Abandonment, the sad kind

My usual Friday post is to share fun resources I’ve stolen from other people (STEAL FROM THE BEST), but my calendar insists I write about this.

Late in 2023, a good friend who was unaware that I composed — and thus had never heard any of my music — got very excited when I played “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way” for her and in her excitement made me believe that we could actually, finally, pull together the world premiere staging of William Blake’s Inn. Mostly I was excited that someone else showed an interest in making it happen.

Almost immediately thereafter her life veered off in a different direction and I was faced with pulling this thing off myself. I put it out there to the community that we were going to attempt this thing one more time, hoping that people would be interested enough to start workshopping ideas. As the months went on, no one seemed to be.

Denise, melissa , and the traveling troupe of sunflowers sing “Two sunflowers move into the yellow room”

(If you’ve read Lichtenbergianism, you may recall the chapter on SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION and the section on the sunflower puppets. That was the kind of collaborative process I was offering; what’s not to be excited about, right?)

Then last August, I scheduled an last-ditch open house session out at Southern Arc Dance Center, to which no one came, and so I pulled the plug on the whole project.

My problem was/is that I no longer have at my fingertips a great crowd of people willing to join me on my insane quests— Pericles; Winter’s Tale; Marriage of Figaro, you get the idea. I thought maybe I had enough gravity to pull a new constellation of artists into my orbit, but I didn’t. C’est la vie.

In the book, I talk about the three different kinds of ABANDONMENT: setting the work aside until later (see also: TASK AVOIDANCE); releasing the work to its AUDIENCE (by far the scariest of the three); and naturally, plain old, toss-it, forget-about-it ABANDONMENT. This is the last of those. I don’t think I’m going to be trying to produce William Blake’s Inn any time soon.

What prompted all this? Today, March 14, 2025, was to be opening night for the world premiere of William Blake’s Inn, music by Dale Lyles, lyrics by Nancy Willard. I had put it on my calendar and forgotten about it until this month rolled around. Perversely, I left it on there, and now my computer is reminding me that my magnum opus will finally have its AUDIENCE.

It’s not a cheerful reminder.