‘I developed a kind of maniacal dedication.’

In September, Rand Steiger began a yearlong Rome Prize Fellowship during which he is composing music. He recently returned from Rome for a brief visit on tour with an ensemble called the California E.A.R. Unit and the performance of one of his compositions by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. Steiger is on the music faculty of California Institute of the Arts in Valencia.

When I was a boy in New York, my five male cousins on my father’s side were drummers. I lways looked up to my older cousins, and there was no question about it--I had to be a drummer.

By the time I was 11 years old, I got my first drum set, and by my teen years I was a drummer in various rock bands. I actually got started thinking about composing by writing songs and doing arrangements for rock bands.

I had the good fortune of going to the High School of Music and Arts in New York. It exposed me immediately when I walked through the door to a whole world of music that I didn’t know about. I was quite ignorant about concert music at the time.

I developed a kind of maniacal dedication once I was in my last years of high school. It was the first time in my life where I started spending long hours practicing, and later on in college I spent long hours composing. You don’t really think of it as working long hours. You don’t think of it as drudgery. It’s just something that becomes organic and part of your life, something you have to do and you want to do.

You sit down and pick up a pencil and paper and start playing the piano and later you realize you’ve been writing music for eight hours. But it doesn’t seem like you’ve been working eight hours. It becomes a kind of meditation that’s very necessary for your life.

Once you stumble on something which makes your life meaningful, which makes you happy with yourself and gives you a feeling that you’re doing something that’s worthwhile with your time, then those time boundaries don’t really quite seem as important.

While it seems like a very oppressive life style, so many hours going into it, you end up with a lot of freedom and flexibility in your life.

The reality is that we need to teach, not only for financial reasons, but also it’s a responsibility to the next generation. But, at the same time, an artist needs to get away from the distractions and pressures of the day-to-day life and go where he can work on a big extended project without any distractions. For me, it’s a very rejuvenating experience.

Composing isn’t something that I just go into a room whenever I have a spare hour and start writing immediately. I need to be in a certain kind of head space. To get four solid hours of writing in, I need at least four hours of not writing where I can just relax and have time to think, maybe take a long walk or just sit in the cafe and drink a little coffee.

Where I am in Rome now I’m just completely insulated from the day-to-day realities of life. I have a studio with a piano and drawing table that’s off away from the main building where I live. I’m all to myself. I can go here any time of the day or night and I’m undisturbed. I have no professional responsibilities, and I don’t think about paying the rent or making car payments or buying groceries. Everything is provided for. I couldn’t imagine living that way for too long, but for a short period of your life, every few years, it’s a great thing to get some solid work done.

The common complaint in Rome is the winter cold. It’s not the city itself that’s all that cold, it’s the buildings. In fact my studio is legendary for being extremely cold. But this year they bought a space heater. I have this image of myself this winter in coat and gloves at the piano sitting on top of the space heater.