Why It Took Me Almost 14 Years To Return To Composing
Mental illness is hard. and especially hard when you have no one there in your corner.
In 2015, I was thrown out of Mental health and labeled "untreatable," and with that, I resorted to chemical help only. In 2020, my daughter told me she and her partner would renovate a yard house for me. She understood that isolation, panic disorder, and agoraphobia were going to damage me so badly. And I guess she had already seen it happen a bit with me.
At the end of May 2021, I moved in with her and her family as the yard house wasn't ready for me to move into due to COVID and other things. And that was the start of my social rehabilitation. Mentally I had already start slowly to recover thanks to writing every day and publishing.
Fast Forward To 2022
In 2022, I joined Ship30for30, and it was then I learned about a Zoom meeting called Creativeworkhour that Alessandra White runs. We had connected on Twitter and been in a couple of Twitter spaces together before I joined. Alessandra and I had an instant connection, and it was that that ignited my wish to start composing again. The next step was that she and her husband Devin gave me a 2013 Macbook Air on which I could install Sibelius software, and the magic started to happen. The first thing I was what would be the first movement of my Clarinet Concertino 'Solistice.'
It's dedicated to Alessandra and her clarinet and is a full concertino now with three movements. So, almost 14 years after stopping to compose or play music, I came back to composing.
The Rest Of The Journey Have Just Began
In April, the first movement of Solstice, the clarinet part, was performed by [Alessandra]
at a recital. Ans in October 2023, my organ piece Epilogous II had its first performance. In 2024, my Kyrie for eight parted choir, soprano solo, and orchestra will be performed in November. And I have other pieces that might be on the table to be performed; among them is my first Woodwind quintet, and the full Epilgous suite for Organ.
You can find my music soon on Spotify and other streaming services.
Onward and uppwards!