Pippin: Tell me about when you did something that no one thought you could do.so my first thought was to make this about the musical and how literally every detail i revealed about it to OGC was greeted with massive waves of “uh huh? i’m gonna be over here watching you fail” but NO. I HAVE THOUGHT OF SOMETHING BETTER.

back in 2009, i was at this chamber music camp, and four of us were assigned three movements from elliott carter’s eight etudes and a fantasy for wind quartet. this is, to put it mildly, a difficult piece. even today, i don’t think i’ve played anything as difficult, and that’s saying something. we worked at it endlessly. we had coachings, scheduled extra rehearsals during our free time, dropped by each other’s practice rooms to work out little details — it was a lot. finally, a couple of days before the performance, we played for the woodwind faculty of the camp. we had been assigned the piece by the bassoon instructor, who was really into contemporary music, and evidently most of the other faculty had been really upset by this, opining that it was a) not a very good piece of music and b) way too hard for us anyway. when we were done, instead of the usual round of feedback, the flute person just turned to the bassoonist and said “you know what? we were wrong.”

i don’t think i’ve ever been prouder in my life.

Aragorn: What is your heritage? Do you embrace it or reject it?[tw: antisemitism during world war two]so my heritage on my mom’s side is very murky. her family came over early in the 1800s and moved west with the whole “manifest destiny steal all the land from the native americans colonize EVERYTHING” thing, and they didn’t really keep many records. so idk what all is even really there to embrace or reject. my dad’s side is much clearer: his grandfather was the son of a shoemaker in lithuania, but ran away to the synagogue in vilnius to become a rabbi, and emigrated in the 1920s, ultimately settling in new york city. tho there are certainly aspects of jewish culture that have rubbed off on me, it’s not something i actively claim. that said, on tour with the band last summer, we visited one of the death camps outside vilnius, and it was pretty clear that that’s where my great grandfather would have died if he hadn’t come over when he did, and it felt … important to recognize that? like, even tho i’m not jewish in many senses of the word, my own history is still intimately tied up with all that, in ways that are lying there if i ever choose to explore them.

Legolas: What has been your most unlikely friendship, and did it last?hm. i tend not to think of any of my friendships as particularly unlikely? so i’m kind of going to answer the opposite question: OGC and i, on paper, seem like we should be BESTIES FOR LIFE, and in our initial interactions, it did kind of seem like we’d end up that way, but YIKES did that not play out. idk if he has the same amount of feels about me as i do about him, but basically we have … very different outlooks on the world in ways that just pushed us further and further apart. i don’t have a great deal of respect for him intellectually (he has a tendency to write of everything he isn’t instantly good at as bullshit and take pride in gaming the system), and i’ve always gotten the sense that he looks down on my music for not being theoretically-defensible enough. basically, despite all the overlap in interests and goals, very much two ships passing, and the better for it.

Elladan: Have you ever failed to help someone you cared about?i feel like this happens pretty regularly, actually. i feel like a lot of my friends have had crises in the wee hours of the morning that i’ve just … missed completely because i was asleep, or hiding away in my room or something. but there aren’t really any big glaring examples that i can think of?

Sauron: What is your greatest weakness?what is this, a job interview? :P so i was going to answer this with one thing, but then i realized that that’s really more of a character flaw than a weakness per se, so i’m going to say this instead: my need for approval. part of me is convinced, on a very fundamental level, that most of what i do is ordinary, pedestrian, and kind of sub-par, that i’m not really worth the time of the powers that be. i spend a lot of time fretting over whether the part of me that’s convinced that my music is GREAT and of COURSE i’ll be a nationally-famous and historically important composer is just deluded and egomaniacal. 

on the one hand, i think this engenders an admirable humility willingness to both work with performers in the rehearsal room and to throw out and revise my work mercilessly (you should see all the versions of songs that didn’t make it into the final show, or the time i cut down a six-movement, twenty-five minute piece into a three-movement, twelve-minute version that’s actually performable), but it also means that instructors who hit this nerve can do a great deal of psychological damage, probably more than they necessarily mean to. (i am thinking in particular of one e-mail that one instructor sent in the summer of 2012 that still makes me have a mini-breakdown if i think about too much.)

Malgor: Do you believe in redemption?i believe that when someone has done wrong, it is possible for them to act in such a way as to demonstrate that they understand the magnitude of the wrong and are doing everything in their power to rectify it, or at least mitigate the consequences. for some wrongs, i think it is possible to wipe them off the ledger and go back to how things were before, but for some, i think the best you can hope for is a clean parting of the ways.

Caranthir: Do you have a temper, and has it ever gotten you in trouble?i am quick to get indignant, i am slow to anger. i think pretty much anyone who’s spent much time with me at all has seen me indignant — just talk to me about queer representation, or ask me why wagner was a terrible dramatist — it’s really not that hard. very few people, on the other hand, have seen me angry. i’m pretty sure hallow-marshmallow saw me get there with the recording session debacle, but i think that’s about it, at least of people who read this blog. basically: indignant!me is an unfocused campfire: very splashy, lots of light and some heat, kind of going off in all directions. angry!me is an acetylene torch: take all that energy and focus it down to a single searing point. indignant!me is loud and voluble, angry!me is icy and focused. you will know when i am angry, it is terrifying.

as far as getting in trouble: i’m sure when i was a wee thing there were incidents, but i feel like that’s kind of universal to childhood, so eh. the e-mail i mentioned in the sauron section was a direct result of me being too righteously indignant for my own good (the one friend who’s seen it thought that the response was completely disproportionate and that the person in question was “power tripping all over [me]”, but i am obviously too close to the situation to objectively evaluate that claim) and nearly resulted in me being sent home from camp. i guess i technically got in trouble for my sustained campaign of “make your life, even just for a moment, as shitty as you’ve repeatedly made the lives of me and many other talented friends”, but that was a calculated part of it and a sign of my success, so i don’t really count it. (also there were literally zero consequences threatened or possible, so … ?)