So how does a composer stay focused on what counts most — composing — amidst the endless ‘non-composing’ demands of a career?  This is something encountered by everyone in any line of work: there’s always that ever-expanding list that draws energy from the main focus.

For me, the category of ‘non-composing’ includes performing, curating, and administration.  Performing can range from playing live electronica with orchestras to DJing in clubs; curating extends from programming new-music at the Chicago Symphony to designing classical/club Mercury Soul events; and administration is just about anything involving that cursed digital-age sprite, email.  There’s a lot of that, especially related to the managing of my catalogue of music (even when primarily handled by a music distributor).

I consider these non-composing activities essential to my compositional life, but there’s no getting around the creation of new work.  That’s the most important thing, and I make sure it receives at least half of my time.  My methods are evolving with my life, but a few tricks continue to help me compose:

• Write first. The morning dawns, and my creativity enters prime time.  That’s when my mind is the freshest, when the California heat hasn’t yet dissipated the morning coolness (and with it, my motivation), and when the caffeine trajectory is on its way up.  Some people do the reverse of this, such as my CSO colleague Anna Clyne: she writes all night long.  Either way, one needs to reserve one’s magic time for writing.

• Resist digital life. My friend and collaborator Anne Patterson, a director/designer who works with me on Mercury Soul, told me that she resists the urge to check email first thing in the morning — and paints instead.  That’s a great plan if you’re a monk, but not so easy for the rest of us — especially those of us out West, where the world wakes up three hours later than New York (where my management and my music distributor need answers before lunchtime).  But that advice ranks as some of the best I’ve ever received.  Email, Twitter, and Facebook are sirens of the digital age: one hears their call, opens a web browser for a quickie, and suddenly gets pulled into the vortex.  So, strap yourself to the mast!

• If possible, leave home. Having a detached studio cottage is one of the great joys in my life.  Perhaps it relates to some man-cave urge to wall oneself off, survivalist style, with weapons and food (in my case, electronic instruments and liquor).  My daily commute, but a few steps through the backyard, nonetheless gives me the sensation of ‘going to work,’ and there is valuable productivity resulting from that.  Even city-folk can have a separate space, since studio-offices can be found at a reasonable expense.  My friend Lorraine Sanders has enough square footage in her two-bedroom condo to hole-up in a corner with a laptop (she’s a writer), but she chooses to go to the San Francisco Writers Grotto because it is ultimately more productive.

• Schedule like a German. We may be artists, but we need to run our creative lives like a gulag — or deadlines get missed.  I carefully arrange my composing schedule so that I overlap projects as little as possible.  Ideally, that means reserving the mornings for composing the latest piece, while leaving the afternoons for orchestrating another piece in its final stages.

• Lean to say No. It’s hard but necessary.  Creating engaging new work takes time, but we all get tempted to accept every project (this includes non-composing activities).   Artists need work more than most everyone else, since we are not exactly receiving government stimulus funds. But for my sanity, and the quality of my work, I try to differentiate between a ‘hefty but reasonable’ amount of work and an ‘insane life-killing’ number of projects.

As life changes, so do the best-laid plans — and with two young children and composer-in-residency in Chicago, I constantly adapt.  For example, I tried composing on the road. That, however, didn’t work so well, so for now my composing and family demands neatly overlap (for both, I need to be home a reasonable amount).  In a few years I may have a different list of composing guidelines, but for right now these are the ones I follow.  Now get back to work!

This question was posed to me so many times over the past month, a whirlwind of music-making that stretched from San Francisco to Michigan to Miami to New York.  As one of the two composers commissioned to write new pieces for the San Francisco Symphony Mavericks Festival, I couldn’t simply wave away the question — even though, to be sure, I’d always rather discuss the music itself rather than the label attached to it.

And to be sure, “Mass Transmission” is not a wild-eyed, Left Coast freakshow of a piece.  It’s not a blizzard of notes (à la “Alternative Energy”), nor a variegated exploration of surreal landscapes (à la “The B-Sides”). The piece is spare, lyrical, and direct: the true story of a mother and daughter communicating over long-distance radio transmissions in 1922.

Scored for chorus, organ, and electronica, the piece has no wall of orchestral figuration to hide behind.  While the choral writing is layered and harmonically elusive at times, it provides singable lines and warm harmonies.  So those looking for their hair to be set afire by the most-notes-per-square-minute encountered something quite different.

What “Mass Transmission” does attempt to do, however, is find new ways to tell a hauntingly beautiful story about human warmth processed through cold technology.  The text is an obscure publication by the Dutch government about the world’s first long-distance transmission facility.  Built in the 1920’s, it connected the motherland with its colony in the Java (where Dutch children were sent to work as pages while their parents remained back home).  Parents were allowed a few minutes every month to hear the speak with their children over these transmissions.

That dramatic juxtaposition required some musical ones: superimposing, for example, the toccata-esque organ music of the Dutch Telegraph Office with ethereal, emotional choral writing.  Paul Jacobs, celebrated as one of the greatest living organists, went into overdrive in these mechanistic passages, providing a mad-scientist virtuosity over which the chorus wove heartfelt lines.

These two worlds are seen through a haze of short-wave radio static, a sonic version of a theatrical scrim.  (Old radio sounds are eerie and alluring — like electronic purring — and much richer than the white-noise on today’s FM radio dial.)  This electronic soundworld morphs into the completely different texures of Javanese gamelan in the middle of the piece, which is a setting of the diary of a Dutch girl about her childhood in the jungle.  Out of tune gongs, light drumming, and jungle noises mingle while the organ lays low.  The final movement returns to the Telegraph Office, where the mother remarks how much this strange experience has changed her.

The piece came off beautifully, and the rest of the Maverick Festival showcased the wide variety of new thinking coming from American musical minds:

Edgar Varèse’s “Ameriques” still sounds as if its ink were wet — so fresh and exuberant, it does just about everything a piece of orchestral music could possibly do.  The SFS took 14 percussionists on the road for that piece alone.

John Adams’ “Absolute Jest,” which required a ‘solo string quartet’ to be stuffed into that burgeoning tour-bus, is a psychedelic trip through Beethoven fragments.  It’s like speeding through a complicated freeway merge and almost colliding with a vanload of madmen.

David Del Tredici’s “Syzegy” is my favorite post-serialist music, a complete showpiece for soprano and ensemble that pushes the extremes of every instrument involved.

Lou Harrison’s “Organ Concerto” brilliantly combines two disparate sonic worlds — a pipe organ and a battery of strange percussion — in a way that sounds absolutely organic.

John Cage’s “Songbook” — well, that piece may just be too ‘mavericky’ for me, but it was a huge, courageous endeavor to bring on the road.  Devoting an entire half of a symphonic concert to a piece of performance art ­was a maverick move in itself.  It’s cool to open a Carnegie Hall concert with, well, a wild-eyed West Coast freakshow.

Thanks to the SFS for including me in this exceptional festival; to Maestro Donato Cabrera for bringing “Mass Transmission” to life; and to three wonderful choruses which devoted so much time to a new and challenging work.