One year ago on June 30th I completed work on my Requiem. This work consumed me for over 18 months. When I finished I was exhausted creatively and all I could manage to do was sing with Masterworks Chorale and practice a couple of Beethoven piano sonatas. In just the last few days I have felt the creativity bug strike again and I have begun the "meditation" phase of a new composition for chorus using Shakespeare's famous passage from Merchant of Venice; "How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!".
The meditation phase is simply reading the text over and over and letting it play in my mind as I decide the mood of the piece and how I will try to achieve that mood. Sometimes this phase lasts a very short time, in fact immediately upon inspiration sometimes, and other times I have to let the ideas mull over in my mind for days and weeks. For this piece I know the mood and how I intend to achieve it, but I need to spend some time with the text and let the natural rhythm assert itself before I start to put it down on paper.
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