Richard D. Russell

On October 22, Dan Wang premiered my new piano solo, “Dantes Variations” at a two-day conference sponsored by the journal 19th-Century Music and hosted at Fordham University in New York City. It happened to be the 200th birthday of Franz Liszt, and many Liszt pieces were included in the concert.

The interdisciplinary conference was organized by the musicologist Lawrence Kramer, editor of the sponsoring journal, who asked me to compose a piece for the concluding concert. The topics of the two-day seminar “… range as widely as the contributors’ imagination can compass…” including…

“…portrayals of music or musicians in nineteenth-century literary works, musical representations in nineteenth-century music of literary genres, characters, or texts, literary opera, incidental music, aesthetic theories, models of performance, treatments of nineteenth-century music in twentieth– and twenty-first-century literature and film, treatments of nineteenth-century literature in twentieth-and twenty-first-century music, including opera and film music, and the list goes on.

My piece was a theme and variations based on Edmond Dantes from Alexander Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo. Here are pictures of Mr. Kramer, Mr. Wang, and me. (Click image for larger size.)

Lawrence Kramer opens the concert

Dan Wang performs “Dantes Variations.”

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Sometimes performers wait around until someone gives them a call and hires them. This means that if they are holding your score in their hands, they won’t likely perform your music. They’ll be busy waiting around for someone to call them. And when they get that call, they’ll perform whatever is asked of them instead of your piece.

Instead, you want to seek out performers who are actively getting their own recitals together — who are busy with their careers. Get involved with these performers! These are the people you want to know. Your compositions will be contributing to their success, and their success will be contributing to your career.

(Performers reading this: don’t forget to keep working at your career and pushing yourself! This always attracts good attention.)

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Since then, I have considered this question more deeply. On what criteria can we measure our success? Is it material things like being published by Schirmer? Prizes? Financial independence? Or aesthetic things, like recognition by your colleagues, or simply being satisfied with your own work?

Are you a “successful” composer? How do you come by your answer?

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