Tidbits about composing and performing from Debra’s interviews and articles.

  • A composer’s best friend is their eraser.
  • Some people believe The Arts are dying, but if history truly repeats itself, they just need a little time to recover and grow some new shoots. Similar to the years following the plague in Europe, I believe humanity will experience and produce another Renaissance as we emerge from these catastrophic coronavirus years.
  • Composing music is best when it works like projectile vomiting.
  • I never consider a composition complete until it is performed.
  • Like all worthy endeavors, a musical journey teaches you something. The hardest climbs lift you to the most breathtaking summits. If you never take risks and challenge yourself, you miss the triumphant Rocky movie moments — raising your sweaty exhausted fists in the frosty morning air atop all those steps.
  • Then, there’s that moment when you’re standing on the podium in a full Mozart Requiem rehearsal and offer a very literal translation of the Latin word “semini,” after which you remember there are high school students in the chorus. Oy.
  • I was just informed that a friend of mine sent me a gift from a winery, due to arrive on Monday. I have never looked so forward to the end of a weekend in my life!
  • I definitely get “in the zone” when I’m creating and this causes me to ignore phone calls, e-mails, children, pets, my spouse, my friends, and sometimes even my own needs. You’d never know it from looking at me, but I forget to eat all the time.
  • The craft of musical notation is as much about preventing the performance you don’t want, as it is ensuring the performance you do want.
  • Artists, musicians, and poets have a way of turning our gaze inward, revealing the hard truths about who we are and what our behaviors bring upon society. Sometimes, those deep difficult searches require nuance, metaphor, and melody to make the resulting blow of self-awareness a bit more bearable. The emotional burden is too great without artistry to help move us from destruction to construction; from ruination of ourselves and one another toward self-growth, course correction, and the edification of others.
  • My own approach to setting texts is very intentional, because I truly believe the sound of words, as well as their meaning and context offers a colorful palette for creative expression.
  • Melismas help add linear motion and flow to what might be an otherwise wooden syllabic rendering of the poem.
  • Most of the time, composition is work. Don’t get me wrong, it’s enjoyable work; but, while it does require some giftedness, it often comes right down to spending time both writing and erasing.
  • Setting private letters to music is a bit invasive. I am making public something that was intended to be private, so I take the responsibility seriously.
  • It’s always important to me that my compositions are satisfying to the performers as much as the listeners. I don’t mind if my work is technically challenging as long as the pay-off to the artistic sensibility of the performer is equal to (or greater than) the effort required to learn and execute the piece. The spirit/heart of the musician is a high priority with me. Finding that balance can be a challenge.
  • Only music can inspire singular moments that are as fresh as they are fleeting. The best music is never the same twice. That is what makes live performance such a treasure.
  • Many music teachers and conductors preach about “following,” but the truly great collaborators anticipate each other. This mutually instinctive kinetic response makes all the difference in the world!
  • As a composer, I find the necessary process of self-promotion to be creatively stifling. I mean, if I wanted to go into marketing, I would have gone into marketing!
  • Ensemble work is all about listening and responding simultaneously, not one after the other. It is an inherent, indescribable vibe: leaving space, filling space, anticipating, and nimbly reflecting or complementing each other’s color and texture. It’s a constantly morphing flow.
  • I prefer to say very little from the podium. If I’m doing my job right and the ensemble is attentive, my hands and arms offer the needed instruction.
  • Composers and performers have a mutually dependent relationship. Musicians are nothing without compositions, and compositions are only dots on a page without performers.
  • Taking on a little Bach like a daily vitamin, keeps me musically fit and strong. I feel ready to be my best musical self when I’ve started my day with Bach, whether the tasks ahead are teaching, conducting, performing, or composing.
  • When I look at young faces, I wonder who among them might become the next Michelangelo, William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, or Claudio Monteverdi.
  • Live music is a strange intangible art form. Basically, it’s just air. Literature, poetry, visual art, film, and recordings are perfected and preserved forever. Live music, theater, and dance changes a little with every performance, even if you’re repeating repertoire. That is why people will always come to the concert hall. There’s this net-less tightrope vibe to a live experience. Not that we want to see anyone fail but, witnessing humans striving together en masse toward a level of artistry that none of them could achieve alone, is riveting and thrilling.
  • Creativity isn’t just something one can shut down indefinitely. It happens, whether we have time for it or not. I think this is the most misunderstood aspect of creativity.
  • I am fortunate to live a life engulfed in music, and that I can bask in some of the most creative, positive energy imaginable.