Field Notes Vol. 6 no 2: 2025...Quite a Year!

Hey, look! 2025 is now behind us…and we made it! In addition to our individual trials and triumphs (hopefully you saw more of the latter), many of us also struggled with what my husband likes to call, “General existential doom and gloom”: anxiety about the state of our world and what we — as artists, as educators, as citizens — can do about it.

In addition to this, the year has also been a profound year of positive change and new discoveries for me personally. It’s been quite a year — and that’s not even accounting for the calamities in our household, but we needn’t get into all that.

Quite a year, indeed.

I know many of you have had similar ups and downs these past 12 months; I hope they have not kicked you around too much. And since this is, after all, another installment of Field Notes, I’ll offer a few insights these last few months have helped reveal…along with some questions clamoring to be considered. 

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As you’ll recall from my post from last May, I’ve (happily) stepped down as Director of the Entrepreneurship Center for Music at CU-Boulder (“ECM”). This past semester (Fall 2025) was the first in my new split appointment between entrepreneurship and composition, teaching a half-studio’s worth of composition students (for the first time in my career) and continuing to teach “The Entrepreneurial Artist,” the new “Graduate Career Seminar,” and the Capstone class for our Certificate in Arts Entrepreneurship. My new role has stimulated a lot of reflection: It got me thinking about entrepreneurial “pivots,” as well as discovering the joys of exercising a new skill relatively late in my career; Focusing more on my own creative work has allowed me to focus on an issue that has long haunted me — namely, how one defines the “artistic voice” and what it means to be “bold” or “conservative” or however else you want to define one’s work; My colleagues’ unexpected reaction to my shift has got me thinking about burnout and the corrosive tendencies of academia; And, lastly, a string of professional disappointments has helped me gain new insights into the ever-challenging notion of “value” in the context of the arts, and whether or not the entrepreneurial notion of “value” is helpful…or the opposite. Let’s dive a little deeper into these.

The Entrepreneurial Pivot

The notion of an “entrepreneurial pivot” is a difficult one for most student entrepreneurs: once they get to the point of determining that the venture in question isn’t going to work, they’ve already put a lot of time and energy into the idea. The willingness to extract the valuable element(s) from the venture and apply them in a new direction takes a certain degree of dispassionate appraisal; it also takes the imagination and creativity to apply those elements in a different context. It’s a simultaneous letting go of what you’ve already invested in and embracing something new and uncertain. There’s an element of persistence, too: rather than saying, “Well, that didn’t work,” and throwing it all away to start again from scratch, the pivot requires an additional level of analysis. This analysis asks, “How else might this idea be deployed? Who else might be interested in this? What else might I address with the core of this idea, and What change(s) do I need to make for that to be viable?” This is a hard transition for a lot of people, especially students who are new to the entrepreneurial process: it is, after all, a lot to unpack. 

And now I know first-hand what they’re feeling, having personally lived the pivot this year: resolving the tension between knowing it was time to pass the ECM torch to someone else and knowing that I wasn’t done being a professor was not an easy process. In the end it took, “a simultaneous letting go of what [I’d] already invested in and embracing something new and uncertain.” It also took a supportive Dean and the coincidental alignment of my decision with a series of retirements that allowed us to reshuffle the org-chart (at least for a couple years). 

Here are some random lessons I learned about “the pivot” as a result of shifting my role within CU’s College of Music:

1. The pivot looks scary until you take concrete steps to make it happen. Once you’ve done that, the positive energy of possibility and new beginnings quickly takes over. 

2. Stepping away from something you’ve invested a lot of time and energy in isn’t a mark of failure or a loss or any other negative association: what you’ve accomplished remains. That’s true even if what you’ve accomplished is simply knowledge gained from your research and customer discovery. One of the hardest things for students of entrepreneurship to embrace is the notion that learning the process (and acquiring the information that process reveals) is more important than a particular outcome. Students — especially musicians — are obsessed with the result: after all, that’s what we do: we practice, we study, we prepare, and then we present our work to the world. The pivot requires a different mindset, and experiencing a pivot can help us see that there are more important things to embrace than whether or not things turned out the way we expected. My time with the ECM certainly had its shares of successes and failures, of countless small pivots within the broader mission. And, like all entrepreneurial ventures, leading the ECM required constant evaluation, ideation, and iteration. Sometimes this had a positive result, sometimes not. But the process kept us moving forward. 

