Meet Derek Jenkins

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Derek Jenkins a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Derek, so great to have you on the platform. There’s so much we want to ask you, but let’s start with the topic of self-care. Do you do anything for self-care and if so, do you think it’s had a meaningful impact on your effectiveness?

I use to believe that to be a professional musician meant that your entire life had to circle around that one thing. Your car radio needed to be tuned to the local classical music station. Your CD player/iPod/audio devices needed to only have classical music on it. Practicing, or in my case composing, needed to be constant, borderline unending. I was led to believe that free time didn’t exist for a musician, if you wanted to be successful. Instead, you needed to be constantly working, consuming, living, breathing your craft from sun up to sun down, and even then you might not be doing enough. When I got to my doctoral studies, that feeling had lessen…a bit. I allowed myself to enjoy non-music things more. But when I got my first full time collegiate teaching gig, I immediately had all of those feelings rush back in. I needed to be “on” 110% of the time. Emails needed to be answered immediately. I had to have a slew of composition projects in progress and even more in an unending pipeline of projects, lest I be seen as unworthy of my position. Even if I did my job perfectly, there was the fear (both real and imagined) of being compared to others and being seen as less than. There was nothing resembling work-life balance. There was work and then there was not-work (eating and sleeping, were about the only activities in that category). Then with the pandemic, music making essentially stopped, and I found myself with time. True free time for the first time in decades. I started to discover and re-discover joys and passions in my life outside of my chosen career path. I started to find me again.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

My primary job is working as an Associate Professor of Music Theory and Composition at Missouri Western State University in St. Joseph, MO (just outside of Kansas City). My secondary job (or rather an extension of the first) is writing music. I am a composer by training and have been fortunate to have written for and worked with many wonderful musicians around the United States and abroad. I strive to create engaging music that can be appreciated by musicians and non-musicians alike. Sometimes this is through a story, an image, or a feeling that I am trying to capture through sound. As I enjoy learning about space exploration, a lot of those stories and images have impacted my music. One piece, “We Seven,” roughly follows the build up to John Glenn’s historic space mission aboard Friendship 7 in 1962. I have several others that explore this passion of mine, and a few more dreamed up. I would like to compose a one-person opera exploring the hypothetical possibility of a stranded astronaut in space. Another project would be to use the poetry of Al Worden (Apollo 15 CMP) and set it for voice, trumpet, and piano. And yet another, is to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Voyager 2 launch with a piece that explores the music on the Golden Disc attached to the craft. Beyond space-related inspirations, I am drawn to ideas that are personal and yet universal. I’ve recently written a trombone and piano piece for my good friend Bruce Faske after the passing of his father. Another piece utilizes pre-recorded audio of people in the audience speaking the names of loved ones that they have lost and then weaving a tapestry of sound upon which a wind ensemble plays. I like to connect to people with and through my music, and it is the biggest reason that I continue to compose.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

Beyond musical know-how and elements needed for the art of composing, I would say that the three things that have most impacted my journey have been: being open and honest, maintaining relationships, and the recognition and acceptance that no matter how much time you have dedicated to your craft there will always be someone “better”. I’ll expand on the last one first, as it seems the most cynical but in reality it is the most freeing. When I started my professional musical journal as an undergraduate student, I wanted to be the best. That desire drove me for so long down my path, but it brought with it frustration, anger, annoyance, self-loathing, and a host of other negative emotions. Once I came to terms with the fact that music composition (a subjective act) was impossible to be viewed wholly objective, I found more freedom to do what I wanted to do. Some people will like some of my music. Some people will not like some of my music. Some will like all of it, and others will not like any of it. Every award committee, selection committee, or decision will be made by a mix of these people, assumably. And therefore, I can’t be “the best” but I can be the best “me.” I now write how and what I want to, thinking only about what I want to do with a piece and of the performers that will premiere it. If it has a life after that, great. If not, also great. I will have stayed true to myself throughout. The other two things that have impacted my journey stem out of a similar source, and that is to be a good person. Nobody wants to work with someone who is terrible to be around and treats them poorly, so why would you ever act that way yourself? I am as grateful to the beginning band student that plays my piece in their school band as I am to the professional musician that performs my music around the world. In both cases, they took time to learn my music when they could have picked something else to play. In both cases, they are spreading my music farther than I personally could. I try to maintain relationships with the people I interact with. Sometimes it is little more than a Facebook message on our birthdays. But I like working with people in bringing my music to life, and I want those that perform it to enjoy working with me just the same.

What would you advise – going all in on your strengths or investing on areas where you aren’t as strong to be more well-rounded?

In the world of music, especially music composition, I find that so often that it is easy to forget to experience the human condition while you are simultaneously trying to write a piece of music that in some way (even tangentially) expresses the same. For so long, I felt I needed to be on all the time, and then some more. Sometimes this was self-imposed, other times it was oppressively bestowed upon me at work. When the pandemic hit, I finally had some forced “down time.” Music performances weren’t happening, so why write anything? Classes were remote, and for a while there I did prerecorded lectures. There weren’t any conferences or festivals to go to. Music life basically stopped (at least initially). So here I was with the one thing I never had “enough of” to satisfy the appetite of my career field and a career field that couldn’t do anything with it. So I began to explore long paused or forgotten hobbies. I did significant electrical work around our house. Adding new lights, rewiring, exploring this craft that my father had nurtured in me years ago. I read, and read, and read. Not just music books this time, but anything. I re-lit my passion for reading astronaut autobiographies, and simultaneously found a true love of sci-fi. And I began baking. I had grown up helping my mother in the kitchen and loved to assist during the holidays because of all of the sweet treats that would pour forth from there. So I decided to tap into that again. I decided to explore and have fun, and almost immediately found myself coming face-to-face with that most temperamental of cookies: the macaron. I had so much fun developing a method to bake the cookies successfully, but I got even more enjoyment from making and devising my own unique flavors. Some of the standouts were: maple bacon, cinnamon toast crunch, old fashioned, s’mores, pumpkin spice amaretto, blood orange jalapeño, and goat cheese-apricot-honey. I even sold them for a short time and had a friend order several dozen of them for a Thanksgiving party. I also played around with other bakes, including some of the challenges from The Great British Bake Off. All of these activities that had for so long seemed to detract from my work as a musician actually made me more productive in the time that I dedicated to my music work. I found that even though I was thinking that I was constantly working on music, in reality I was idling. Now when I get the opportunity to work, it is focus and produces the same, if not greater, results in less time.

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