Stellan Hinz

I’ve never really agreed with the sentiment that any discrete period of life feels like it’s going by faster than it should. People mainly say this about high school and college. They say that those four years are over before you know it. I, by contrast, often feel trapped in whatever stage of life I am in, and recollect those times as lasting a while. This is the case for the last 10 months.

In that time I regularly worked 45-50 hours a week for my day job, taught saxophone lessons which took another 5 hours a week including the commute, and I tried not to disappear entirely from my circle of friends. I did not finish a creative project in that entire 10 month period. I traded creative productivity for financial stability and (minimal) sleep. It has been perhaps the worst 10 months of my life.

I write this because I have left that job. My schedule is cleared up and I have again been able to make progress on music and other endeavors. One of those other endeavors, which I wanted to do right out of school and would have been slightly more relevant, is to document and reflect on my time as a music composition major. I want to describe the composition of every major work from my time as an undergrad and reflect on how that changed. 

I write this as a blog post instead of a personal document because I am somewhat incapable of producing something without an audience. I hope that this series of blog entries will be useful, especially to someone like the person I was when I decided I wanted to major in music composition even though I wasn’t a very accomplished musician and had only been composing for a brief time in High School. I must preface that with the somewhat obvious statement that I am not (yet) a successful composer by any metric. This post started with the admission that I haven’t written anything in 10 months after all. I did, however, improve a lot through my education and won the respect of some of my peers and the composition faculty if I dare say so. Furthermore, I find that if I were to wait to write this memoir of an undergrad when I became successful it would be of little use to me and even less to anyone else. While my thoughts are fresher in my head, and my notebooks from the time not lost or decomposed, I will be able to reflect more earnestly and more honestly.

There is also another goal for this blog series. I think that a university education is important even as the proliferation of AI and the poor job market make it less of an attractive capital investment when judging by ROI. In my opinion getting the most out of a college education, as far as I am qualified to say, requires investing a lot of one’s self into their studies and in some ways rejecting the mindset of ROI. It took me some time in college to realize that and while I don’t think the time before that was wasted, if I can help a young student make the most of their education (not their tuition) I would be delighted. I plan to do this by sharing some of my thoughts about being a college student framed around the pieces I wrote in that time.

I also think the thesis of this blog series will become more clear if I explain the title of this forward. Stress is pretty self explanatory, but “disintegration” may be a little more opaque. I mean quite literally that I became less integrated with my own life. I dissolved away from my community and my previous mode of life. There’s a John Green quote I find relevant to this situation. During a TEDx talk Green described his transition from school, to his first job, to being a professional novelist like this:

I had one learning community in high school, then I went to another for college, and then I went to another, when I started working at a magazine called “Booklist,” where I was an assistant, surrounded by astonishingly well-read people. And then I wrote a book. And like all authors dream of doing, I promptly quit my job… And for the first time since high school, I found myself without a learning community, and it was miserable. I hated it.

I worked in the distribution arm of a North American beverage brand was miserable. I hated it. I hated it not only because I lost my connection to my previous community of learning, but I found in my new community of grocery store managers and assorted vendors a community deeply disinterested in learning. 

There was no buy in. Everyone’s job was too profit optimized for a commitment to practice to have room to settle in. The practicalities of the job made innovation from my position impossible. The only option was to pick up the slack inherent in the system, as everyone was expected to do.

I got the impression in that job that no one I met was interested in building something. They were following the incentives put upon them by corporate priorities. The sublime and fulfilling aspects of my previous creative community and the community I hope to find in the future was completely absent. To live and work with people you believe you can build things with is a kind of beauty that should not be forsaken.
Undergrad is a lot of things. There’s a lot for people to figure out in that time. I certainly had a lot to figure out. It is truly a place to build and grow as a person and a musician. It can only be that place if one commits themself to it, and if one acts as a generous steward to that community. I hope by chronicling my journey to being, I hope, a good steward for my collegiate community I can convince a prospective reader to buy into theirs.