3. Even if you miss parts of what you used to do (or are mourning the fact that you won’t be doing something you were looking forward to), the pivot can open up new things you hadn’t anticipated; things you didn’t know you could do or never dreamed would bring you so much joy. More often than not, the pivot will be the best thing that ever happened to you or your entrepreneurial venture. For me, the joy I’ve experienced teaching composition for more or less the first time in my career is almost impossible to describe: it’s made me a better teacher, a better composer, and a more effective presence in our College of Music. And the relief of no longer being the Face, Voice, and Embodiment of the ECM and all it stands for has been nothing short of transformative. Sometimes you don’t realize how much the rocks you’ve been carrying around were weighing you down until you drop them by the side of the road.

   
   

Artistic Guts

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about artistic guts: what does it mean to have them in this day and age where there are very few limits on how an artist might express themselves. I wish I could say that I didn’t care about my “style” or whether or not I’m a “conservative” composer or an “edgy” one. But as anyone from my generation can attest, the notion of where one fell on the spectrum between “Barber/Copland” and “Stockhausen/Boulez/ Crumb/Glass,” between “Uptown” and “Downtown,” was an important, even all-consuming, question for composition students. One of the most important things one’s education was supposed to develop in those days was a sense of one’s artistic “voice,” which was a nice way of saying, “how your music will be categorized.” And it was assumed it would be categorized. I think a lot about my mentor at Rice, Paul Cooper, who used to tell us stories about going to grad school in L.A. in the 1950s: UCLA was Schoenberg’s domain, USC was Stravinsky’s — and each camp stuck with their own. At concert intermissions, the two groups would congregate at opposite ends of the lobby; they would not speak to each other. Paul had to sneak over to the USC library to study scores by Stravinsky, since they were not available at UCLA. And if his music strayed too far “in the other direction,” his teacher was sure to drill any “neoclassical” tendencies out of him. Those were the days when you had to plant your flag in one camp or the other, and no matter which camp you chose you would surely be viewed with contempt by the other.

By the early 90s, when I was in grad school, the binaries that had defined the previous three decades had relaxed a lot: minimalism and post-modernism had shaken things up by giving composers permission to explore new possibilities. But vestiges of the old orthodoxy still remained. At one point late in my doctoral studies I was experimenting with a highly “tonal” style, and one day during a master class an old-school guest crankily proclaimed, “The problem is, if you’re going to sound like Samuel Barber then you’d better be Samuel Barber.” Reading that line just now, in print, you might think he was saying, “You must write what’s authentic for you — only Barber can do Barber.” But his tone suggested otherwise: I was no Samuel Barber. Cue nearly 20 years of searching for “my voice” and wondering if my music was “too this” or “too that,” or if not having a clear answer to those questions meant the quality of my work was lacking… (It’s amazing how students must figure out how to balance respect for their teachers with knowing when to reject their counsel. And for us teachers, we must never forget the powerful impact we can have with even a stray comment: in the studio, there are no throw-away comments.) 

It wasn’t until I was commissioned for my first symphony (the geological symphony, Formations, from 2013) that I exorcised the stylistic demon once and for all. I figured that if I had a commission by the Geological Society of America, to be premiered by a professional orchestra, that I’d better not blow it. My first thoughts were ones of anxiety: what did I need to write so the “gatekeepers” of symphonic music would approve? But then something clicked: maybe it was just being tired of that proverbial struggle; maybe it was realizing that there was no way to predict what someone else might or might not think about my work; maybe I just decided I didn’t care anymore (probably a combination of all these things). In any event, I resolved to only write what I wanted to write; I would follow my guts and my heart and my intuition and give no thought to what anyone else would think about what I’d done. It was liberating in ways I can’t begin to describe and resulted in a major artistic breakthrough. I haven’t looked back. 

