Why are we doing this?

There was not a hint of dissatisfaction in the question. I suppose we were an unusual little group, seven musicians aged 18 to 80 with experience ranging from school music student to community orchestra member to professional concert artist. And I suppose it was an unusual thing for all of us to be spending our Saturday on: seven generous people scheduled three hours on a recent Saturday to read through my Sinfonietta for Strings so that I could record the reading, since it was impossible for me to record the performances a few months ago.
The original idea was to put together a recording I can send to other community and youth programs to promote future performances of the piece, and a recording the Carroll County String Project may also use for promotion. We still plan to do that, and that was my reply whenever the question came up. Perhaps I will post some bits of that recording here at marklackey.net sometime soon.
After a while, though, I started to realize that it did not really answer the question. Ultimately, we were doing this for the satisfaction of doing it. For me it was a chance to follow my composition into rehearsal and see it in a new way. It was an excuse to make the two-and-a-half hour round-trip to a neighboring county to be a peripheral part of a rehearsal in a church basement. And I would like to think the players were there for the satisfaction of getting to know their new piece, a composition written for their community string program, understanding how it all fit together. We were all there for the pleasure of creating something new.