Jeff Morris

I’ve heard many stories about the surprisingly large and huge amount of failures that many ultimately successful people have faced in time (Abraham Lincoln comes to mind), and comparing these anecdotes to my own experience, it appears that I am on the right track.  It has been difficult to make time for creative and scholarly work amidst my other more “squeaky” job requirements, but somehow (I still don’t know how, really), I managed to complete and submit an extraordinary (for me, at least) amount of creative and scholarly work in and around the month of December, 2007.  The speedy onset of new projects hasn’t died down and given me a real chance to breathe yet, but I did take a moment to reflect on the results of that “mensis mirabilis” and see how it turned out.  To a large extent I don’t care, because I am very happy with the work I produced during that time, and if they are initially rejected, I will be able to use them again.  However, I was thrilled to realize that of eleven (!!!) works I submitted, half of them have already been accepted.  Only one was rejected, but part of it was still accepted in a different format.  The rest I haven’t heard from yet.  

I haven’t ever kept track before, but this already seems like a very good success rate.  After my first so many rejections early on, I learned to send things off to calls for work or competitions as if it were a requirement like taxes: send them, and forget them, and that’s all.  Then, out of the blue, some people would invite me to perform, talk, or would ask to perform or publish my music or writings.  It’s been a much happier way of thinking of things.  Rejection notices just get deleted.  You didn’t win the sweepstakes—so what?

I don’t know of anybody who systematically boasts of failures, however, and I don’t want to interfere with review processes by listing organizations that are still reviewing my work, but here is a list of the outcome of that crazy month:

• Article under review: “Notes on Intermedia Counterpoint”
• Awarded! Faculty development grant from the Texas A&M University Academy Academy for the Visual and Performing Arts for the production of a series of concerts and lectures related to my current interdisciplinary collaborative work, “Time is the substance of which I am made”
• Under review: Another proposal for a paid performance of “Time is the substance of which I am made”
• Declined, but accepted in a different format: presentation and publication of a paper on “Time is the substance of which I am made”
• Winner! “Ancient Chinese Secret” for Laboratorio 060
• Under review: “Chromatic Greys” for toy piano and live electronics
• Accepted! “This is Not a Guitar” for electric guitar and live electronics to be performed by Chapman Welch at the Extensible Electric Guitar Festival
• Accepted! Lecture: “The Maturation of Electronic Instruments as Posthuman Computation Instruments” for the symposium “Instruments of the Post-Prohibitive Age” during the Extensible Electric Guitar Festival
• Accepted! Lecture: “Music in a Mediatized Modernity: Intermedia Composition and Posthuman Musical Instruments” for the Computer Art Congress in Mexico City, Mexico
• Article under review: “Structure in the Dimension of Liveness and Mediation”
• Lecture under review: “Live Concrète: An Intermedia Composition Exploring Mediatization as a Structural Element in Live Performance”

Whew…now back to work.