I am five days too late with this entry but last Thursday marked exactly two years since Lubomir Georgiev passed away after an extended battle with cancer. He was a noted cellist, a successful part-time composer, and my wife’s primary professor during her tenure at Florida State. He was an interesting man (and anyone who knew him knows precisely what I mean) and his musical instinct was second to none. Most importantly, despite his rather odd beliefs on a variety of sensitive topics, we considered him a friend.

I have been thinking about Lubo a lot the past couple of days, especially about some of the more interesting thoughts about music and advice about composing that he shared with me during our brief acquaintance. He had some very strong opinions, and I have been trying to visualize our conversations in an effort to remember some of the more influential, or at least, amusing anecdotes.

As a member of my doctoral committee, he seemed unnecessarily nitpicky about the tempo markings in the piece I wrote as part of my dissertation. At the time, I was stressed, under a monumental deadline and growing more and more intransigent that what I had written was already good enough. In retrospect however, his comments made me rethink the piece and was a valuable lesson in how to use tempo and tempo markings to help create the best music and reflected by the most accurate and powerful performance. (A lesson that has been ongoing for my entire career as a composer and one that I anticipate will continue until I am no longer writing.)

My favorite Lubo memory is of a comment he made to me regarding the use of tremolo when writing for strings. As clearly as if it were yesterday, I remember him telling me that: “Tremolos are the mark of a lazy composer.” While this is of course an overstatement (in typical Georgiev fashion), I understand what he was trying to communicate and to this day pause whenever I consider using orchestration to mask or improve a bad idea. This impulse has caused me to rewrite and very often, considerably improve poorly written or poorly conceived music.

It seems simple to say, but knowing that easy path does not always lead to the best results is not always the easiest lesson to learn. Now if I can just figure out when to “keep it simple, stupid” and when to challenge myself to forge ahead through difficult compositional problems, I will have cleared a major hurdle in my own career. I suspect it will be many more years before I can divorce myself enough from my own process to know the answer to this question but I am certain that I am a better musician and composer for having known Lubomir Georgiev.

My thoughts go out to his friends and family two years after his passing.

На здраве Любо!