arrange • compose • conduct
Design is a vital and often overlooked part of writing music. I’ve long been obsessed with design – thanks to my long relationship with graphic design by way of concert programs, CDs, posters, etc. I spend at least a little bit of every week with visual design. Which is why […]
Don’t make your leadership goal to please everyone you’re leading. That path leads to failure. I’m going to say it again because it’s always constant, and that is leadership is messy, and I want everything to be neat and well organized and beautifully designed, and I hate mess [….] The […]
My (alto) student remarked this evening, “Tenor parts are weird.” The correct response is, “You’re right. And alto parts are weird too, right? But they’re weird in the way you know.” If you’re an alto, alto parts are normal-weird. But tenor parts are just weird. If you’re a tenor, it’s […]
The right amount of self-discipline is just enough. I have enough self-discipline to write here daily since 2014, to create new monthly compositions and arrangements for my Patreon, to plan weekly, monthly, yearly, and multi-year projects. I have enough discipline to write daily, but not enough discipline to consistently write […]
Maybe designing schools to work like factories isn’t such a good idea. The one-size-fits-all, lockstep education approach that is pervasive throughout the world is best described as the “factory educational system.” Indeed, there is some evidence that the designers of modern public education in the 1920s-30s turned to factory owners […]
The question shouldn’t be “What’s next?” It should be “Which is next?” When you finish a project, you are invariably asked “What’s next?” Often, that is an unwelcome question – you’ve just poured all your energy into getting a project out the door. Why in the world would you be […]
Yesterday, I wrote that our education system is the core cause of our young people to be afraid to fail. I wrote, “We need to change direction.” So a savvy reader asked the natural question: “How. How do we change direction?” I think it’s complex, hard, and worth doing. Here’s […]
If you’re too afraid of failure to play Wordle, I blame the education system. I heard recently about some high school students who had given up playing Wordle because the fear of breaking a streak by failing to guess a word was debilitating. They would rather not play it than […]
Writing a piece “without thinking” is a good sign you’ve done a lot of thinking for a long time. Every piece I wrote used to take my entire brain, and hours of work crafting the perfect solution to the musical challenge at hand. Today I wrote an entire arrangement for […]
Once upon a time, “Because I said so” was a valid answer to the question, “Why am I learning this?” No more. Young people are savvier now, more aware of the world and what matters, and more inclined to balk at learning material that they don’t consider to be of […]