The brief said: an original composition, any instrument, any length, not previously performed.
Daniel stared at it for three weeks before writing a single note.
He was a good player. He had passed grade eight at twelve. He had always played other people's music — complex, beautiful music that told him exactly what to do at every moment.
His own music refused to form.
He tried approaches. Wrote scales and tried to build on them. Listened to composers he admired and attempted to find his own voice in relation to them. Played freely and tried to capture what came.
Nothing felt like his.
In February, with five months left, he played his grandmother a recording of his best attempt.
She listened carefully.
"It sounds like it's trying very hard not to be embarrassing," she said.
He stared at her.
"You're thinking about how it sounds to other people," she said. "What would it sound like if you wrote something only for yourself? Something you weren't planning to play to anyone?"
He went home and wrote something he didn't intend to submit. Something about his father leaving and coming back. About his grandmother getting older. About the particular light in the kitchen on winter mornings.
He didn't name it. He didn't perform it. He just wrote it.
Then he listened to it.
It was him. Unmistakably him.
He worked from it for the next four months.
He submitted it.
He didn't win. But the judge wrote: "This sounds like it was written by a real person."
Daniel kept that note for longer than he kept anything else.