Try is a uniquely self-aware and self-referential work for me. It was commissioned by the South Carolina Band Directors Association thanks to SCBDA President Leslie Gilreath—an incredible composer, conductor, educator, and human being whom I am deeply grateful to call my friend and colleague. When I received the commission, I was in a period of heightened stress; it was late in a busy, difficult school semester, I had been feeling quite “stopped up” creatively, and to top it off, I was vicariously stressed for my partner, who was also going through a period of heightened stress with her job and career. The prospect of composing this new piece scared me, and I grew anxious that I’d have to back out of the commission out of an inability to produce anything of quality. But as I acknowledged and worked with the fear I was feeling, I realized that I had began repeating a particular phrase to both myself and my partner during our shared time of stress: “it doesn’t matter whether or not you always succeed; it just matters that you always try”. I was shocked with a fresh consciousness for the fact that my fear and anxiety didn’t have to stop me; that I could not allow them to do so. This phrase became a mantra, reminding me that it’s not the achievement that matters in the end but the human need to strive. Put simply, I needed to try.
In that spirit, Try begins with a musical “attempt”—at what is left up to the listener’s imagination. However, the attempt does not succeed, and we come crashing down and grind to a halt. But that’s okay; we tend to our scrapes and our bruises, brush ourselves off, stand back up, and get to work. We reflect back on our attempt, analyzing our failure, and we practice. We struggle, sure; we get frustrated. But that doesn’t stop us; we acknowledge our feelings and we push forward, doing the best we can with what we have and know. Eventually, we look back on our growth, and we feel ready to try again. We take a second attempt, and this time, making use of all that we have practiced and all that we have learned from our failures, the differences in our attempt lead us to success. It is ecstatic and enrapturing to achieve what we’ve strived so hard to do—but in the end, what matters most is that we set our minds to something and we tried. That is the greatest success we can ever seek to achieve in this life of ours.