After the trip I had to San Juan, I wrote the poem in my house. After a day or two I was on a study group session with a dear friend, Kevin Santana. When we had a break, I showed him the poem, and he told me I had to add music to it and add it to the chapbook. Then I started think that I could add music to it, but the question awoke inside of me How?! I don’t know about other composers, but for me I start a project and I leave it, since I don’t know how to finish what I start. After a few minutes I started to whistle a tune (which came to be the motif,  a short succession of notes producing a single impression; a brief melodic or rhythmic formula out of which longer passages are developed). After whistling 6 notes, I knew that I had the beginning of the song/poem. I had my MacBook Pro so, I started to check write the notes in my finale 2011. After 15 minutes of deciding, what tone served best for a 4-8 voice piece for a mixed choir, checked the meter. After analyzing that I had an iambic pentameter, I decided the song was best in a 2/4 with a few changes in meter, as the song progressed. After deciding all of this, I started to write on the blackboard we had in the classroom., you can see this in these pictures:

           (As you can see here, this is the lyrics with the beat.)

          (In this picture you have the motif of the song.)

After doing all of this, I started to write and had the first phrase in no time. After a day or two I had the poem and the song. here you have the lyrics and an excerpt of the sheet music and the audio of the song.

And here is the first phrase of the song:

And here is the audio of the song.

The Berlin Study

In the early 1990s, a trio of psychologists descended on the Universität der Künste, a historic arts academy in the heart of West Berlin. They came to study the violinists.

As described in their subsequent publication in Psychological Review, the researchers asked the academy’s music professors to help them identify a set of stand out violin players — the students who the professors believed would go onto careers as professional performers.

We’ll call this group the elite players.

For a point

of comparison, they also selected a group of students from the school’s education department. These were students who were on track to become music teachers. They were serious about violin, but as their professors explained, their ability was not in the same league as the first group.

We’ll call this group the average players.

The three researchers subjected their subjects to a series of in-depth interviews. They then gave them diaries which divided each 24-hour period into 50 minute chunks, and sent them home to keep a careful log of how they spent their time.

Flush with data, the researchers went to work trying to answer a fundamental question: Why are the elite players better than the average players?

The obvious guess is that the elite players are more dedicated to their craft. That is, they’re willing to put in the long,Tiger Mom-style hours required to get good, while the average players are off goofing around and enjoying life.

The data, as it turns out, had a different story to tell…

Decoding the Patterns of the Elite

We can start by disproving the assumption that the elite players dedicate more hours to music. The time diaries revealed that both groups spent, on average, the same number of hours on music per week (around 50).

The difference was in how they spent this time. The elite players were spending almost three times more hours than the average players on deliberate practice — the uncomfortable, methodical work of stretching your ability.

This might not be surprising, as the importance of deliberate practice had been replicated and reported many times (c.f., Gladwell).

But the researchers weren’t done.

They also studied how the students scheduled their work. The average players, they discovered, spread their work throughout the day. A graph included in the paper, which shows the average time spent working versus the waking hours of the day, is essentially flat.

The elite players, by contrast, consolidated their work into two well-defined periods. When you plot the average time spent working versus the hours of the day for these players, there are two prominent peaks: one in the morning and one in the afternoon.

In fact, the more elite the player, the more pronounced the peaks. For the best of the best — the subset of the elites who the professors thought would go on to play in one of Germany’s two best professional orchestras — there was essentially no deviation from a rigid two-sessions a day schedule.

This isolation of work from leisure had pronounced effects in other areas of the players’ lives.

Consider, for example, sleep: the elite players slept an hour more per night than the average players.

Also consider relaxation. The researchers asked the players to estimate how much time they dedicated each week to leisure activities — an important indicator of their subjective feeling of relaxation. By this metric, the elite players were significantly more relaxed than the average players, and the best of the best were the most relaxed of all.

Hard Work is Different than Hard to Do Work

To summarize these results:

• The average players are working just as many hours as the elite players (around 50 hours a week spent on music),
• but they’re not dedicating these hours to the right type of work (spending almost 3 times less hours than the elites on crucial deliberate practice),
• and furthermore, they spread this work haphazardly throughout the day. So even though they’re not doing more work than the elite players, they end up sleeping less and feeling more stressed. Not to mention that they remain worse at the violin.

I’ve seen this same phenomenon time and again in my study of high achievers. It came up so often in my study of top students, for example, that I even coined a name for it: the paradox of the relaxed Rhodes Scholar.

This study sheds some light on this paradox. It provides empirical evidence that there’s a difference between hard work and hard to do work:

• Hard work is deliberate practice. It’s not fun while you’re doing it, but you don’t have to do too much of it in any one day (the elite players spent, on average, 3.5 hours per day engaged in deliberate practice, broken into two sessions). It also provides you measurable progress in a skill, which generates a strong sense of contentment and motivation. Therefore, although hard work is hard, it’s not draining and it can fit nicely into a relaxed and enjoyable day.
• Hard to do work, by contrast, is draining. It has you running around all day in a state of false busyness that leaves you, like the average players from the Berlin study, feeling tired and stressed. It also, as we just learned, has very little to do with real accomplishment.

