08: About Delivery Dates

Mao’s Last Dancer was mixed and in the can by the middle of December 2008 and I immediately commenced fulltime work on Lightfall.

Mao's Last Dancer Recording Session

It is always difficult to come off a major project: it invades your whole being, even your dreams and I had been occupied with MLD, on and off for a year. Actually there had been projects back-to-back for a few years, generally with demanding deadlines, so it is no surprise that it took me a month just to start “living” the concerto. This would not have been a problem except that I had agreed to deliver the finished score in late-February 2009, and that was revised from the original date of 5 January.
Back in April 2008, at the meeting that laid out the terms of the commission, the question of delivery was raised and I remember opening my mouth to suggest early-July 2009 (which gave about the same lead time before rehearsals as my Bass Trombone concerto had been given) when someone else jumped in with January 2009. Not wanting to appear a crusty and difficult composer I swallowed deep and agreed. It was an agreement that put me under intense pressure throughout the writing of the concerto and I have only myself to blame for not negotiating a more realistic schedule. It is not a mistake I intend to repeat with my future concert works.

Those outside the hallowed world of orchestral administration might wonder why a piece needs to be delivered so far (in this case, nine months) in advance of the first rehearsal. The biggest reason is to give the conductor a chance to learn the piece along with the dozens of other works, old and new, that he/she will be studying and performing during that time and beyond. Of course the soloist needs plenty of time too, however it is possible to feed the soloist bits and pieces as the composition progresses where as a conductor is really only interested in seeing the finished score. (Perhaps I will talk to Richard Gill about this in a future blog; it would be interesting to know how he prepares a score that no one has ever heard.)  Then there’s the elephant in the room; although no one mentions it, I am sure that everyone wants to make sure that the composer has written a decent piece and if not, to have the time to cook up an alternative, in this case, I imagine a Strauss horn concerto would be considered.

The filmmakers of Mao’s Last Dancer afforded me the rare opportunity of attending the films’ mixing sessions full time. Knowing this would take to mid-December I requested and received an extension of the concerto’s delivery date to late February. Although tight, this seemed achievable because it gave me a month to get into the swing of things, followed by about six weeks to compose the concerto. This was not unrealistic because eventually the concerto took just seven weeks to write: it was the “getting into the swing of things” that took a lot longer than planned.

It was now time to collect all those ideas that had been buzzing around for many years and start out on the voyage of discovery.

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