arrange • compose • conduct
The joke goes that students ask, “Will this be on the test?” rather than just engaging with the material regardless. Well, of course they do. We’ve taught them to. “It’ll be on the test” is how we’ve tried to convince students to engage with our material since they started school. […]
One of the joys of singing choral masterworks is being aware of the connection across time. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony has surely been sung by millions of singers since its premiere 1824 (198 years ago!). Getting the chance to perform it connects you with all those amazing singers across ten generations […]
There’s another debt college students are unfortunately graduating with. College costs have ballooned far faster than inflation in the last thirty years, leading to the well-known ballooning in student debt. But that deficit isn’t the only one students have when they leave. So many students I know necessarily have to […]
As you get further removed from the age and generation of your students, how do you maintain mutual reference points? There are at least two ways. You should probably use them both. Stay current! Do your best to engage with current music, styles, trends. It’s important to draw a distinction […]
Back to my old ways… I gained two things during my months of conducting with a mask. First, I learned ever more clearly how to conduct with just my eyes and hands. I, like many conductors, tend to use my whole face, and it was a great education in how […]
Not being Mozart is freeing, not frustrating. There is a mindset out there that people who are around a Mozart, but aren’t themselves at his generational brilliance, will feel jealousy or a sense of personal failure. Call it Salieri Syndrome. But not being Mozart gives you so much freedom to […]
Follow these two opposing instructions in sound checks. First, sing consistently like you’ll sing in concert. Don’t mark, because the sound person can’t get a reliable level if you’re marking. Second, don’t oversing. You’ll be singing a lot in a dress rehearsal/sound check, and you don’t want to overuse your […]
It’s obvious. The best thing about your first year is your second year. That’s often been said to and about first year teachers, and it’s true there, for sure. The learning curve of your first year teaching, and in most jobs, is so steep that the second year is better […]
The real art of teaching is singular. The real art of teaching is figuring out what makes one student tick, and then devising techniques to (a) make them curious about a subject and (b) help them feed their curiosity. It’s not scalable. It’s personal. It’s one-on-one. The best teachers can […]
What you’re doing looks like magic. In 1962, Arthur C. Clarke published his Three Laws, and the third and most famous is that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” As digital technology gets more advanced, that certainly feels true – computers and computer software take on a more […]