A personal challenge

In the past week I have been updating my website with some of the fine details about my compositions.  These details include performance history, movement titles and composition dates.  It is amazing to me how prolific I used to be.  There are some pieces which I composed in about a month or so.  These are not short, easy pieces either.  One such piece is Sleep's Journey for piano.  This is a six-minute piece that took me about six weeks or so to write.  Nowadays it seems as if it would take me six months to compose such a piece.  There are two pieces, Incursion for bass trombone and Not With, but Not Alone for flute, which took me two to three days each to compose.  Again both of these pieces are about six minutes in duration.

So I have been thinking about this and I decided to challenge myself.  I am going to try to compose a song for Dream Cycle this weekend.  This is a lofty goal for me considering that I have been working on this song cycle off and on for almost eight years now.  I decided to use one of the shorter texts that I have been considering.  I am in the process of composing a different song for the cycle, Mutability, but it is too long for me to challenge myself to finish this weekend.  The text is I Dream'd in a Dream by Walt Whitman.  The poem is only five lines, but the imagery and meaning is perfect as an interlude type song for Dream Cycle.

The goal is to compose this song this weekend.  It will be a tough challenge for me as voice and piano are two of the more difficult instruments for which to compose.  In fact I would be happy if I finished the song by the end of the week.