That illustration gives us a clue to where artistic guts may reside. We might look at someone who has boldly blown apart an established genre (for example, how Hamilton blew up the notion of what a Broadway show could be), and we say, “Wow. That took artistic guts.” And it did, but not because it blew up the notion of what a Broadway show could be…or, not exactly, anyway. I think it took artistic guts because Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote the show that he had to write, even though he knew it was going to cause a stir. The guts didn’t exist in the risk associated with breaking conventions; the guts came in having the personal will to create something so deeply authentic. The shattering of norms was a consequence of his artistic guts. 

I was fortunate to see a great example of artistic guts recently which renewed my thinking about this. Back in November, my CU-Boulder colleague Annika Socolofsky presented an evening of songs and storytelling by her “queer country alter ego,” EmmyJean Jenkins. One of the things I admire most about Annika’s music is that it’s always fresh, each piece defying easy categorization and occupying its own particular world, all while remaining unmistakably Annika. This show went way beyond that, however. It was a fantastic evening, filled with original country songs and hilarious commentary, all delivered flawlessly by “EmmyJean.” EmmyJean is a true alter ego: an embodiment of someone who is absolutely and authentically their own person, the “yin” to the creator’s “yang.”

The show brought back memories of my schooling and the imperative that you stake your flag in one particular stylistic territory — and then commit to it. But in developing this show, Annika clearly said, “Rubbish!” to all that. And I think that’s at the heart of what it means to have artistic guts: to follow your Muse wherever it might lead, even if that’s creating music so far away from what you’ve done before that it requires a separate person to embody it.

So what does artistic guts mean for the rest of us as artists? As entrepreneurs? As administrators or performers or anything else? I think it begins with committing to the idea that each one of us, regardless of our role, has a unique voice. And in a world where our pop culture, industrial design, architecture, user interfaces, and pretty much anything else we encounter in our daily lives is becoming increasingly uniform, increasingly subject to the tastes of “influencers,” our unique voice is more important than ever. Maybe the best illustration of artistic guts is to stand up against the tidal pull of conformity and proclaim, “This is me. And I have something to share with you.”

Burnout & the Value Dilemma 

I’m not sure what reactions I expected from my colleagues (at CU and elsewhere) when I announced I was stepping down as Director of the ECM, but I can say that I never anticipated what has been, by far, the most common reaction: admiration for me stepping down on my own terms but also a wistful feeling they can’t do the same themselves. And the more I encountered this reaction the more I got thinking about just how unhappy so many folks in academia are. The reasons are many — a steadily rising baseline of expectations without a corresponding increase in support (salaried or otherwise), the insidious policing of research and ideas, the burden of seeing our students struggle with unprecedented levels of anxiety and stress but lacking the tools to do much about it  — but the results are the same: folks are burning out (for faculty and students alike). And it seems to me to be the saddest kind of burnout (if there is such a thing): smart people dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and the teaching of future generations, for whom a job at a college or university is a dream come true, are bit by bit, year after year, being ground down. 

Understanding all this on a deeper level got me thinking about the nature of “value.” Specifically, how does one reconcile the notion of value in the entrepreneurial sense (what I sum up in my “Entrepreneur’s Maxim” as The Market will Value the Product that Meets Its Need(s)) with not feeling valued by the academy? No sooner was I looking down into that dark well than I received several big professional blows. You know the kind: Thank you for your submission but we regret to inform you… Sometimes you get these and you shrug your shoulders and say, “Well, you can’t win if you don’t try.” Other times the rejection really stings — you’d had a lot riding on acceptance. So now we have another value question: what does it mean when the Gatekeepers of your profession don’t appear to value your work? Do the Gatekeepers play the role of “the market” in the Entrepreneur’s Maxim? Is “value” the same as “acceptance”? As I pondered these questions, I began to experience a growing gut intuition that these questions of value overlap with questions of burnout. But it took me a while — along with the insights of a friend — to help me see the connection. And that will be a topic for a future Field Notes…so stay tuned!

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So: did I say something about this being quite a year? I think we all share that feeling one way or another. But amidst all these questions, one thing I know for sure: we need each other more than ever. And that goes beyond the close circles of our nearest and dearest; it goes for our society as a whole: the only way out of the mess the world is in, is to do it together. And since the arts are one of the few things that can bring people together, that means we have a vital role to play. Let’s start the New Year with a fresh resolve and renewed energy: there’s work to do. Let’s get to it.