HI all. I'm a concert hall composer who is pivoting to bookkeeping. While the pivot is exciting, the reason for the pivot is that, owing to a long illness which removed me from the professional music scene for fifteen years, I've not been able to make a dent since. When I returned to the scene in 2017 I found it barely recognisable, and discovered that the music infrastructure I trained for has virtually disappeared. You can only really grow as a composer if you receive performances, and those have not been so forthcoming for about a decade now – one a year at most.
I used to believe in fate in a sort of mystical way; e.g. that my life as a composer was somehow preordained. I don't now. Instead, to take an extreme example, I wonder how many Einsteins are begging on the streets of Calcutta.
In my free time I have recently begun to post essays and articles on Substack and Zenodo about a range of topics. Uptrust seems a good site to post to, so here goes.