I'm at loggerheads about my juvenalia. Should I keep it in my cabinet, or make it public, putting some PDFs online and letting them go out wherever the electron flow takes them?I was not a prodigy, indeed very far from a prodigy, but I did a couple of cool (or at least odd) things as a teenager, and they're a substantial enough part of my musical biography that they still resonate with my current concerns, whether being particular about intonation or being particularly ambiguous about music history. So they're a recording of a search, sometimes stumbling, sometimes sure, to figure out what makes music work and locating the beginnings of possible paths of my own.
Of course, the downside risk of this is that maybe I was a more interesting composer at 17 than I am now -- an impossible rivalry - or worse, I haven't made any progress at all. Oh well, sometimes stasis is a form of resistance, too.
If you can bear to look at anything you did when you were a teenager, it's either a work of genius or you have a cast-iron constitution. Either way, you're a better man than I am.
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