By George B. McGuinness

While I was making The Cage, I was in an uncomfortable position creatively and emotionally. I was a burnt-out double-major senior at Whitworth university, who, the year prior, had an experience which made it impossible to enjoy making music. I had a catastrophic falling out with my best friend and main musical collaborator. It was so toxic working with them that I had to quit the ensemble I had performed in for three years. Whenever I was making music, I could only think of them. The safety I had once treasured in my relationship to music was damaged. I stopped practicing and my output as a composer dwindled.

I had creatively shut down. I had other outputs like my work as a mathematician and the writing courses I was taking for my English minor, but the absence of music-creation seemed to invalidate those other activities. I remember plenty of attempts to get back into a consistent routine, and several abandoned music compositions and half-hearted jams with other musicians littered those aimless months. With each failed attempt, I became more frustrated and impatient at the fact I needed time to heal. 

It was with The Cage that I was able to produce something musical after so long. At first, I wasn’t so sure about The Cage as a project. It had antecedents in musical history but was still something which pushed the boundaries of graphical scores, and I wasn’t sure if I had the skill to pull off something so ambitious while also incorporating what I learned from the class effectively in the assignment. On the other hand, the kind of disillusionment I had with music at the time made it easier for me to throw my inhibitions to the side. The Cage was never designed to live up to some grand aesthetic dream of mine or to fit into some larger philosophical goal in my work. It was playful and bashful, experimental and ignorant. 

Because the work I was doing with The Cage was so distant from the work I had done with my former best friend, they hardly came to mind as I was working on the project. The Cage was in this nebulous category of being more than just a piece of music, and I think that is one of the most valuable things I had to relearn about making music. A score is never just a score. It’s a visual narrative, a contract between performer and composer, a riddle, and a way of communicating which carries its own political and ideological implications. Not only did The Cage give me a moment when I could return happily and comfortably to music, it gave me a new perspective on some parts of music making which I had always taken for granted. 

When I finally presented the finished version of The Cage at the end of the course, the reactions from my classmates were immediately positive. Not everyone seemed to understand it, but they nonetheless saw how much I cared about my work. The passion that I had in my music before seemed to reappear. However, The Cage was not the start of a return to form for me. I continued to have failed projects and was caught up in preparing for graduation. The farthest anything got along was my early sketching and writing for a mass I had intended to write based on the author Grant Morrison’s run on the comic book Animal Man. My plan was to incorporate what I had learned in the making of The Cage and synthesize it with more traditional music scoring. I still hope to one day finish this work, which was to be titled the Coyote Gospel.It would take at least another year and a half after the completion of The Cage before I would seriously take up composing music again. As of late, I have been working on a string quartet which has very little to do with the ideas presented in The Cage. I feel like I’m finally feeling safe in music again. And even if The Cage ends up being a singular experiment from my undergraduate years as a composer, I really love it for all its eccentricities and the part it played in my return to music. It may not have signaled the end of my exile from music, but it is part of the arduous journey of healing I was and am still on.