Ep. 60: Dan Forrest: Composing and Marketing Major Works

Dan Forrest, welcome to the show.

How are you doing?

I’m great.

Thanks for having me here, Garrett.

Why don’t you just introduce yourself really briefly to our listeners, because I know you wear a lot of hats.

Yeah.

The hats that I wear are primarily a composer of music for chorus, and or piano, and or orchestra, and or a lot of things.

I also work at Beckenhorst Press, a choral music publisher as vice president of publications and editor there.

I also run choral workshops for the John Nusbeck Foundation, where we teach aspiring choral composers and run mentorships for hand-chosen people with potential and do cool things along those fronts.

I serve as artist in residence at my church here in Greenville, South Carolina.

And I also have personally come off a role at ACDA, chairing the National Committee for Composition, and I teach a little bit over at Furman University, which is here in town as well.

It wasn’t very short.

Well, that mix of skills and that mix of job descriptions, it makes you sort of the perfect guest for this show because, you know, our listeners are both composers, but they’re also people who work in publishing.

And we’ve talked a lot on the show about, you know, pros and cons of self-publishing versus working with a publisher.

And how do you work with a publisher?

And basically all this stuff that they don’t teach you in music school that you need to know.

And you’re someone that’s been very outspoken about those issues, you know, publishing articles on, I think you did one, how to do your taxes as a composer, you know, just things like that, like very practical things that don’t always get thought of.

But I wanted to start today by talking about just the process for creating and marketing major works or large scale works.

Because it’s something you’ve made a name doing certainly.

I mean, back in the day, right?

That was that was everything, right?

For the for the masters, you know, for Bach and Beethoven and all those guys, like major works were in many ways the thing they’re known for.

Nowadays, I feel like most of the advice that I hear is, you know, keep it short, keep it accessible, you know, like it’s almost limiting in scope, right?

What you hear advised to composers today.

And so I just wanted to start by asking you, like, how does a large scale work fit into a composer’s career?

At what point should they be writing one?

Or is it only certain types of composers that should be doing it?

Like, how do you see that in sort of the bigger picture of a composer’s career?

Yeah, you were saying those things that composers are told, like, keep it short and they’re not wrong.

The bunny line is if you’re tempted to write a novel, the best advice we have for you is go into a dark room, lie down, take to aspirin and wait for the urge to pass.

And then maybe write a little short story or something.

It’s so much more of an investment.

Yeah, the major work thing is interesting.

My first really extended work was my doctoral dissertation.

And I remember being determined that I was going to be the one that wrote a doctoral dissertation that didn’t just sit on the shelf and gather dust as some academic exercise, but that it was going to be performed.

I was going to write something that people would be interested in and want to use, even though it jumps through the academic hoops, and it sits on a shelf and collects dust.

So you can’t just manufacture widespread appeal and performances and interest and that kind of stuff.

It takes a really specific and unique combination of elements, I think, to be successful with larger works like that.

And that’s why so many people do steer composers away from that.

I don’t think a major work is a great place to start.

Should we define, maybe, what we’re talking about?

I mean, is a major work just something that’s really long, or in your mind, is it something more specific?

People can use the term however they want.

Yeah, I mean, a major work could be just like a single movement, 15-minute thing that’s just like not your average three to five minute little choral miniature, you know.

I tend to use that term to mean more like a multi-movement work, probably with larger accompaniment forces, some overlap there probably with oratorio, probably not opera because of the dramatic and staging elements.

But yeah, kind of oratorio-ish type things is kind of more what I’m thinking about.

From a compositional perspective, the scale, I mean, all of music is just trying to unfold sound over time.

Our canvas is not limited by the number of inches on the side of the canvas.

Our art is limited by time.

Where does the downbeat happen and where does the cutoff and the final reverb tail happen?

And then we’re done.

And how do we get from that initial point to that final point in a way that engaged the listener and kept their attention and provided enough diversity so that they stuck with us, but enough repetition and unity so they didn’t feel like it was just all random.

And I mean, just accomplishing those things and so much more that we could talk about just over the course of a three and a half minute piece, like that is a significant accomplishment.

If you can keep somebody’s attention for 200 seconds like that or five minutes or whatever, if that art unfolds in such a way that it feels balanced and it has flow and it has momentum and rise and fall and all the things that a novel has to do with words, we’re just doing it with sounds.

It’s still the same processes.

So I think most people need to spend more time, probably really working out how a three and a half minute piece works like that before they start tackling a seven minute piece or a 10 or 12 minute piece.

