Lawrence Dillon@Sequenza21.com

"There are no two points so distant from one another that they cannot be connected by a single straight line -- and an infinite number of curves."

Composer Lawrence Dillon has produced an extensive body of work, from brief solo pieces to a full-length opera. Three disks of his music are due out in 2010 on the Bridge, Albany and Naxos labels. In the past year, he has had commissions from the Emerson String Quartet, the Cassatt String Quartet, the Mansfield Symphony, the Boise Philharmonic, the Salt Lake City Symphony, the Ravinia Festival, the Daedalus String Quartet, the Kenan Institute for the Arts, the University of Utah and the Idyllwild Symphony Orchestra.

Although he lost 50% of his hearing in a childhood illness, Dillon began composing as soon as he started piano lessons at the age of seven. In 1985, he became the youngest composer to earn a doctorate at The Juilliard School, and was shortly thereafter appointed to the Juilliard faculty. Dillon is now Composer in Residence at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, where he has served as Music Director of the Contemporary Ensemble, Assistant Dean of Performance, and Interim Dean of the School of Music. He was the Featured American Composer in the February 2006 issue of Chamber Music magazine.


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Friday, May 25, 2007
Expertise

I’ve painted a house, hung a door, fixed the plumbing. I’ve cooked a five-course meal, dug a grave, installed a lock. I’m not good at any of these things, but I did as well as I could under the circumstances. Fortunately, nobody depends on me doing any of these things on a regular basis.

All of these activities have given me a lot of respect for people who do them well, because I know that I had to invest a lot of time and effort just to do them passably. I don’t have the talent, patience or just plain dumb luck to master these kinds of tasks so -- at this point in my life -- I do my best to avoid them. Instead, I rely on the assistance of experts.

And I’m happy to pay the experts fairly for their expertise.

I live in a painted house, with mostly well-hung doors and reasonably functional plumbing. If any of those things falter, I’ll call the people who have devoted their lives to fixing them.

When they arrive, I’ll show them the problems, and nod encouragingly when they describe solutions I don’t understand.

Then I'll head off to my studio, sit down at my desk and busy myself with the one thing I’ve devoted my life to doing well.