C: What is your arrangement software of choice, or do you write your compositions by hand?

JD: I’ve used for Finale for a long time, but recently I’ve become very unhappy with composing at a computer screen. It’s too impersonal. I feel disconnected from the music. I’ve been moving towards composing more in sketchbooks, much in the way Beethoven did, and at the piano. I find it’s much more rewarding to struggle over an idea on paper, scratching out or erasing ideas that don’t work, and then carefully piecing together smaller sketches into larger ones. I haven’t completely cut the cord yet with notation software but I do write out all my scores by hand first. 

C: Most composers play at least one instrument proficiently. What instrument or instruments do you play, and has this helped in how you arrange or compose classical music?

JD: I studied trombone in college and still play some now, but I don’t think it helps much outside of when I compose for wind instruments. Recently, I’ve been practicing to become better at playing piano and this has helped tremendously.

C: What is your proudest accomplishment in your collection of arrangements and/ or compositions?

JD: Whatever I’m currently working on, which at the moment is a piano quartet and a fantasia for piano and orchestra. Both are more expansive than anything I’ve composed before and I’m enjoying the challenge of it. I feel good about a composition while I’m working on it and overcoming the particular challenges that it presents. Once it’s complete and I’ve moved on to something else, I start to dislike my own work and feel like it could’ve been better. I think this is the curse of being any kind of creative person. Even if intellectually you know that you did your best work, it’s having that feeling that what you created could be better. Beethoven talked about this. But, it also pushes you to do better the next time, and it keeps you on an upward trajectory of always surpassing your best.

C: Do you really collect old books? What is your favorite book and/ or your favorite author?

JD: I do. I love classic literature and I buy a lot of poetry books because I’m always keeping an eye out for poems that would work well in music. I always buy older editions when I can find them. My favorite that I’ve collected so far is actually an 1855 English translation of a treatise on composition by Albrechtsberger, one of Beethoven’s teachers in Vienna. 

C: Can you list your three favorite historically classical composers, and why they are your favorites?

JD: The Three Bs: Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. I love the contrapuntal nature of Bach’s music and the rigorous thinking that that skill requires. Beethoven is the archetypal Romantic—bold and daring, and he labored tirelessly when composing, working and reworking his melodies until he got them right. His music is so burdened by struggle but it finds a way to overcome. The finales of the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, after all the turmoil that comes before them, are two of the most beautiful things in all of music. Beethoven’s music reminds that anything can be overcome. Brahms’s music, like Bach’s, is also cerebral. I really admire his ability to create unity, no matter how large the piece, by constantly transforming basic motives, and how his structures evolve naturally out of his thematic material.

C: When you compose, do you have in mind a subject, person, emotion, or something else? How strongly does this influence the outcome of the composition versus the technical theory?

JD: It depends on what I’m composing. If it’s vocal music, my focus is very much on the text and I strive to make the music match the text’s emotions. In instrumental music, however, I don’t compose with any picture in mind or try to fashion a story to my composition. This is why I never give my compositions descriptive titles. My main focus is always the motif that I’ve selected to be the fundamental idea of the composition. There is, of course, an emotional response to that idea and what I’m writing but I wouldn’t say that it’s my main focus. After a piece is finished, I let it sit for a while, then come back to it with a very critical, technical mindset. You should always compose with emotion but you can’t always trust what you get. Sometimes you get something wonderful, other times it falls short. Many times when editing a composition, I’ll find a clearer, more effective way to write a particular passage, and the original idea becomes that much better.

C: There were various directions as a musician that you could have chosen as far as the genre of music that you compose for. Why classical?

JD: I love the intricacy and complexity of classical music. I find that I can’t just listen to classical music. It invites you to perceive things beyond the immediate sensation of hearing the music. You must work to follow the thought process that led the composer in composing it. Music is the process of thinking—in essence, consciousness—in sound. I’m drawn to music that reflects the depth, complexity, and variety that the mind is capable of.

C: In what sense are you a romantic?

JD: Well, I compose in a style most would call Romantic, but that is only the result of being a Romantic. Romantic art is not a portrayal of the way things are, but as they should and ought to be. Essentially, Romantic art represents a potential, and that’s why it can be so inspirational. For example, the Romantic hero in literature is an abstraction, a projection of the heights to which it is possible to climb. To create this, the Romantic artist must choose which values he will hold in highest regard. It’s a similar process in music. As I mentioned before, music is consciousness in sound. I recognize that reason is mankind’s greatest attribute and is, in fact, what makes us human. It allows us to think logically and to expand our knowledge. Tonality and tonal harmony reflect this process. There is a hierarchy of knowledge by which more complex concepts are built on simpler ones. So there is also a hierarchy of music, where more complex combinations are built on simpler ones, ultimately derived from a fundamental, or tonic. It’s not by accident that tonal harmony was perfected during the Age of Enlightenment. Just as harmony is a vertical representation in music of concepts, melody is the horizontal representation. By means of counterpoint, and melodic variation and development, music portrays how concepts are interconnected and new concepts proceed from old ones. In short, I am a Romantic because I choose to have my music portray the potential of the mind in its proper state, where thought is rational and hierarchical, and all elements combine to form an integrated whole. 

C: What would you consider to be an acceptable pinnacle of your career as a composer?

JD: I have no idea. I think someone else would have to decide that. I don’t plan to reach a point where I feel like I’ve made it and I can just coast from there. I plan to always keep striving to be a better composer.