And how many themes are you going to have?

Because now it’s probably not monothematic or stanzaic.

Now we have like multiple things that we’re kind of juggling, and how do we bring it back enough but not too much?

And then once you get to writing multi-movement works, now those same processes have to happen both within movements and between movements.

And there’s this macro way that you have to step back and say, okay, how does this movement have momentum and flow and balance and design and interest and unity and diversity and all that stuff?

But then how does my combination of movements one and two do that?

Or movements one through five or movements one through 12 or something?

So as it unfolds like that, if you haven’t really worked out that sense of intuition and finding deeply compelling ideas and presenting them in some kind of way that feels just absolutely inevitable and organic, if you haven’t worked that all out on a four-minute scale, it’s not going to go well when you try to work it out on a 12-minute scale or a 16-minute scale.

So I think it’s a good place to start on the smaller things from the compositional angle.

The long answer, sorry.

I think it’s also important on the publishing level because it’s so much more difficult as a publisher to mark a piece by a brand new composer with a name that nobody has really heard of before.

You have to earn trust, I think.

I don’t want to overstate that, but I think there’s something to that, to earning trust with conductors.

If you want to say your market, if you want to use marketing terms like that, the people who might be interested in your product.

I think there’s a trust that has to be built there before they’re going to be willing to bite off something that big.

So would you say that it’s, I don’t know, this sounds wrong, but would you say it’s kind of a status thing, like you have to be an established composer before people are going to take interest in a larger work like that?

Or is it more of just practicality that like there’s name recognition?

So I don’t know.

I totally get what you’re saying, because the words coming out of my mouth sound like you have to have some status.

I have status.

That’s why I get to write these big things.

And you, little person, do not have status.

And that’s why that is the last thing I want to communicate.

And it’s so frustrating if you like get pigeonholed, like you don’t have the status.

You don’t have your composer card yet or something.

I mean, certainly from a publisher’s standpoint, though, like they’re not going to put the effort into marketing an hour long work for a composer who doesn’t have any name recognition.

Right.

I mean, I think that’s fair to say.

I would disagree with that.

Yeah, absolutely.

As a publisher, I absolutely would if that composer sent me a piece that was so utterly gripping and compelling that the moment people heard it from the initial downbeat to the final cutoff, they were just enthralled and couldn’t think about anything else.

And that music haunted them for days.

I don’t care what your name is.

Like, absolutely will publish that.

So I think it’s more than just the name recognition there.

Is it harder to get choral directors to consider that piece?

Yes.

When if they’re just like looking at the cover.

Like, who’s this name?

Like, are you sure?

Like, do I really want?

But if you the best way to sell music is to write great music.

And if you’ve written something that is just like, it’s your breakout piece and it’s phenomenal, then who cares about name recognition?

Just write the great piece and get it out there.

It’s just that that doesn’t happen very often because people need to kind of cut their teeth, like I said, on those smaller scale projects before they’re really prepared to do great things on the big scale, I think.

Yeah.

I mean, what’s your advice for getting people to actually listen to your music?

Because like you say, if people hear it, then they’re able to judge the work itself and not just, do I recognize this name on the cover?

A few things.

There’s so much music out there now, and especially with the rise of self-publishing, you know, if you want to go hop on My Score, I mean, you could spend the rest of your life probably, probably literally listening to all these pieces by people that are so eager to want you to hear their music.

You know, there’s just so much available.

The Internet has has given everybody a voice in a beautiful way, but it’s also just like flooded the system, you know, with with so much and like what rises to the top there.

That’s really difficult.

I think you’ve probably heard me say elsewhere before, I really still believe in traditional publishing for the vetting process that happens there.

And I realize there’s a fine line between vetting and gatekeeping.

And, you know, nobody wants to be a gatekeeper.

That’s not cool.

And, you know, push down people so they can’t rise.

That’s awful.

And nobody wants to do that.

But there is a sense in which a good choral publisher knows what their market is really going to get interested in.

So I think writing things that are publishable in that way, like if it comes out, I can just speak for Beckenhorst.

You know, if we’re going to put our stamp of approval on it, it means that we believe this is really worth hearing.

And I think we’ve built trust with the people that buy music from us so that they say, oh, okay, if they’re willing to put their stamp on it, then maybe I should take a listen.

I think getting a great recording can be really helpful on those fronts, too.

But a great recording of a more mediocre-ish kind of piece is never going to really get somewhere.

