I am very much looking forward to contributing to the North Carolina Symphony blog. Perhaps this will be a kind of journal or diary. It promises to be a lively one. That's because, for the following reasons, my 2009-10 season promises to be one of the most challenging and fulfilling of my entire career.

• My North Carolina Symphony repertoire for the year contains a perfect mix of pieces that are "old favorites" ( including Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique ) and pieces that I have never conducted before (including Tchaikovsky's "Polish" Symphony and Hanson's "Romantic " Symphony).

• I recently accepted an additional job as Music Director of the Durham Symphony Orchestra. I have great respect and admiration for this organization. As with the North Carolina Symphony, there is great chemistry between the players and myself. I am determined to be a fervent cheer-leader for them in the community.

• I am composing my first major work in 10 years, a song cycle for soprano and orchestra to be premiered in May 2010 by the North Carolina Symphony and Shana Blake Hill, a wonderful singer who was the soloist on my concert with the Durham Symphony Orchestra last November.

• Obviously, I will have to manage my time very well in order to do justice to these challenges. Maestra Landry has informed me that astrologically speaking ( I am a rare "triple " Cancerian ) I will be in an incredible zone of energy this year. Good. It will come in handy.

So, why composing? I'm not sure why. I began composing at the age of 13, within one year after learning how to read music. By the time I had finished high school I had written two concertos, music for two theatrical groups, a great deal of chamber music and an orchestral piece that won first prize at a contest sponsored by Carnegie-Mellon University.

My interest in composing must have had something to do with my strong need to express myself through the medium of music, a need that has not abated over the years. I suspect that having Leonard Bernstein as a hero and role model also had something to do with it. Like many young musicians of my generation I watched him on his televised concerts for young people and thrilled to the sounds of his musical plays, Candide and West Side Story.

When in 8th grade and assigned an essay with the title " What I want to be when I grow up,” I unhesitatingly wrote that I wanted to be Leonard Bernstein. And little did I know at that time that I would spend the rest of my life trying to catch up to this multi-talented genius. I have not caught him...but I have become a better teacher, lecturer, conductor, composer and musician as a result of my somewhat quixotic goal to be the equal of the very best all-round musician this country has produced.

I had two living heroes growing up. One was Bernstein, the other was Aaron Copland. I felt as a teen, and I still believe, that Copland is America's greatest composer of orchestral music. I never met Bernstein but I did have a chance to meet and work with Copland for a week in the late 1970s.

At that time I was the Resident Conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and he came for a week to conduct concerts of his music and a Bruch Violin Concerto. I had casually met him once before, in a receiving line at the Peabody Conservatory. But, a few years later, I was now very aware that he was an iconic genius and I was absolutely petrified about being in his presence! Fortunately, because I was his understudy and assistant that week, the time finally came when I had to "re-introduce" myself.

It was backstage in his dressing room after a day with two difficult rehearsals. He was exhausted and wanted to sit and relax before going back to his hotel. He would have been in his late 70s then. I mentioned to him that I had composed in my teens but gave it up in college because I didn't want to be a "jack of all trades and master of none." He told me that many people had accused his famous protégé Leonard Bernstein of being just that, but that was all "nonsense.”

He told me that when he was my age, a very wise lady told him that once in mid-life he should pursue something related to but somewhat different from his main occupation. Otherwise, as he put it, “you are always chasing yourself.”

It took me a very long time to understand the full import of what he told me. For Copland, this something "different" meant conducting, which after a slow start, he eventually excelled at. Copland then said, “Don't forget that as a conductor you are competing with every living conductor but as a composer you are competing with every living and dead composer!"

This sobering remark about being a composer is very true: there is a Darwinian struggle in the concert world, a "survival of the fittest" that separates the weak from the strong and indeed, the very good from the superb.

I must admit that Copland's comment about being a composer scared me more than it inspired me! But there were many other reasons for this long hiatus from musical creativity. As a college student, I quickly found out that the tonal, neo-romantic, "melodic" composers like Copland and Barber were considered to be passe'.

The "gods" of this era were the atonalists such as Arnold Schoenberg and the avant-gardists such as John Cage. While at the Oberlin Conservatory I studied orchestration with a very important Schoenbergian, Richard Hoffmann, Schoenberg's last amanuensis. He was a gentle genius and quite approachable and one day after class I asked him whether I would be wasting my time trying to write tonal music. He replied, " As Schoenberg himself said, there is still a lot of great music to be written in C major."

That was encouraging.....but soon after that I was hired to be on the conducting staff of the Richmond, Virginia Symphony which quickly led to me being hired to replace the legendary pianist and conductor Leon Fleisher as Resident Conductor of the Baltimore Symphony. The next 25 years were busy with conducting successes as I conducted most of America's finest orchestras, made my Carnegie Hall debut, was written about in Time magazine, won the coveted Stokowski Conducting Prize and was nominated for a Grammy. During this time, I never looked back at composing until a severe mid-life crisis brought me back to composition and changed my life forever. And that will be the subject of my next entry.