This analysis leads to an important conclusion. Whether you’re a student or well along in your career, if your goal is to build a remarkable life, then busyness and exhaustion should be your enemy. If you’re chronically stressed and up late working, you’

re doing something wrong. You’re the average players from the Universität der Künste — not the elite. You’ve built a life around hard to do work, not hard work.

The solution suggested by this research, as well as my own, is as simple as it is startling: Do less. But do what you do with complete and hard focus. Then when you’re done be done, and go enjoy the rest of the day.

(Photo by RKHawaii)

**This is a guest post from  http://calnewport.com/blog/2011/11/11/if-youre-busy-youre-doing-something-wrong-the-surprisingly-relaxed-lives-of-elite-achievers/

Twists and turns
Drowned dreams
Muffled speech
The moon slowly flickers
Beside her feet
Light Orange penetrates the moon

Below her soul a restful Earth resounds
Owls, Crickets and Coquís sing:
“Peace on Earth, let mankind sleep!”

As this ambiance shines trough
The sun, it all it’s glory, seeps through
As the lone Virgin lulls to sleep
As the lone Virgin falls asleep.

José Clavell Acosta
2011®

I see, just see, skyward, great cloud-masses;
Mournfully, slowly they roll, silently swelling and mixing;
With, at times, a half-dimm’d, sadden’d, far-off star,
Appearing and disappearing.

(Some parturition, rather—some solemn, immortal birth: 10
On the frontiers, to eyes impenetrable,
Some Soul is passing over.)

-by: Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Moderator stands
Time’s up
No turning back
She introduces the song
Silence ensues
As a reminder of what I must do

Why am I so nervous?
It’s because you are there…
My friends and my family
And everybody I care for…

Legs flailing
My body shaking and I
Must stay cool and collected
It’s not my first time…

A head nod
He starts to play
Arpeggios fill the sky
As my body churns inside
Sighing and breathing slow
It’s all I’ve wanted so go
Share your talent with them
As God’s admiration he pushes
All my fears away

Piano e seguro de ti
I start to sing
Santa Cecilia
Don’t fail me now
I close my eyes
And start to express…

“Respiriamo insieme…”
I go silent
As the piano continues to play
The invisible violins, violas,
cellos and basses materialize

A forte plays on the violin “Protagonista del tuo amor
non se so sia magia o realta”
as the bel canto ensues
Expressing everything
the public looks at me
as I finish this amore melodía

Heart racing
Hands shaking
Palms sweating
Claps break the final chord
A smile on my face
A bow and present he who accompanied me in aria

All for you …
This night has been

José A. Clavell Acosta
2011

___________________________________
i A sequence of notes or chords comprising the close of a musical phrase.
ii Notes of a chord played in succession.
iii Patron Saint of Musicians.
iv “Cinema Paradiso (Se)” Lyrics written Ennio Morricone.
v Cinema Paradiso (Se) Lyrics written Ennio Morricone.
vi A lyrical style in singing
vii A group of notes that sound together.
viii A long, accompanied song.

Jose A. Clavell ®

To get full effect or grasp, please listen to Eric Whitacre’s “Sleep”

Listen to Chopin’s Piano Concerto in E minor Op.11
(First Movement)

Knots fill my back as the sound of silence lurks its head. The staring contest begins as fire consumes me and I slam my hand on the espresso table and the centerpiece falls and the sound of water dripping serves as a backdrop to what nobody expected to hear.

“Don’t YOU have anything to say, you made this mess and you don’t give a damn, do you? You’re just waiting for her to solve all your problems again, aren’t you? After how many years? 40? 30? You are a lazy ass man, who doesn’t even deserve to have her? Every mess you make she just cleans it up for you and you never appreciate her, or even thank her for all that she’s done to you!” He just sits there in silence as I bark and scream, never looking at me… just at the espresso table as sobbing ensues around me-

The young man with black hair, approximately 5’9’’ breaks the silence: “What’s done, it’s done. We have to live with the consequence of the actions he committed. Everything will be all right just- (screaming at the top of my lungs) Why do you say that, YOUR life hasn’t been like mine?! Your life and hers (pointing to the 34 year old woman, eyes full of disbelief) doesn’t even compare to what I’ve lived through. You only visit once in a while, only when you actually give a shit. She visits almost everyday but I on the other hand, I am and always be the one whose stuck here in this situation! You say you will help but the reality is that you DON’T. You- “This wasn’t supposed to happen… this… this…” Said the 50-year-old woman. “I never thought this would happen to me… to us… where and what are we going to do? There is no place for us. This is the last place they can take… Why are they taking it? This wasn’t supposed to happen… Why?… Why? “Sobbing hysterically making everybody silent. The man with the blue shirt looks at us and just says “I’m sorry”. He stands up and leaves, turning on the TV. in the room beside us.

Characters:

50-year old woman

34-year-old woman

Man with a blue shirt

Man with black hair

19-year-old man

Screaming and shouting my name
I wake up from my treasure filled sleep,
Covered in the jewels I robbed
Showing no mercy as my masters shouts
I knock them down, I get on top of them
my deathly white daggers scrape their face
Whiplash fills their bodies
As I triumphantly waits for my next victims