And again, I’ll just circle back to that phrase, the best way to get people to hear your music is to write great music that just stands out.

And that’s the kind of stuff that we’re looking to publish, like the top 0.001% of what came out that really is worth, that really stands out, head and shoulders above the rest, and grabs your attention.

And it’s that kind of stuff that helps it get heard.

You’ll notice that my answer has very little there to do with social media strategy or working the algorithm.

That just kind of grosses me out.

I want to focus on quality product more than marketing tricks and schemes and trying to work the system in some way.

Just write the very best music that you can.

If you write great music, I think it gets out there.

Well, and the term gatekeeper has a lot of negative connotations for very good reasons.

But I do think that there is more and more a positive role that gatekeepers, or if you want to call them influencers or something else, I think there is a greater role that I see those types of people or organizations playing in the industry.

Because like you said, there’s so much music out there, and people are not able to sort through it all themselves.

And so a lot of times they do outsource that vetting process to others, whether it’s a publisher or even just things like editors’ choice lists or festival lists or other recommendations that come from some of these organizations.

That seems to be where a lot of the energy is happening right now.

People that have influence saying, these works are worth your attention, right?

Yeah, right.

That could be conductors who are doing that, like with a publishing series or just a conductor who’s, this is what I chose to program.

That catches people’s eye for sure.

You mentioned the whole editors’ choice thing from JW Pepper.

And it’s a helpful process that they do there in terms of, here’s the stuff that rises to the top.

Maybe you want to consider this even more than other things.

On the other hand, I think that if publishers were doing that job, then maybe JW Pepper wouldn’t have to so much, you know?

Like, our goal with our publications is that we want the whole thing to be editors’ choice, you know?

We don’t want to put out something that wouldn’t rise to the top in that regard.

And we’ve had, like, I sound a little braggadocious, but at Beckenhorst, we’ve had entire releases where everything that we sent them got editors’ choice.

That’s our goal.

Like, all of this should rise to the top.

And we want to be very specific about that.

I realize there are other publishing goals, too, where people might just be trying to fill a particular niche or something, and it might not always rise to that level, but they have a specific purpose for why this piece needs to be out there.

That’s fine.

I’m not trying to be critical, but I do, I think it would be great if more of that vetting process, I think vetting is a better term than gatekeeping, if more of that vetting happened at the publisher level, and then JW Pepper wouldn’t maybe have to do as much of that.

That’s my unsolicited opinion, sorry.

Well, no, I mean, but for composers trying to get their works heard, it feels like an obstacle because you have to get your music heard by those people doing the vetting, and then if they, for whatever reason, pass on something, you kind of feel like, well, I don’t know what to do with this now.

Like you said, writing great music is the first thing, and then I would say the second thing is just getting anyone to perform it is the second thing.

Because the number one thing that I hear from directors when I talk to them is, where do you find your music?

They look at what other people are programming.

And there’s the reputation of their colleagues, and there’s also just like the videos that come from that.

And I think a lot of music gets found on YouTube because people can watch performances.

And so the social media algorithms are ikky, but sometimes they can really play a role, I think.

They do, yeah.

And I have mixed feelings about that.

Maybe this is me being consistent.

I hope it is.

In one sense, it’s helpful.

Like this is what people really wanted to hear.

This is what stands out.

This is probably what you’re going to want to hear too.

On the other hand, I’m not sure how much that helps new music.

Because the rich pieces get richer.

And there might be other things that maybe deserve more hearing, but we didn’t already have 10 conductors performing this, so it’s not going to get 10 more.

And I know it’s so much more work, and there’s so much that they’re trying to choose from.

It’s so much more efficient to look at, what did other people choose?

And I can just follow in their wake.

But I like to encourage conductors where they can.

And even if it’s just like 10% of the programming, like look for something that other people aren’t doing.

Look for something that maybe deserves to be heard a little more, and maybe you’re the first person to do this, and other people will follow you instead of you always just following others.

Maybe that’s idealistic.

I don’t know.

But I hate to see just the same pieces get performed in this echo chamber, as opposed to like some other deserving pieces be heard.

If I can go back to the other thing you said about like the gatekeeping and like it’s frustrating as a composer, you want your music to be heard, but then the publisher says no.

I mean, that’s how I entered this whole business was as a pianist who wanted to write music for an instrument that could actually sustain and crescendo instead of diminuendo and decay.

So it got me into choir instead of just pressing down piano keys that die, the box of decrescendos.

And I got a whole bunch of rejection letters.

