After months of procrastination, I began composing String Quartet No.3. I’ve never had trouble starting works since my process relies on intuition, situation and subjectivity so intensely.

One’s third quartet has to be good and I’m freaking myself out just a little. Wolfgang Rihm, one of my great heros wrote his third quartet at the age of 27 and it is one of his finest works. Brahms, my childhood hero stopped at his third quartet. For the first time in my life I have let the blank page spook me. My solution: write String Quartet No.4 concurrently to simply remind myself that String Quartet No.3 isn’t the last word.

I played a similar trick on myself when writing Sibyl Tones, my first quartet – I said that it wasn’t really my “first quartet;” it was only a sketch. When writing my second quartet, I thought it would turn my Sibyl Tones into my first quartet by being a latter movement. By then (even months later), I realized that the situation (and thus my intuition) had changed significantly and that String Quartet No.2 (2005)  really stood on its own.

I believe they are my finest works and suddenly, surprisingly I find myself standing in their shadow as though they were written by someone else and I doubt if I can replicate the feat, let alone exceed it.

Even though I’m sitting here, slouched over in a rumpled flannel shirt with banana chip crumbs in my five days of unshaven facial hair, this is BRILLIANT. I loved this article for so many reasons.

“Today the well-off 55-year-old is likely to be the worst-dressed man in the room, wearing a saggy T-shirt and jeans. The cash-poor 25-year-old is in a natty sport coat and skinny tie bought at Topman for a song. Young men are embracing the “Mad Men” elements of style in a way that the older men never did, still don’t and just won’t. The result is a kind of rift emerging between the generation of men in their 20s and 30s and those in their late 40s and 50s for whom a suit was not merely square but cubed, and caring about how one looked was effeminate.”

I notice this trend at the Met; may it spread to concert halls everywhere. And if you think this only applies to the “normal” professionals and not musicians, think again. Consider the JACK Quartet who are in their 20′s and wearing suits as opposed to a certain perpetually disheveled collective of 50-year olds downtown in June. Or number of highly successful composers under 40 that fit this description perfectly.

I occasionally show up to concerts, sometimes of my music, in suits. Once, in Europe, I was told I looked more like a banker than a composer – it was not a compliment. But this article (not the argyle and plaid) emboldens me; my mom will be so happy.