3/10/2022 After Western ACDA

What an absolute whirlwind the past few weeks have been. Between a number of performances and recording sessions through USC, the Western Region ACDA conference, and all of my concurrent academic activities, it has seemed as if there has been no opportunity to rest and reflect. Now that I stand on the other side of all of this activity, I want to take a minute to breathe and consider what this year’s ACDA conference meant to me.

These conferences have marked the culmination of the process I began around this time last year, when I entered my composition, The Rose that Bare Jesu for consideration in the ACDA Brock Memorial Student Composition Competition. After learning in August that I’d won, I was overjoyed, and now having had the chance to hear my work performed in an ACDA concert session, I am absolutely elated. The piece was performed at the Southwest conference by University of North Texas, at the Western Conference by California State University, Long Beach, and will be performed at the Northwest conference this week by Portland State University and Pacific University, and there may have been other performances that I haven’t heard about yet. While I was only able to see CSU Long Beach perform the piece live, the experience was deeply transformative for me. I am extremely grateful to those choirs that put their hearts and souls into preparing and performing my work, and to those who deemed it worthy of such recognition.

I am also thinking in particular of Pacific university and their upcoming performance. Pacific was the first choir to perform this piece back in 2017, along with many of my other works. Scott Tuomi, the director of the Chamber Singers at Pacific, is my father, and so I had considered it at the time to simply be a favor from father to son in order to support an interest in composition. Similarly, most of the performances of my work prior to this have been because I either programmed and performed it myself, or I requested that friends of mine consider programming them, and they, being supportive friends, have done so. And in all honesty, that much has been enough for me - to be able to create art and share it with my friends and family.

This competition and the resulting performances and conversations I’ve had have been extremely meaningful to me, especially because of what they have caused me to realize about the process of creating something (I expressed this sentiment in a recent interview on ACDA’s Membership Minute as well). When a thought is given tangible form - whether that be music, text, paint, or any other form of art - it ceases to be your thought. It is no longer a private conceptualization, but rather it has become a living piece of existence. Everyone who perceives it from then on will see it differently, taking their own lived experiences and personal ideas and ascribing new meanings to it, feeding it and allowing it to grow. So to anyone with an interest in creating something, I say: Create. Make your art, make your statements, give them form and let them take on their own lives.