And most of my submissions were being sent to Craig Courtney, Beck and Forrest, because my teacher had published there.

And she was like, yeah, you should, I think this might work.

And the thing of it is Craig never just wrote me a rejection letter that said like, thanks, but no thanks, bye.

Like because he saw some potential, he was always like giving little input, like here’s why this doesn’t quite work for us.

Here’s what might help tip this in a new direction.

And so to this, that’s what John Nesbeck did with him.

That’s what he did with me.

And that’s what I continue to do with all the composers that submit to Beck and Horst.

We’re constantly trying to help steer them and not just say like, nope, bye.

But especially like the composers where I can see there’s potential here.

Like there might be a meeting of the minds somewhere down the road.

Our rejection letters, we are always trying to give a little bit of input.

We have to be careful that we don’t end up, like we don’t want to give so much input that we’re fixing the piece for some other publisher.

Here’s how this could be much better.

And now somebody else is going to benefit from what we offered.

So like we do kind of have to draw a line and we can’t just give like a, an email composition lesson for every submission.

But we really, and I say we, because I have an assistant now, which is really good, but we work really tightly together to, to try to do those same kinds of things so that composers know like, here’s why this doesn’t work.

Here’s where maybe you can improve and here are some paths for you.

We’ll even recommend other publishers sometimes, like this doesn’t quite work for us, but this might work for so and so, you know?

And we never say that unless we really meet it.

It’s never just to like get off my back excuse.

Like if I really think it could work, I’ll be like, yeah, why don’t you send that over here?

See if that could.

So I mean, I got my start with dozens of rejection letters too.

So I completely understand that vibe and the frustration of nobody wants my music and is this worth continuing?

But yeah, I try to like rise the tide of all of the choral composers that submit to us and help steer and encourage and build them, not just shoot them away.

No, absolutely.

And you’ve definitely, I think more than most been outspoken about needs of composers.

And I really appreciate that.

To get deep and philosophical for a minute.

Yeah, you mentioned, obviously, you know, the amount of music out there is just staggering.

It’s only going to get bigger.

AI or not, that’s only going to keep growing.

Do you think there is a limit of how much music our industry can sustain?

I mean, are we going to reach a point where there’s just literally too much?

How many pieces do you put out a year with Beckenhorst?

30 to 40.

So, I’m assuming that number comes from some level of market research, looking at sales, looking at data, and seeing what gets used in a year.

Do you think there would be a big difference if you put out 50 in a year?

Like, if you just had an amazing crop of submissions and they were all dynamite, do you think you would sell less for having published more music?

Or do you think if it was all up to that amazing standard, do you think it would still do just as well?

Yeah, I would answer the question very differently if you’re talking about just Beckenhorst versus everything that’s available anywhere.

For Beckenhorst, if we truly had 50 pieces that were really deeply compelling, we would go higher.

Like, this last release, I think we had 21 titles, or 21 things that are coming out, 21 new SKUs, because there was just a lot of good stuff that we’re excited about.

So here it comes.

I do think there is some point at which we saturate our particular market segment.

Like, we just recorded Christmas music, for instance, a couple of weeks ago.

I’m in the middle of mixing it now.

And I held off on one or two Christmas pieces and pushed them off a year because we already have a couple of pieces in kind of a similar vibe.

I mean, that’s a very generic kind of word.

It’s maybe if they’re both arrangements of traditional, familiar carols, and they’re kind of ethereal, and they both have violin or something, and they both kind of start high and work low.

I mean, I’m just making something up.

But I feel like some conductor is going to look at that, probably choose one or the other, not both.

We could potentially, as a publisher, make a little more money if the sum total of that release, if we put out that second piece, and it sells an extra 2000 copies or something.

But that’s not the best interest of the composer.

Because we’re making them compete with something that’s just not a good.

So I would rather wait, hold off, and try to do right by that composer so they can really be heard.

So I’m always weighing and negotiating what goes within a release, so that we’re not being a little bit redundant and watering down our sales.

And I also would never just tack something in if we can’t sell.

I mean, our goal is to sell 5,000 at least the first year and at least 10,000 lifetime.

If I don’t feel it can do that, we say no to it.

Which is tough because there are pieces that come in the submissions inbox that we’re like, yeah, we could probably sell 2,000 of these at the first year and maybe 5,000 lifetime.

But we’re aiming for a higher threshold than that.

So I like your piece.

It’s got a lot going for it.

But sorry, no.

