It’s December 30th, 2023. It’s the day before my 40th birthday.

I reflect on things quite a lot – sometimes for good, sometimes to my own detriment – and I find myself thinking back about my last decade, particularly the creative aspects of it. The teaching part was generally really great, but I’m not going to focus on that here. Let’s dig into the decade of writing:

My early 30s started with a bang. In the first year of my 30s, I had a commission from the Icelandic Festival of Manitoba for a piece to be premiered by our civic orchestra, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. I attended a workshop in Banff, where I really honed my skills and met lots of other artistic folks. I started and finished Icelandic Folk Song Suite, which was my most technical work to date and had it premiered by our civic wind ensemble, the Winnipeg Wind Ensemble. I also finished scoring a Betty Boop rhythm game which had me writing 45 minutes of original music in every style imaginable (and starting a terrific friendship with the game’s creators). 2014 was a heck of a year.

2015 wasn’t so bad either. I scored a Warhammer 40K mobile game called Horus Heresy: Drop Assault and was commissioned by my friend and colleague, Alexis Silver at Sisler High School, to write a piece for her band. That piece, The Meeting Place, eventually went to print with C. L. Barnhouse in 2023 and made it onto the Ontario Band Association festival syllabus).

In 2016, I was commissioned to write a trombone octet, which became Prairie Trombone Suite. I also scored a short film about the early life of Carl Sagan called Star Stuff, which started a creative relationship with Croatian director Ratimir Rakuljic. It’s one of my very favourite projects to date. This year also began a huge run of arranging for the WSO. I had become one of their first-call arrangers and I got to work with some amazing local and national artists. I wasn’t writing original music, but it was so cool to write for that ensemble and to work witth these unreal vocalists (it also helped pay the bills, so there’s also that).

2017 saw the start of a wonderful musical relationship with Dr. Nora Wilson at Brandon University with the commission of O Magnum Lux, the first of three commissions we’d do together. I also arranged music for the WSO Canada Day show at the Forks with vocal phenom, Faouzia, which is probably the coolest artist collaboration I’d ever done. Hearing her sing stopped me in my tracks, I remember listening to an early YouTube video of her and screaming from my study because I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing. And just one more thing: I started work on the best game soundtrack I’d ever written (and still have ever written): Ship Out of Luck. Sadly, it never went to market, but this past year, I’d gotten the blessing of the developer to share the soundtrack online, so at least it’s available now. All this is great, but it’s still not the most important thing that happened in 2017.

That year, I was awarded the commission to compose a piece on the passing of Ken Epp, the former president of both the Manitoba and Canadian Band Associations. It was for band and choir and is one of the coolest premieres I’d ever experienced, the band playing the parts on stage, the choir singing the parts in the stands, and me in the middle, surrounded by music. It is called Transcendent Light and was a visceral experience, but still not the important thing that happened in 2017.

I also started my Master’s that year at Brandon University, studying with both Dr. T. Patrick Carrabré and Dr. Wendy Zander. I needed to up my game. I now knew what I didn’t know and so the work began. This was an incredibly busy time for me. It felt amazing being back in school as an adult, who knew how to work and study. I had the year off of teaching, so I could really focus. I wrote my euphonium concerto and Colossus as my big works for that year, but while quite a lot of this was important, it still wasn’t the most important thing that happened that year.

That prize goes to the birth of our first child and, as one might imagine, everything changed after that. I’m not sure if I consciously knew at the time, but a switched flipped and, all of a sudden, everything was different. I was still driven to create, but it had changed. No matter what I had to do, I always had time to be with that little kid, whether it was 4pm or 4am (and that’s still true). The love that you feel as a parent for your child is overwhelming and amazing. There’s nothing like it. So all of a sudden, I was Dad, which is the right person to be, but there wasn’t much room for any other part of me. I was told it would happen, but hearing about and going through it are two very different things.

The next five years saw some cool things. In 2018, Arizona State University did the American premiere of Transcendent Light, which was incredible (and the first time my wife and I were away from our small fry). I finished my masters, wrote some chamber music, collaborated with an Indigenous drumming group to write Cardinal Elements, and had very few (but not no) commissions. Things were different.

I didn’t know at the time, but I was feeling creatively a bit lost, and a big part of that was because so much of my focus was on my child, and then we had another, and both my wife and I were back in the saddle of sleepless nights and midnight feedings, and also engaging a four-year old too.

Oh, also a pandemic, but you know about that. It was terrible, not just for the fear and mental health, but we had no childcare for almost two years. Between that, teaching music during that insane time, and trying to stay healthy, it was more than I could bare. When our daycare had informed us that there would be no summer childcare in 2020, I literally smashed the shopvac against the garage – not my proudest moment, but that’s where we were.

In that time (and perhaps slightly before), I had cultivated new hobbies like table-top gaming, creative writing and artisan pipemaking. I was writing less and less music and it didn’t feel good, but I told myself that I didn’t have it in me, or that I didn’t have enough time, or that my teaching job was too intense. I always had a reason not to compose.

I went to Midwest for the first time in 2022 and it was really challenging. Between work being mad (for good reasons) and my wife being mad (also for good reasons), my luggage getting lost, and the storm of the century resulting in me almost missing Christmas, I had a really bad time. And while I quasi-lined up a commission for that year (that didn’t transpire), the experience resulted in zero sales, as far as I could tell. I saw some good clinics, but it meant time away from the booth that my colleague, Matt Neufeld, and I had agreed to, leaving him hanging more than I would have liked. Speaking about leaving someone hanging the week before Christmas, my wife had some thoughts about that time.

I had one commission with Dr. Nora Wilson in 2023, which I’m really proud of, and one new band premiere with Black Bear, but it put the cap in a pretty dry spell…

Which brings us to now, just after Midwest 2023.

I did it right this time. My family and I made Christmas memories before I left and I didn’t leave my wife holding the bag. I pulled my weight at work and was a team player for our big Christmas show. I was at the booth while at the conference, I was making connections, I went out at night with new colleagues, I met people, I set up new projects for next year. Watching Matt work beside me was also inspiring because he had this drive that I needed to see and be around.

Now that my kids are older, there’s more room for creative work. As my neighbour said, it’s now not just Dad, it’s Dad AND. I still hang out with my kids all the time, but they’re also playing together and making their own games, drawing together, doing play-doh, or just goofing around. The super intense period appears to be drawing to a close.

My wife and I are also sleeping again. Our kids didn’t sleep, period. We didn’t sleep for three or four years and I was a crazy person. I didn’t know it then, but I look back at that person and I can barely recognize them, just drifting through life, being everywhere and nowhere all at the same time (more on that later).

But not now. Now, I feel fired up. I’ll write another post tomorrow with some of my dreams and intentions for this next decade. I’m ready.

-Kenley