We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Clark Lawlor. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Clark below.

Clark, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Do you wish you had waited to pursue your creative career or do you wish you had started sooner?

That’s a good question. My situation is a bit unique, having started over as a composer in my 40s. I had basically given up on my dream of being a composer through my late 20s and 30s, but you never know where life will lead you, and now here I am again.

If I could go back in time, I guess I would’ve started my career at age 5 by taking piano lessons. Or maybe I’d have accepted my mom’s offer to pay for lessons when I was 12 (which was unheard of in our family of 10 kids). Or maybe I’d have not dropped out of music school in my 20s.

For most of my adult life I’ve been plagued with the knowledge that I was behind my musical peers. I didn’t really discover my passion for music until my late teens. I didn’t grow up learning music, and I always felt like that put me at a disadvantage. It’s one of the reasons I dropped out of music school. How could I possibly compete with musicians who had been eating and breathing music since kindergarten?

But I’ve learned a couple of lessons over the years. First, you can’t go back and change the past, and you can’t dwell on your regrets; you can only act now and change your future. And second, your passion doesn’t have to be a competition. So when I started composing music again in my 40s, I did so with the attitude that it was only for my own fulfillment; I didn’t need to be the best, and I didn’t need to make a living out of it.

Now that I’m starting to see a little bit of success, however, I’m hopeful that it can become a full-time career eventually. But if it doesn’t, I’m still determined to keep doing it for my own enrichment. After all, what is life for if you can’t do the things that bring you joy?

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Ever since discovering music in my teens, I’ve had a strong sense that it was my calling in life. And despite being away from it for most of my adult life, I still feel this way. I love composing music!

In music school I aspired to become a great film composer. But then life happened, and I took a different path. In my mid-30s I gave it another go, writing a few pieces for piano & cello, and dabbling a bit with electronic music. But it never went anywhere, and life got busy again. Now, in my 40s, I’ve been writing choral music for a couple years, and things finally seem to be going somewhere.

During a choir trip to Hungary in 2022, shortly after I had begun singing again, I felt inspired to start writing choral music again. The first choral piece I wrote in over 20 years was a setting of a traditional Swedish summer hymn, “I denna ljuva sommartid.” I hired some local singers to record it and I uploaded a video to YouTube. In less than a year it’s received over 29,000 views! Another piece I wrote, “Gift of Winter,” with text by famous lyricist Charles Anthony Silvestri, has seen similar success. I eventually published the sheet music for these with Endeavor Music Publishing. “I denna” has now been performed by choirs throughout the United States, Malaysia, South Africa, and has upcoming performances in France, Hungary, Lithuania, and Norway!

I’ve written over a dozen pieces in the past year and a half, and I don’t plan on slowing down. I’ve also entered as many composing competitions as possible, winning 3 of them in 2023: the International Contest of Choral Composition from the University of Alcala in Spain, the Utah ACDA choral composing competition, and the Edwin Fissinger Choral Composition Prize from NDSU. This year I plan on shifting my focus to networking more with choir directors and building my portfolio of commissions. But mostly I’m just going to keep writing choral music!

The jury is still out on where my composing career will take me in the next 5 to 10 years. It’s still very early in the game, and it takes a long time to build up a reputation. I only have 2 pieces published so far, but I’ve got a handful more sitting with publishers, and another handful behind those waiting to be recorded. Only time will tell, but based on the responses I’ve seen so far, I’m very optimistic about the future.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

I don’t like to use the word “spiritual” because it often has strong religious connotations. But if there’s anything in my life that invokes deeply spiritual experiences for me, it’s music.

I’ve often been brought to tears listening to a powerful piece of music. Music is transporting and transformative like nothing else is for me. And creating a piece of music and watching it come to life—from my own mind? There’s just nothing else like it in the world!

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

Most musicians are probably familiar with the “10,000-hour rule” and some general concepts from the science of expertise. I’ve enjoyed several books on the subject, and although these instilled in me a growth mindset and gave me valuable tools for developing my own skills, they were also a source of some discouragement, reminding me of my disadvantage from all the critical hours of practice I missed out on in my youth.

There was one book, however, that stood in contrast to these and helped restore some confidence in my path: “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” (Epstein, 2019). In this book David Epstein argues that while some fields—like golf or piano performance—may require thousands of hours of deliberate practice, many fields—particularly creative or entrepreneurial endeavors—actually favor generalists over specialists.

When we think of world-class musicians, we often think of the countless hours of practice they’ve endured. But music composition is much different than music performance. Performance demands precise execution using techniques established over hundreds of years, and the only way to compete is with thousands of hours of practice. Composing, on the other hand, is a more creative endeavor. Once you get beyond the basic theoretical frameworks, the only path to success is thinking outside the box and inventing new ways of putting notes together. It’s more inventive and entrepreneurial than procedural, and it requires more breadth than depth.

I’d always seen my meandering path through different majors and multiple careers as a liability or a weakness, but “Range” helped me see it as a strength. Though I often wonder where I’d be today if I hadn’t dropped out of music school those many years ago, I also believe that the wandering path I’ve taken instead has given me valuable insights and experiences that inform my creative endeavors today. These experiences made me who I am, and I don’t know that I would trade them even if I could.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.clarkwilliamlawlor.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawlorclark/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ClarkLawlorMusic
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@clarkwilliamlawlor

Image Credits
Becca Lichfield and Clark William Lawlor