But that helps make sure that the few things that we do put out, hopefully really get the attention they deserve.

I think if you extrapolate that out to the whole market, I think we’re far past the point at which we’re offering more music than can be performed in a year.

There’s just so much out there.

And because, I mean, the beauty of the self-publishing thing is that anybody can hang out their shingle and put it out on the internet and try to get heard.

The drawback is that it’s just, there’s so much to wade through that the vetting has become, like you’ve said, I think more important so we can try to pick through all that and find the best things that are really worth performing.

Well, and as you mentioned, you’ve been outspoken in support of traditional publishing, but you’ve also made the decision to self-publish your concert music.

So could you talk a little bit about that decision and why you follow a split business model?

Yeah.

I have been outspoken about the benefits that I think exists for traditional publishing because, because you’re competing with so many other things, the market is so flooded.

I don’t know that it’s in the best interest of most composers to try to self-publish and then go through all that work and then sell 10 copies or 30 copies or I don’t even know, whatever.

We’re just throwing on random numbers.

I think those energies might be better put into developing their creative and crafting skills such that they could try to get over the bar of a publisher’s vetting and really do a lot better.

And I realized that now I sound like a gatekeeper again.

But I feel like it’s in both the composer’s best interest and choral music’s best interest and the conductor’s best interest for more energy to go into that than just like, oh, now we have 300,000 new pieces this year, unlike the 200,000 new ones that we had last year or whatever.

So, yeah, that’s that’s just kind of how I feel about it.

I do think self-publishing has its its benefit for certain people in certain situations.

And I got to the point where I felt like it was the best option for me for my concert music.

Yeah, I felt like I had an audience and I had a connection to people that were going to be looking for this.

And if I have a voice compositionally that is saying things that people want to hear and a way to get them to hear it, that question that you asked earlier, then, yeah, maybe my best bet is to just kind of retain control of those things and raise my profit margins instead of paying a publisher to do things for me that I may be able to do pretty successfully on my own.

That kind of brings us back full circle to the large scale works because at least recently, it feels like that’s been a lot of where your creative attention has been focused.

Yeah.

Yeah.

My first two large works that were successful, unlike my dissertation, gathers dust on a shelf over there.

Actually, that’s not fair.

Someone needs to perform this.

Somebody listening, you have a choir, go reach out, let’s get this thing out there.

I’m not sure I would recommend it, honestly.

It’s pretty thorny in places.

The last two movements, I made a little prelude and fugue out of them, basically.

And that gets some performances.

So I’m happy with that.

That’s fine.

That’s all of us.

All right.

Stand down.

Stand down, everyone.

I’m trying to not drag people into something that they’re going to be like, oh, I don’t think I trust Dan anymore.

No.

So my Requiem and Ubalatedeo were published with Hinshaw.

Rudder was publishing there at the Times.

That was a really big draw, like be in the same catalog, you know, that kind of thing.

And Hinshaw had a really good connection to that kind of market.

And they were very successful with connecting those two pieces to choral directors all over the world.

Always be really thankful for Roberta Whittington, who helped with that and kind of gave me, took a chance on a large work like that.

But yeah, at that point, some things changed at Hinshaw, and I had been eyeing self-publishing for quite a while, and I thought, all right, this is the time to do it.

So I’ve self-published three large pieces now, Luke’s and The Breath of Life, and then the new creation oratoria that just came out.

And I really like being able to control, especially like customer experience, instead of having to send somebody like, well, here’s the customer service address.

I’m not sure what that policy will be.

I’m not sure if they’re in right now.

It’s just a lot of, I really like trying to take care of choral conductors and give them a really positive experience.

And if this goes poorly, now it’s on me.

It’s nobody else’s fault.

But I can just say, this is how I want to handle this.

And I want to take good care of that person.

I want to, let’s rush that order.

Let’s not charge for this thing.

It just gives me freedom to do a lot of things that I hope can raise the bar for oral music purchasing experience.

Is there a life cycle to these large-scale works?

You talked about a successful piece at Beckenhorst will sell 10,000 copies, right?

Is a large-scale work different because it attracts a different type of performer?

I mean, is it more long-lasting because it’s more significant, would you say?

Yeah.

I think the clearest distinction I can make is not quite between a church anthem and a major work, but more between church market and concert market.

I think church market, traditionally, although this is changing, and I’m really glad, traditionally, church market has this huge spike at the beginning.

Second year, still pretty decent, maybe half of that, and then it tends to taper off.

