Played Off

Unless you’re one of about 20 or so leading composers worldwide, chances are you’re not making a living solely from your art. The barriers for entry into this group are incredibly high, and getting higher: dwindling commission fees, organizations with smaller commissioning pots buddying up to fund a shrinking pool of composers, a sharp, widely felt rise in the cost of living, and so on, and so forth.

Composers aren’t without agency in this system—perhaps there’s a structural reason why composer-performers are omnipresent these days—but, like all creative practitioners, the crux of the vocation still requires dedication, pride, and a certain degree of egotism. Blowing your own trumpet is tiresome, annoying work that draws skepticism, and so the composer needs constant champions to share that yoke. Though some new structures, like the recently founded Music Patron, are trying to make the pursuit of patronage easier, in this niche of music-making, finding genuine, knowledgeable fans of your art—who don’t have something to gain in the professional sphere by backing you—is a rare but tantalizing prospect. 

In David Torres, William White thought he’d found such a person. White, a Seattle-based composer in his 40s, began emailing this aspiring student composer from Macedonia after Torres discovered White’s work on the subReddit r/VeganAntinatalists. (Because Torres is still a minor, VAN has decided to grant him anonymity and change all identifying details about him for this story.) During a year of correspondence via email, their relationship slipped through recognizable archetypes: at first fan to star, then peer to peer, and, later, disciplinarian teacher to transgressive student, landing, finally, at disappointed father to ashamed son. 

Here is the curious and rather sad tale of how an unlikely composerly relationship soured.