My failing composing career and what turned it around

I'm not so convinced that we all know what we're talking about when we talk about luck the dictionary says look success of failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions but if you ask anyone about luck they'll usually say something like you make your own luck or luck comes from hard work I mean look at all these quotes Champs favors the prepared mind diligence is the mother of good luck the winds and waves are always on the side of the ableist Navigators they all say the same thing set the conditions right put in the effort and the luck will come your way but what if it doesn't what if you work your butt off you try everything you can think of you spend years honing your craft but still no luck [Music] that's pretty much what happened to this guy that's me 25 years ago you ever seen a more unlucky looking [Music] so today I want to tell you the story of how my luck changed it's a story about how after a decade of trying my career as a composer was really going nowhere fast I was feeling pretty uncertain about my direction and with nothing much happening on the composing front I made a rather half-hearted attempt to set up a web design company it was a pretty spectacular failure but it led to a chain of events without which I don't think I'd have the composing career that I have today it was the moment that my luck changed but I realized today that luck has very little to do with it it was actually something else something much more important look at something as artists tread carefully around as if we know how important it is to Our Success no one wishes each other good luck in the Performing world it's too dangerous in the dance world you say meh I guess I better beep that because it's the French force in Opera you say the phrase it probably originates in the tradition of spitting three times to one off evil spirits and of course for an actor you wish them to break a leg break a leg better to tell somebody to break a leg than wish them good luck that shows you just how important luck feels to artists so important that they don't even mention it for fear of jinxing it I'm speaking for myself there's one specific way that I've always considered myself to be lucky and that is that I've always known what I wanted to do from a young age eat ice cream okay and also be a musician music was an obsession of mine it was something that I felt that belonged to me for as long as I can remember there was never really any question music was going to be my life in one way or another and I've thought about people I've met who don't have that who through no fault of their own don't know what to do with our Lives having this kind of sense of a calling well that really is a great piece of luck to start out with here's 15 year old me saving the day for my local drama Group by stepping in as their pianist at the last minute making the headlines in the local paper 15 year old me had a dream he barely knew any classical music but he'd started to compose and he had the dream of one day having his Music performed here at the Royal Albert Hall at the biggest Festival of classical music the proms and well he'd probably not even heard an opera by then or if he had he probably had that kind of warbling stereotype that some of you might have of it but he dreamed of something to do with music and Stage that he couldn't yet put his finger on 15 year old me had a strange mixture of determination and imposter syndrome he was determined to achieve those goals but at the same time they seemed so far out of reach as to seem completely ridiculous [Music] so if you told 15 year old me that he would indeed fulfill that dream that he would come here to the Albert Hall to hear his own music being performed if you told him that he would fulfill even that not yet dream and write operas that would be commissioned by the Royal Opera House in glenborn and get nominated for prestigious prizes like the Olivier Awards it's safe to say 15 year old me would find that pretty hard to believe [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] but one day those dreams did come true he had a piece of Music performed at the promise and he's written operas which have been performed here at the Royal Opera House in fact it was that Opera that made him first start thinking about luck so Philip Pullman is best known for his his dark materials Trilogy this is the latest book the book of dust but before that he wrote a shorter story called the firework Maker's daughter in it a young girl wants to be a firework maker like her father and she learns that to become one you need three gifts which it turns out she's had all along those gifts are Talent determination and luck and I made that story into an opera which premiered at the Royal Opera House in 2013. conspiracy and that listed of the three gifts has stayed with me because it's just so accurate whenever you see someone who has done well they have obviously some kind of talent but they've often worked really hard for years and years they've got the determination but then there'll always be some kind of luck involved to make that final leap now I'll leave others to judge whether I have talent or not but I've certainly been determined and driven towards my goals as I mentioned I did feel lucky to know what I wanted and the direction I wanted to take my life but to explain the true role that luck or what I thought was luck played in my career we need to go back to the period around the turn of the millennium so it's the year 2000 I'm 30 years old imagine already 30. 30 year old mius had just a handful of professional performances and a couple of competition wins he'd set up an ensemble with his friend and given it the absolutely terrible title of Ophelia you know the one in Hamlet who drowns while singing turned out to be the perfect metaphor for The Ensemble they did one performance here at St Martin in the fields on a similarly gloomy day crashed the van that was taking the percussion to the performance and called it a day 30 year old me has written a couple of 10-minute operas and wow the suspicion he'd had about music and theater had been confirmed he'd loved working on those that was an area he felt like he excelled in and he really hoped he'd get to do more maybe even imagine a full-length Opera someday super exciting but still totally impossible idea after more than a decade 30 year old me has finally left the warm blanket of Academia throughout his 20s he'd stayed in school because he knew that outside the world was a lot colder and less protected the chances of getting performances in particular were really Slim so he'd done an undergraduate degree in music two master's degrees in composing at the Royal College of Music and then he strung out a doctorate here at King's College over five years but that was all finished now and he was out in the real world [Music] one more piece of luck he'd had was to meet his wife during that second master's degree lucky not just because one of the most beautiful girls he'd ever seen returned his glances but also because she saw something in him beyond the scruffy exterior and the guy barely scraping a living for some people meeting a partner is something that has no particular effect on their career or work but for me it felt like the two of us had planted our flag in the ground and established home base and I could finally knuckle down and learn and study with an intensity I'd never had before so that for 30 year old me by the time he'd finished his studies he did finally feel like he knew a little more than nothing [Music] but by the end of those studies 30 year old me was in danger of hitting a brick wall he was scraping a