Of course, there’s a million exceptions and outliers to that trend, but that’s kind of the way it’s traditionally been.

And I hate that because it treats music as disposable.

You know, like, oh, here’s the new thing for this year, and then, well, what’s new for next year?

And then what it generates is another piece that sounds just the exact same.

I always make fun of, like, the Palm Sunday piece with an E minor with boom chuck accompaniment and tambourine.

Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop.

You know, like, can he just get cranked out year after year with basically the same text and the same mood and the same feel and…

You know what I’m going to send you now?

I’m going to send you a Palm Sunday song and F minor.

It’s in.

We want that.

We’re going to blow people’s minds here.

And so for the last stanza, then, your predictable half step modulation will go to F sharp minor, right?

That’s what we’re going to do.

And it’s not going to go well.

No.

So there is that trend, and I don’t like it because it just tempts composers to just keep cranking out the same sort of piece and not really find a new idea for the next piece, because the market just demands it.

I mean, that’s the thing I find most enviable about what you get to do and just write these big long works is, you have a lot more creative opportunity with that.

You have 45 minutes to do all this stuff, and so you can reach for different ideas that you wouldn’t necessarily be able to throw into a two and a half minute accessible concert piece.

Yeah.

I mean, it’s a privilege and a responsibility.

You have this much larger blank slate to fill, but then you have to fill it well.

So traditionally, that church piece spikes and then tapers off.

Concert music can be any number of graph shapes.

Sometimes it’s a slow start and gradually gets discovered and then takes off.

Sometimes it has a decent spurt at the beginning and then tapers off, but then it gets a big performance somewhere and people hear about it, and then everybody follows that conductor and program what they can, or a recording happens on a major label and now suddenly a whole bunch of people.

So that shape of the graph can change drastically in concert music more than in church, which is, I’m afraid, a little more market driven sometimes.

The joy of what I get to do is that I operate in a space between those two.

So I’ve had church pieces that just sold pretty well their first year and then just kept pretty well another 5,000 copies, another 5,000, another 5,000.

So they blur the lines between those common graph shapes.

I haven’t had as much of that tail off from the market on some of my church pieces that I’m thankful for.

As far as major works, yeah, I mean, those vary too.

It really is just more a subset of concert, I think.

The Requiem was a little slow getting out there.

It was my first major work.

The premiere wasn’t necessarily widely heard, but then the publisher Hinshaw programmed it on their big celebration concert that they did every year.

And that was the point at which tons of people heard it, and it just snowballed from there.

So that was like a ramp up on that one.

Yubilate Deo has been more of just like the steady, like it just keeps going.

The Breath of Life, the fourth major work that I wrote, is just much more challenging, and it came out right before COVID, which was not a good time to sell choral music.

So that has actually languished, frankly.

Like it’s not all just peaches and cream for me.

Okay, composers, you can buy that one.

Or you can buy that one.

That one has been very, very slow to take off.

But actually, it’s like starting to get some traction now kind of out of the blue.

Like I’ve seen a marked increase in the number of rentals that are going out and scores being sold.

So yeah, maybe it’s just finding the right time and that’s hitting the market well.

So I do hope that like these major works just last, that they have some staying power.

There’s no guarantee that it’s going to just because it’s big.

You know, just because the score is thick doesn’t mean it’s great.

You know, it still needs the same strength of idea underneath it.

And the compelling aspect to the musical content, where people are just gripped by it and have to hear it and have to get to the end and then want to hear it again, want to perform it again.

And that’s what makes it successful.

But if it’s doing those things, then yeah, I hope it has a significant lifespan that’s proportionate to the amount of work that went into making it.

Well, and that’s a good point, because there is sort of an opportunity cost to writing a large work such as that.

Because you’re not able to write as many smaller works while you’re cranking that out.

And so if it doesn’t go well, I mean, it’s a risk reward thing, I assume, right?

That the payoff is great if you write something that really resonates with people.

But there’s always kind of that risk.

I mean, there’s always that risk there, but there’s bigger consequences if it’s a large scale work, I would assume.

Absolutely.

Yeah, I don’t know how many years I’m going to have to write music, if it’s 50, or just choose a nice round number.

The Requiem.

At least for 75.

Yeah, that sounds good to me.

The Requiem took like a year of my life to write, so that’s 2% of my output.

There’s a cap on this.

There’s not this indefinite.

There’s going to be an end date on Dan writing music, so 2% of that is the Requiem, like 3 or 4% is Ubalata Deo.

