I’ve been working on Before the First Peace for months.
Most of that work has happened in pieces. An hour here. An evening there. Playing through a section, changing something, starting again.
Last week, I took an afternoon at Ravenswood to play through the whole thing.
It was a dark, cloudy day in Chicago. I turned on the strand lights and dimmed them to about 75 percent.
It was just me in a room that is usually full of people.
Around me were 27 crystal bowls, ten gongs, two rain towers, the concert bass drum, chimes, bells, and more instruments than I could count.
I had a music stand out, which I almost never do. My notes were on it, with my phone underneath keeping time.
I started playing.
And I got through the whole thing without stopping.
When the last sound disappeared, I sat there for a moment.
I had just played Before the First Peace from beginning to end for the first time.
It is by far the longest musical score I have ever written.
I felt good.
Then I touched my phone.
The timer said 62 minutes.
I had advertised 90.
Tickets were already sold.
My chest tightened.
The performance was in about two weeks.
I had spent months working on this, and now I needed to find 28 coherent minutes in two weeks.
I have a recurring dream where I get to the end of a semester in college and realize there is a class I haven’t been to since the first day.
The exam is tomorrow.
I have one night to learn everything I was supposed to have learned over the last four months.
So what option did I have?
I had to get to work.
But it wasn’t just the missing time that bothered me.
When my chest tightened, I also had this quick flash of feeling that there was a bigger issue with the piece.
I wasn’t ready to go there yet.
So I focused on the thing I had some control over.
The time.
I needed to find 28 minutes.
The piece has three movements, each roughly 30 minutes long.
I started with the first.
I played it again.
21 minutes.
I sat for a little while and looked around.
There were certainly more sounds available to me.
I found a texture I liked and worked it in.
Then I started the movement again.
23 minutes.
I had found two.
I needed seven more in that movement alone.
And 28 more in the piece.
How was I going to find 28 minutes?
I tried something else.
Then something else.
There were sounds I liked. Textures that genuinely belonged there. I made notes and tried them again.
But the numbers barely moved.
At some point I stopped playing.
The room was quiet again.
Twenty-seven bowls.
Ten gongs.
Two rain towers.
The bass drum.
Chimes.
Bells.
None of them making a sound.
I sat there for a while staring into one of the geometric paintings on the wall.
I don’t know what I was looking for, but something my dad said to me years ago came to mind.
He was an ultramarathon runner. Once, I asked him how he could run for more than 24 hours at a time.
He told me that when he ran on the streets in Chicago, he would look for the next stop sign.
That was the destination.
Then the next one.
A hundred-mile race became one block at a time.
Ninety minutes was too much to hold in my head at once. Even 30 was hard to feel while I was inside it.
So I broke the first movement into five-minute sections.
Five minutes.
That seemed almost ridiculously manageable.
I started again.
The opening begins with chimes.
I played them, let them ring, and answered them with the bowls.
When I reached what felt like the end of that first section, I looked at the timer.
I wasn’t even close to five minutes.
So I started again.
This time I tried not to think about where I was going.
I played the chimes and listened.
When the bowls came in, I let them stay for a while.
Almost immediately I could feel myself wanting to move forward.
I wasn’t bored. I liked what I was hearing.
I just had this impulse to get to the next thing.
I had felt it all afternoon without noticing it.
Now, with five minutes sitting there in front of me, I couldn’t stop noticing it.
I played something I loved and almost immediately began thinking about what should follow it.
I arrived somewhere and started leaving.
I played it again.
And there it was again.
A sound would settle into the room and almost as soon as I heard what it was doing, I was ready with the next idea.
There was nothing missing.
That was the strange part.
I had spent the afternoon trying to add things to a piece that already had plenty in it.
I played the opening again, this time letting each idea stay a little longer.
And the piece started to feel different.
Not longer.
Different.
I thought about that feeling I’d had when I first saw 62 minutes on the timer. The one I hadn’t wanted to look at.
I played the opening again.
One musical thought would begin, and before it had really gone anywhere, I was already introducing another.
Then another.
Everything I wanted was there.
It just never had much of a chance to become anything.
The strand lights were still dimmed. Outside, the afternoon was still gray.
I played the chimes again.
Then the bowls.
I let one sound become another without hurrying it along.
For the first time that afternoon, I stopped worrying about whether I was going to make it to 90 minutes.
I was trying to make it to five.
And five minutes was taking forever.
That’s when I thought about my boys.
People have been telling me since they were born how quickly it goes.
Enjoy it.
It goes so fast.
I’ve never liked hearing that.
I sat there looking at the timer.
Five minutes.
I played the opening again.
This time, when I felt myself reaching for the next sound, I waited.
Not dramatically.
Just a little longer.
The bowl kept ringing.
The room stayed quiet around it.
And after a while I couldn’t tell whether I could still hear the bowl or whether I only remembered hearing it.
A few days later, I sat down to write about that afternoon.
I already knew what I wanted to say.
So I wrote all of it down.
When I read it back, everything was there.
The timer.
My dad.
My boys.
The five-minute sections.
And every time one of those things appeared, I was right behind it explaining what it meant.
I had done it again.
I was giving away the answers before anything had a chance to develop.
So I started over.
I wrote the afternoon again.
The dark room.
The 62 minutes.
The painting on the wall.
My dad looking for the next stop sign.
Five minutes that wouldn’t end.
And whenever I found myself getting ahead of it, I went back.
This is the most I’ve rewritten any of these essays.
I’m still working on it.