Being a composer has never been very practical. And there are lots of fantastic reasons not to choose this path. Those who are even remotely likely to have any stability in their life whatsoever, however, are precisely those whose ears have always remained stubbornly deaf this wisdom. I am, for better or for worse, one of them. I would, of course, live happily making a living in a traditional way, and thus buying myself time to compose when I can – that’s one way a beautiful life could look. 

However (you know where this is going), I’d be lying if I told you I don’t miss the days, (through which I never lived), where a court would hire a composer, or later when an aristocrat would, or later when composer could sell their scores and receive commissions from an ensemble in a thriving musical society, or later when they could sell their records in stores, or even later when they could sell their albums online. I, however, have found myself in a different world – one in which, for all its blessings, expects all things, even music, the most marvelous of things,  to be free. I also share this expectation. 

If, however, you’d like to support me and thus be a part of the answer to the whole “how am I going to make a living from music?” thing, here’s the place to do it. I’d love if you thought of this as patronage – that a society should have beautiful, new music,  and that is only possible with the support of the community. As they say, “it takes a village”. So, I am inaugurating myself as one of the village composers (occasionally a village idiot) , and you can, if you have the means, be my neighbor. 

With neighborly love,

Ben