Creation took me two years to write the whole thing, and do all the versions, and do all the editing, and just from start to finish.

So, I mean, that’s a chunk of my output that I invested in that, and what is the return going to be?

Is it going to be one performance, and then nobody’s going to do it, because it’s just too much to bite off and chew?

Is it going to be one performance, and then just a smattering of others here and there, and then it just kind of gradually dwindles, and nobody really cares anymore?

Yeah, I absolutely think in terms of investment cost and cost versus benefit, and how much time do I have, and how do I want to steward it?

Yeah, those are big questions, I think, to ponder career-wise.

I have never thought about it in that light before.

That’s kind of morbid.

It’s sobering.

Yeah, I mean, I hope it’s not too dark.

You don’t get to write music for the next 150 years.

It also affects what texts I’m going to choose.

I don’t have time to set decent texts or mediocre texts, or texts that maybe I care about.

You know, like, I really want to write things that are worth saying that are going to be good stewardship of my time, my energy and my gifts, what I can say to people.

So does your compositional process change for a larger work?

Or is it is it really just the way you develop the ideas, but your process for creating the ideas is the same?

Yeah, the major works, there’s so many angles and thoughts to organize in the process of that.

So I do a ton of journaling in like a notes app.

So I have these like massive notes for any of my major, and I save them all.

Like I have all those.

You can kind of trace through and see like the ideas that got rejected and different.

That would be a fun score study.

Put those out.

Not a score, it’s just this like epic length note, and you can see what I crossed off.

And like better ideas go bold or larger font, and ideas that I’m leaning away from go smaller, or get the strikethrough font.

So when you say idea, are you talking about like oboe playing whole notes, or are you still more big picture at that point?

It’s all of the above.

Yeah, I have this little talk that I do where basically, I believe that the compositional process is not from small to big or from big to small, but working on both ends until they meet in the middle.

And like figuring out the little ideas, but they have to make sense in terms of the big picture blueprint, and then adjusting the big picture blueprint, but you’re going to have to make sure you can find the little ideas to build those big structures, you know?

And I think it’s kind of a slow magnetic pull towards the middle, where eventually things all line up and lock into place.

Starting out on the edges of that is like my least favorite part of composing, because I don’t know where I’m going, like what ideas do I need?

What am I trying to build?

I don’t know.

Well, let’s figure out what I’m going to try to build.

But how do I build it if I don’t have the materials yet to build?

You know, it’s a self-defeating process.

It’s more to the middle where I really like composing, because those, the big and the small, are working together.

So my notes are on all those levels all at once.

And sometimes I keep separate notes.

I’ll keep one note for possible texts or themes or narrative flow.

And like, what order could these ideas come in?

I’ll keep one for like orchestration and scoring ideas.

And then I’ll keep one for like each movement in terms of like the phrase structure and kind of where it’s going to go and how many themes.

And what sections should I repeat?

And what gets too long and whatever?

Yeah, it’s kind of a big mess.

But eventually I just sort through all that stuff until it works.

And then, of course, I’m writing music too in the score.

I do a lot of sketching.

And like in finale, I use the different layers to denote the priority of how good my ideas are.

Interesting.

So anything in layer one is something that I really think I’m going to keep.

When something gets demoted to layer two, it turns red.

That means like, I’m not ready to throw you out yet, but I’m I’m not sure you belong here.

Layer three is like, yeah, it’s probably bye bye.

Yeah, probably not worth paying attention to in the event that anything makes it to layer four.

It’s usually like, yeah, you don’t have a chance.

But I guess I just didn’t hit delete yet.

But that kind of helps me see like what, what is really worth keeping and what’s not.

It would almost be like Beethoven in his, his manuscript notebooks where he’s just scratching out stuff.

For me, it’s like instead of scratching it out, I just demote it by layers.

And then eventually I have this, I put a double bar at the end of my file and then I add on like 300 bars past the double bar and that’s where the ideas go to die.

But they don’t even belong in the score anymore, but I’m like, in case I ever want to return to this, I just copy and paste it into that graveyard that lives at the end of my file.

And I don’t know that I’ve ever pulled anything back from the graveyard.

Once it goes there, I’m like, yeah, it’s not happening.

But it just helps me kind of organize my ideas and thoughts and stratify them and prioritize them without feeling like I might have discarded something I should have kept.

So yeah, somewhere between all of those big long notes app notes and then all of my different layers in my finale files, something starts to emerge.

Then when it starts emerging, then I can actually make the score look good.

