Messiest Musical Divorce: To Hélène Grimaud, the pianist, and Claudio Abbado, the conductor, whose musical partnership fell apart after a dispute over which cadenza Ms. Grimaud would play for a Mozart concerto recording.

I’ve been on both sides of the issue. I used to write arts features regularly as a freelancer for Boulder’s Camera. I was a weekly columnist, and it was made known to me that I was the highest paid columnist on staff. I wrote 600 words a week, and I received $100. When I augmented my monthly freelance contract to include four columns, a Friday Magazine cover story (the weekend magazine you can get for free all over town), and two other centerpiece stories for other sections, I was hopeful that I could negotiate a sum that could keep me afloat financially.

For the four columns and three beefy stories, I had to first find my ideas, pitch my ideas, and then, of course, report. I’d crank out 6,000-7,000 words a month. All of this for $800. (Before taxes.) And I was told, repeatedly, it was one of the best contracts that a freelancer had.

I quit after a year. $640 a month, after taxes, was hard to live on. But I still think a lot about the stories I wrote then, about the contemporary ballet company, the men who grew their white beards long to sit as Santa in the malls, the arts festival where small children dressed as fairies among tulips. (Yes, it’s Boulder.)

When it was my turn to start an arts organization, I learned what it was like on the other side of the equation. My group, Telling Stories, took classical music and funny essays out of the concert hall and into coffee shops. And the media liked that. At many of the publications, I talked with overworked reporters who wrote about everything, so I found myself having to explain who Benjamin Britten was and how piano trios worked. But there were a few “real” arts critics still left, and I invited them with great pride to our shows. At our third official concert, the music critic for the Rocky Mountain News attended, and wrote a nice piece about us. I did an interview with him, and I got to talk about my musical training. He understood the works we performed, and could (to our terror) compare our performances to other professional groups.

Then the Rocky closed, and we were featured by Kyle MacMillan in the Post. He did a great three-part series about organizations that were saving classical music, and he included Telling Stories in all three articles. Not only did it give us a huge boost of pride, people from around the nation noticed us.

I worry for artists now that both Kyle and John are gone from the Post, with the Rocky long shuttered. I worry that artists won’t be able to find a writer who is well versed in their discipline with whom they can really talk to about their project. I’m worried that without the critics’ expertise, they aren’t able to shout Denver’s achievements to the larger art community. I’m worried the papers will hire young freelancers, like I used to be, and pay them cheaply to grind out a lot of work. I’m worried those writers aren’t passionate about the acoustics in the symphony hall, the architecture of the new wing of the art museum, the summer series that attracts national attention. I’m worried they don’t feel, like Kyle excellently wrote, “The arts are not a luxury but an essential part of life. They probe the very essence of what it means to be human, taking us on emotional journeys that bring us face to face with our weaknesses and sorrows, but that also lift us to incredible heights of joy.”

That is life, isn’t it? So rarely are we afforded graceful transitions in between the busy and the slow sections, and it’s so difficult to hold things steady as we move between speeds. With our move, my schedule went from warp speed to quiet, and I stumbled pretty hard. I had found such joy in going fast and working hard. Without that validation, I felt like I had lost all my steadiness. Now that my schedule has relaxed and I’m rebuilding, I’m trying hard to lay down some steady underpinnings of the work I want to do. It’s hard to carve out the time I need to practice and write, but keeping a steady rhythm of creating art away from gigs and teaching makes my brain feel calm.

Hopefully I can keep this whump steady when the wiggling starts again.

I started clicking through to see how many emails it took to fill up Gmail. The answer is over 38,000. Five years of email.

I’m going through and deleting, but being of sentimental nature I am saving emails that are important to me. In the past five years, there have been a lot of ups and downs navigating the media and classical music industries. And through all of it, I keep reading all these emails from friends helping me back to my feet. Helping me build websites (like, ahem, this one). Helping me design flyers for my shows. Helping me revise my resume over and over. Helping me by coming to every single weekly show I put on. And then taking me for beers after.

Sometimes email can feel very isolating, but today it reminded me of my community.

I felt shy talking about my “real” life. As a classically trained musician, I’ve been well-versed that I’m supposed to be making music 12-16 hours a day, reading my Grout music history book, and dreaming in recitals.

But! I have a life. I do. Not much of one, but a small one, and I decided to add it on to my fancy-pants resume (which is what I like to call my cv). Here’s what’s under my “life” section:

Ran Boulder Backroads Marathon, training for New York City Marathon 2012. Boxer, bike rider, beer brewer, bread baker. Collector of used vinyl; reluctant collector of new, expensive vinyl. Food server in Yellowstone National Park in 1999, subsequent hitchhiker when car broke down in West Yellowstone, and, finally, fly-fisherwoman when an RV offered both a ride and fly-fishing lessons. 

Does anyone else include their “extracurricular” activities? What are yours?

You too can feed a squirrel if you only work four hours a week!

This morning I started my practice by listening to two right-handed drumstick-hits in a row. I listened to their volume. I listened to how they were spaced within two given beats of the metronome. I listened to how they sounded when they had to artfully dodge my left hand interjecting. Such detailed listening is exciting to me, because it’s the beginning of my practice. I’m warming up my ears, and my hands, and all of this is going to apply later when I try to say something musically.

But partway through my warm-up I found my brain getting distracted (this is nothing new) with the idea of how hard work is viewed today. Specifically, I thought about this article I had read about there being no natural talent, and instead, just how hard, driven work provides success. I also thought about this fellow Tim Ferriss, who is all over the media with his “Four-Hour Workweek.” (And four-hour body. And four-hour chef.)

I’m not sure why anyone would want a four-hour workweek. Isn’t the goal to find the thing that we’re driven to do, and to do it well? Yes, there should be down time (and even days off!), but isn’t that down time more fulfilling when you’ve pushed yourself to your potential all day? What sort of potential are we reaching as a culture if we’re driving ourselves to a hands-off four-hour workweek?

There is a beauty in hard work. I don’t think it’s evil. To my end, it provides discipline for a wandering mind. The joy of my product — playing music — is so much greater than the best beach vacation. I don’t want to be remembered for how efficiently I condensed my work so I could augment my leisure. Naively, I still want to change the world. And I think that might take more than four hours a week.

….Boredom can also encourage innovation….It can drive the thoughtful to question the accepted and to seek out beneficial change…Boredom should not be abused, exploited, ignored, sneered at, rejected or talked down to as a product of laziness or of an idle, uninventive and boring mind. It’s there to help, and its advice should be welcomed and acted upon. That many of us suffer from it should be no cause for embarrassment.

from “The Thrill of Boredom” by Peter Toohey.

It’s quiet, the acts of searching and sorting, which is in contrast to what I’m used to, a noisy life of lecturing college kids and teaching the drums.  Sometimes I go for a walk in the backyard to feel connected to something else.

I go out pretending I’m going to look at the tomatoes, but I just want to feel the warm grass under my feet. I like to lay my head against the metal pole that holds up our laundry lines, and it angers the hornets that are nesting in its rusty holes. I listen to them buzz, and our swamp cooler continually drip water down through the roof, blowing cool air into our quiet home.