I'm on the TGV — the “Bullet Train” — even as I type, from Paris on my way to Marseilles. I'm exhausted and exhilarated, as my week in Tucson was full and the premiere on Friday evening was a heady success. I flew back to New Jersey on Saturday evening, and then back to France last night, arriving this morning. Short of a 50-Euro taxi ride, getting into Paris from Charles de Gaulle Airport is a complex affair, involving multiple train transfers, so imagine my pleasure as I unexpectedly found a bus bound directly for the Gare de Lyon train station, where I would catch the TGV. Imagine my horror an hour-and-a-half later when we were still sitting in Paris rush hour-traffic and the TGV was set to leave in 15 minutes. I made it to the train, but the doors literally hit me in the ass as I got on board.

I still (again) face getting from Marseilles to Cassis, of course, and given my bad luck with travel within France, I'm worried. But assuming nothing goes wrong with the trains this time, someone from the Foundation is picking me up at the Cassis train station. I hope.

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My Meditation, Rhapsody and Bacchanal for violin and percussion was premiered in Tucson on Friday night. It was an absolute pleasure working with violinist Joseph Lin (“Joe” to his friends) and percussionist Svetoslav Stoyanov (“Svet” to his friends — he occasionally refers to himself as “Svetty” in E-mails, but you won't hear me calling him that). These two young guys have boundless energy combined with a musicianship and integrity that resulted in one of the most astonishing premiere performances a work of mine has ever received. And the place was packed: it was without a doubt the highest attendance any chamber work of mine has enjoyed.

In recent years, especially since Lyra and my rebirth as a composer, I have found myself wanting musicians to bring their own personalities to my music, to make it their own and in the process make it something different and larger. I didn't always feel this way, but now I find that that rich rewards come from giving my music away to others. I said in my article Advice to a Young Composer that "As much as composing often feels like a hero's journey, in the end making music requires collaboration," referring to the need to treat one's colleagues with respect and approach the music-making process as a team sport. But I also feel strongly that composing is itself a team sport, that my music doesn't mean very much if it languishes on the page unperformed or is performed dutifully but without investment.

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Joe and Svet often had ideas for the piece that directly contradicted my own, but I encouraged them to try everything. “You've written a diminuendo here,” Joe said at one point, “but to me if feels like I should crescendo.” Joe is one of the gentlest, most unassuming human beings in God’s creation, and a giant of a musician, so when he says such things, you listen. “Go ahead,” I told him.

In the last movement Svet played the Bulgarian Tapan, an instrument he specializes in (pictured above). I wrote a substantial solo for him, during which the tempo and rhythmic complexity increase until the violin re-enters and pulls things back to earth. Svet asked me, “Do you want me to play exactly what you wrote here?” “No,” I said, “improvise.” In rehearsals over the course of the week the solo became something entirely of Svet's own making, and also twice as long as I had originally intended. In the actual concert the solo grew even more, and so Joe hung out with his violin, waiting for a cue of some kind from Svet, who had pushed the tempo up to such a frenzy that Joe could justifiably have wondered if Svet was already twenty bars ahead of him. But these are consummate professionals, and suddenly Svet turned to Joe, returned to the prevailing meter marked in the score and gave Joe his cue, who entered as if he'd done it a hundred times already. It was so effective that I have since decided to modify the score accordingly. The end of the Bacchanal is of course the climax of the entire work, given its wedge-shaped structure. Just to help push things over the edge, the two of them started shouting and whooping into the final downbeat. (I’m not going to put that in the score because it needs to be spontaneous to be effective, but I will say here that anyone performing the work should feel free to do so.)

The audience laughed and gasped during the entire performance, watching these two go at the piece this way, watching that Bullet Train coming straight for them. At the end of the first movement, when Svet picked up the waterphone — an instrument that looks like something E.T. might have used to phone home — an audible sensation went through the audience, and as he started playing it the pleasure was palpable. (In spite of my notes in the score to the contrary, the ending of the first movement really must be played with a waterphone. At the first rehearsal we still had not retrieved it from its owner, and Svet improvised by bowing cymbals and the like, but the waterphone’s unique sound, never mind the dramatic visual effect of the thing, makes it indispensable. I’ll probably have to buy one myself to loan out to anyone who wants to program the piece.)

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Tucson is an interesting place in its way. Certainly you can’t complain about the cultural life there, of whatever kind. These concerts of the Tucson Winter Festival fill the house.

But Tucson is also the southwest, which as a political and sociological phenomenon is just an extension of the west coast (says me, that's who), so it’s an environment I’m familiar with. This is a small desert town that one blistering day finally melted into the surrounding landscape and so all of its proportions went haywire. There is a disheartening sprawl to the place, which is especially clear if you try to get around on foot. The main streets in Tucson are so wide that a single “Walk” sign is just enough to make it to the median strip, where you have to wait for the next cycle as SUVs and pickup trucks the size of a house rocket past at speeds approaching the sound barrier — I’ve never felt quite so defenseless. And the fact that the main streets all have median strips pretty much says it all. This is a place for cars, not for people.

I spent the week at the home of my dear friend Dan Coleman, who is composer-in-residence of the Tucson Symphony. It was fun seeing my thirty-something friend play the role of elder statesman: a phone call or two and a needed percussion instrument was located, this or that problem was solved. A New Yorker would dismiss this as a big-fish-in-a-little-pond phenomenon, but seeing it in action, in the context of this town that takes its culture seriously (and I don’t mean chamber music, but culture), I was reminded that the big ponds just aren’t fun anymore. The only reason any of us participates in the life of our community, whether in New York or Tucson or East Jesus, is to feel a sense of contribution, to feel that our presence in this place makes a difference. In this day and age, that comes easier in a place like Tucson.

Still, it’s awfully hot there. I arrived in Jersey City a week ago to bitter cold; I arrived in Tucson a couple of days later to temperatures in the nineties. Today I arrive in Cassis where it’s in the sixties with clear blue skies. This one’s just right!