And that’s really satisfying instead of this big mess.

That all makes a ton of sense.

And I think it’s a really fascinating look at it because I think most people just delete stuff if they don’t like it.

But in a work like this, where you have so much time, how do you decide if something’s good enough to keep or not?

Yeah.

The word compelling is one that I use a lot.

I mean, is it a good, better, best thing?

Do you just keep it until you find something else?

Do you use placeholders when you’re writing?

Or is that not the way this works?

No.

I wouldn’t describe what I do that way.

An idea just has to spark joy.

To borrow a phrase from Marie Kondo.

It has to have some magic about it, where it sticks with me, and I feel like it’s speaking, and it just has this glow about it in my mind, that is not just the same as any other improvisation or something that I’d make up in five minutes, but it just feels like something special.

There’s something going on there.

It’s a little bit alive.

The idea has some life in it.

Sometimes I might say it feels like the whole is more than the sum of the parts.

So there’s a little bit of magic about it that I can’t fully explain, but it just feels like a really good idea.

And it excites me.

Honestly, at the most basic level, it’s the kind of idea that I hear, and I’m like, oh, that’s cool.

I want to mess with that more.

Most of the ideas that I come up with, I audio them or play them or whatever, and I think, well, that’s dumb.

Or it sounds like 18 other things that have already been written, or it sounds like what I was listening to yesterday, or I have very few good ideas.

Most of what I come up with is very dumb.

But yeah, when those ideas that are worth keeping show up, I’m like, oh, what’s that?

And then I really want to explore that because it’s sparking joy.

So yeah, I’ve constantly got that kind of evaluation meter going on.

Sort of like, does this cross some threshold where it’s really good?

I’ll go for many days in a row, sometimes weeks in a row, probably without coming up with an idea that’s actually worth keeping.

But then when I find the right idea, it usually goes quickly.

I think that’s important to emphasize because I think sometimes musicians have this image of like what inspiration looks like, inspiration and it’s, I think sometimes there’s this image of the composer just like waking up in the middle of the night, I know exactly what to do and I have to run to the piano, but and it all just comes pouring out of me and this stroke of genius.

For those of you listening to the podcast, please hear my eye roll.

I mean, that’s not how it goes.

It’s just not.

I mean, so I just think, I think that’s important for people to realize that it’s a lot of trial, at least for me, it’s a lot of trial and error.

If not that, like you said, sort of editing yourself and having the discipline to put that filter on things.

Absolutely.

I think every composer has to figure out where they are on the spectrum of self-confidence.

And there are some composers that are too critical of themselves, like their self-confidence is low.

And so they come up with ideas that might actually be worth exploring, but they’re so in pursuit of something better that they don’t even recognize when they have something good going on.

And they need to be a little more like courageous and like hold on to that idea and try it.

And you might have something good there.

These composers are the exception, not the norm, I think.

I think most composers struggle on the opposite side of just being a little too in love because they just finally found an idea.

And like, I finally got, I know that feeling, I get it.

Like, I finally found something after these many days or weeks of looking for something.

I’m going to go with it.

But is it actually great?

And like that self-evaluation process of self-editing is another way to say it.

Of is this idea really worth keeping or not?

I think a lot of us need to raise that bar a little higher.

Not so high that you just become painted into a corner or you’re self-defeating.

There has to be just a happy medium on that.

But you got to know yourself and find where you are, so that you’re really challenging yourself to find the best ideas that you can, and not just going with the first or second or third thing you found.

But then once you find that right idea, you got to have the courage to go with it, and the patience to stick with it, make it happen.

These are ideas from Frank De Kelly, by the way.

I hear myself echoing, he has a great video about the process of composing on YouTube.

It’s like five minutes of gold.

He talks about patience and courage in that way, like the courage to accept an idea, and the patience to stick with it until it becomes what it can be.

Well, I think that’s a fantastic note to end on.

Where can our listeners find you and find your music?

I’m at danforrest.com.

Forrest has two Rs in it.

All my music is listed, and there’s lots of information about lots of things there, and performance opportunities and whatever.

Publishing-wise, it’s beckanhorsepress.com.

That’s where my music is published and my concert music is distributed.

And then all of my editing work that I do with so many other composers is on display there, too, in all the new publications that we write.

And then for listening, I’m on all the usual streaming platforms.

You can find me on any of those platforms under my name.

Well, thanks again.

Everyone check out Dan and his music, and we’ll talk to you next time.

Thanks, Garrett.

It’s been great.