostile to one or both of those loves and I am now afforded a new way to pursue them both without restraint. I am on the doorstep of a new career leading a non-profit I co-founded with my friend and collaborator Benjamin Harding, whose fine piano playing you will hear on many of my albums. The Kalos Arts Foundation has a Substack of its own where I have been sharing some of the ideas that fuse my passion for faith and music:
It was in October of last year that I began to experience a profound change in how I approached life. I have been on a journey from experiencing the world, my faith, and my place in both largely as one of a series of propositions in my mind and neglecting the reality of what it is to be an embodied soul. Perhaps it is the natural embrace of mysticism that happens in people as they age, but that doesn’t make it any less a profoundly broadening aperture onto what is True. My faith, my reading (on the topic of Re-enchantment) and my understanding of the role of beauty in a life fully lived have animated my musical pursuit in way that is nothing short of transformational for my whole person. I have awoken from a long rationalist slumber to marvel at a cosmos and creation that is utterly baffling, mysterious, grand, and unknowable. I could continue to unwittingly fade into a disenchanted illusion in the midst of a powerfully enchanted world and nurse my decline with the rage-fountain that our internet technologies have become; but, by God’s grace I will not. I am in a new moment of savoring life fully, richly, and with my whole person. This is happening across the entire spectrum of my activities, but especially so in my creative work. One of my earliest steps on this road is to share my ‘priors’ as a part of my ongoing artistic dialog (monologue?) with all of you who may have an interest. This email is that act.
Works
Late last year, I was pleased to receive a commission to create a new work for concert band for the Longmont Concert Band. Their director, Fransicso Borja, and I spoke about what he wanted and I found him an energetic and adventurous artist interested in presenting works from our time. I was all too happy to oblige! The work, tentatively titled Re-Enchantment, is now complete in its first draft but I will take my time to refine spots as it is not slated for delivery until May. I work very quickly and my pieces tend to be woven from a single thread from beginning to end once the opening music presents in my imagination. It’s a bit cliched, but the stories of how Michelangelo ‘uncovered’ the sculpture that lay waiting to be revealed is a bit like my process. Until I hear the music fully formed starting in my minds-ear, I cannot start the work. Once it happens, the work follows quickly. I write the work directly into parts and do not start from a piano piece as many other composers do. I determined that for me, as a pianist, I already tend toward very intricate and pianistic writing and my orchestrations are improved when I conceive the music fully clothed in orchestral timbres from the outset. It is another reason my work can move quickly.
A side note, for any musicians out there who were long-time Finale users (I started on it in 1991), I have been working through the difficult journey of moving to Dorico Pro. It was rocky at first as 30 years of keyboard shortcuts and well-trod drop-down menus wore deep ruts into this aging soil. However, having now written a nearly 8-minute band piece with over 30 independent staves for a full complement of symphonic winds, percussion, and harp, I have touched many of the notational problems that I need to solve and have become almost as adept in Dorico as I was in Finale. A win for sure.
I have some other new works underway but chief among them is a collaboration on a new musical. I have always hoped to create works for stage in my life and I am determined to create my first draft by the end of 2025. I will share more about this evolving project in a future note. It will be set in recent historical events and I am not yet sure how the music will adapt as the script is still being created (not by me!).
I am open to create new works on commission and as I am now more fully dependent upon music-making, I would welcome interest or conversations about creating new works.
Releases
Symphony no. 1
In my last note, I shared some of my big release milestones in Q4. I am pleased to share that my Symphony had a strong launch on streaming platforms and has received some journalist attention. Of particular satisfaction were reviews in BBC and mention in classical media. In no way is it some blockbuster, runaway ‘hit’, but it is not that type of music. My hope is that people continue to encounter it in deep and focused ways as a form of conversation together about the societal journey we shared through the COVID pandemic and our collective response. If you haven’t had a chance to hear it, you can do so through the album page which will direct you to your platform of preference. Please drop me a note if you have thoughts or feedback on the piece.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
I also released this roughly one year ago. I mentioned in my last email the fleeting chance this had of award consideration and alas it was as fleeting as I suspected. Nevertheless, this work for orchestra and narrator continues to have strong streaming for a few of the tracks and I am working with my record label to produce a special set of video projections to accompany live performance. We will be reaching out to artistic directors and orchestras around the world to pursue performances of this multi-media, immersive work. It’s cinematic, but not a film score. I have likened the work to be a concerto for narrator and orchestra. The projections will be subtly kinetic and representational as they are based upon engraving by Gustave Dore, but they are not narrative in a cinematic sense so I hope that it provides audience context for a focus on the words and music more fully.
Business
As I have wrestled through my last two decades of creating, recording, and sharing new music, I have learned much about the economics of music creation: none of encouraging. In general, the technology machine has commoditized and further reduced the ways for music creators to be paid for their work. I don’t want to dive into a screed about the state of things, they are what we collectively have decided they should be. However, as a person who creates musical art works of particular (peculiar?) appeal, I am seriously considering how to best produce my work in a way that is sustainable and offers genuine supporters of my work way to help me create it. You might believe (as did I) that streaming platforms are a way for artists to be heard and compensated. They are not, and increasingly less likely to be so in the future. I have been reading Ted Gioia on his Substack and he has helped me understand this more clearly:
In this note, he explains how a releasing artist makes $3.41 for every 1,000 streams. If you have 1M streams in a year, you make all of $3,410. The ‘scale model’ is not one that will sustain, or frankly artistically reward me. So, I am considering if perhaps moving my released material to Substack might be a wiser move. I am considering introducing a subscription approach that would allow me to create posts like this for paid subscribers wherein each post is a recording along with a discussion of the work so that I can help inform and enrich the encounter with the music. Perhaps I do not have supporters and appreciators for whom this is appealing, but I know that effectively giving my music away for free to multi-billion $ tech platform companies to use to make themselves money is not working. I welcome any thoughts, comments, tough love that you may want to share as I consider how to navigate my passage into Act 3 of my life with music, Christ, and you as my companions.
If you read this far, thank you for your interest and support. I genuine hope this finds you well and thriving in body, mind, and soul.
-Gustav