Composing as a Calling

I'm generally a pretty slow person. My brother once gave me a book called The Discovery of Slowness. But it took me a while to work out what he was saying.

Anyway, all this is to say that I've only very gradually been growing comfortable with the idea of composing being my "calling". There's lots more I want to explore about this – what a "calling" even means, if everyone has a "calling" of this kind, and how God might choose to confirm (or deny) such a thing. But I'm now comfortable enough to say this:

I'm committed to obeying God's calling for me to be a composer.

How God intends this to work practically is something I'm still trying to figure out – especially as he's also, very clearly, called me to be a husband and a father. I've been noticing that "successful" artists often tend to be not so great at those other roles, which doesn't seem right.

But, in the interests of openness, here's a list of what I've learnt about my calling so far...

• I am totally reliant on God for my composing ability – again and again I despair about being able to complete whatever composition I’m working on, until I ask God for help; basically, I can’t compose without him.
• The kind of composing I do is meant to take a long time.
• It’s hard to compose as a “hobby” on the side of other jobs – generally speaking, when other work has kept me busy, composing has almost stopped, because to bring compositions to completion I need large chunks of concentrated time.
• I can't compose when it's just a “job” – the music doesn’t come unless it’s actually something I care about.
• My genre of music ("contemporary classical") generates very little income from royalties (performances, recordings, sheet music) – it relies on commissions for new work.
• But commissions don’t get me very far – they’re hard to get, there aren’t many of them, and they often don’t pay well.
• Interestingly, my most fulfilling commissions have come from real people, not prestigious arts organisations.
• There is no “industry” for me to tap into that will sustain the kind of composing I do; I am directly reliant on who my audience actually is to support me.
• I don’t like working in isolation – I want to be able to share music as I write it with real people who will care about it.
• But I do like to work alone most of the time – I think the best art is created by people working as individuals, even if it later gets put into something larger, involving more people.
• Some music I write is ‘about’ stuff, or to tell a story, and other music is just fun to write and doesn’t necessarily ‘mean’ anything that can be put into words – both kinds are good and necessary to me.
• People hardly ever listen to the music I write, unless they come to an event and hear it live; that’s when it touches them, that's when it matters.
• Although the composing is important, often it's what happens around the composing that turns out to be more important – when I meet with real people and talk about real life things. Composing is a portal to this.

All this has informed what I'm currently working on (Mark Illuminated). So far – somehow – it's working.

By God's grace, I continue to be a composer.

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