living teaching piano and accompanying on the piano at kids ballet school newly married and contemplating starting a family in terms of his career he was a little bit lost the chances of earning a living as a classical Concert Hall composer are almost zero even very successful composers have to rely on other sources usually teaching or performing and 30 year old me was a very long way from being any kind of successful what's more he'd always assumed he would take the most traditional route for composers to earn money and become a composition Prof at a university but having done a few stints as a teaching assistant at Kings 30 year old me realized that wasn't going to be a life for him giving lectures gave him cold sweats weeks in advance and the environment just made him feel uncreative and caged I can see now that it was a time in my life that for many aspiring artists becomes a turning point many of my composing friends went through the same crisis at similar times in their own lives and quite a few didn't get out the other side they ended up giving up composing altogether but just five years later here I am taking my bow on the Carnegie Hall stage in New York So what had happened what kind of magic did a 30 year old me use to get himself out of that hole well he did probably the last thing you would expect he went back to something he'd done as a kid computer programming the internet was really starting to take off and he figured he could set up a company making websites for customers that would be something he could do from home and fit it in while he carried on trying to compose but at this stage he was probably beginning to doubt whether the composing would ever lead anywhere two maybe even three years went by where he barely composed anything without any realistic possibility of a performance it just seemed a bit hopeless a bit pointless he was no longer feeling particularly lucky the lowest point came after he'd paid a lot of money that he didn't have on a bunch of adverts for the new business and not a single person responded Not only was his composing career failing it seemed he wasn't much good at business either then finally one day the phone does ring and it's a guy named Richard Richard doesn't have a business he's just a guy with an idea is this very strange metaphysical philosophical theory about the universe and our place in it all very interesting but definitely not the start to a website business I've been expecting so 30 year old me meets up with 60 year old Richard and despite the age difference we really hit it off he's an artistic soul Who's thrilled to learn about my composing side and whilst we continue to work on my website one day he asks me to come with him to watch a play by his writer friend called Anna so I meet up with him and Anna the show is great and before long the three of us are firm friends and although my web design business doesn't take off I start making other sites of my own that eventually allow me to earn my living one of them is a site for writers called right words which the three of us found and run together one day Anna Rings up and says she's seen an opportunity for composers and librettists to develop an opera together so should we apply sure I say why not so we put our proposal together the months go by and we make it through the selection process the Opera starts to get developed and eventually with the help from the company that had put on my previous mini operas we found that we'd written push my first full-length Opera which was staged in London and toured the UK and it went down really well after that was all over and behind us I submitted the score of push to a call for composers for a Carnegie Hall workshop and residency and to my absolute amazement that gets accepted okay so here I am in New York today this is Times Square so 36 year old me finds himself on his way to New York to hear his music being performed his luck is beginning to change so that Opera push really was the start of it all since then I've never not had a new commission to work on this was me just a few weeks ago at the Royal Festival Hall taking another awkward bow after a new piece had written for the lpo in the firework Maker's daughter Leela learns that the third gift she needs to become an artist is luck in her case her look was to have good friends who cared enough about her to follow her on the dangerous trip up Mount merapi and rescue her just in the nick of time and The more I've reflected on the Opera over the years the more I felt that really misstates the case there was no luck involved it was the power of friendship that saved her I'd long thought about how my friendship with Anna was my real look because without her suggestion to apply for the Opera Workshop it's quite possible my whole career as a composer would never have taken off but I realize now it goes back a stage further than that if I'd never tried to start that web design company and never place that one terribly performing advert I would never have met the one person who did respond to it that one person Richard who passed away a couple of years ago happened to become my friend and like any good friend he was looking out for me thinking of ways he could help and support me and make my life better only through him did I meet Anna and eventually get that chance to reignite my composing career [Music] friends are like the roots that you lay down around you they give you stability they feed you they nurture you sometimes they hold you firm when you're about to fall a true friend will help you stand tall and become the beautiful thing you dream of being and although in some respects my story is about luck I mean Carnegie Hall had one of those horrible age limits on their opportunity and I was very lucky to scrape into their 35 and under limit with literally two weeks to spare but for me it's about learning two important lessons the first is the lesson that I still have to keep relearning I suppose I'm particularly addressing this video to people like me who you know on the whole find interaction pretty exhausting you know there's a reason I enjoy sitting in my room working on my compositions and videos by myself because I know in that situation my brain's at peace you know when I'm out I do like meeting people I do enjoy people's company but then it often takes me hours to recover that's one of the reasons I don't really teach face to face because a meeting like that often ruins the day for me I'm just exhausted from it so quite often that puts me off from going out and meeting people I'm always not sure is it going to be worth the energy it's going to cost me but this video is really just as a reminder to myself that some of the best things in life come when you put yourself outside of your comfort zone that's an important lesson to learn and the second is that some of those best things in life are friends and to treasure the friends I do have and try to be as supportive and nurturing to them as they are to me and although this story isn't about her and she's kept herself well hidden from this channel so far which is probably wise for me there's one friend in particular who's been by my side for 30 years now she's been a source of good luck and good haircuts for all this time and as another YouTuber once put it gosh if you've been like a tsunami of good fortune in my life so this is just a little thank you to you for being there and all I can say is I wish all of you watching the good luck to find a friend as good as that foreign [Music]

Channel: David Bruce Composer

Views: 127,184

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Id: 5Yyr33E4BV4

Length: 15min 41sec (941 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 02 2023