arrange • compose • conduct
Allow me to offer a first listen to my long-delayed canon based on Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky, best known for its appearance in Through The Looking Glass. I completed the piece in late-2019, and would have premiered it with the Rockford Aces at the 2020 World Choir Games. We all know […]
John Wooden famously wrote, “You haven’t taught until they’ve learned.” In my opinion, a teacher should view every success as a result of the student’s hard work and every failure as a result of the teacher’s ineffectiveness. I try to give all the credit for a good performance to my […]
There’s a moment in my favorite sitcom, Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night, when one of the lead characters, tv producer Dana Whitaker, acknowledges her failings in the situation. She (Felicity Huffman) says to her boss, Isaac Jaffe (Robert Guillaume): Dana: We did a big thing badly.Isaac: I know.Dana: Can I try […]
Ben Folds: You don’t end up with a 140,000 word book that you end up cutting down, you actually get there. Nick Hornby: Right. I always underwrite, for a start. And it’s when I’m reading it back and doing a second draft, it gets longer, not shorter, because I can […]
One of my challenges as a leader is to accept the power differential between me and my students. Personally, I tend to think of myself as a peer to my students – students of any age. We are all fellow travelers on a journey of learning, and I know that […]
It’s my first time writing our annual Cabaret Show in two years. In the meantime, I’ve made the switch from Finale, which I used from 1993 to 2020, to Dorico. The element that is most important to me in writing our Cabaret Show is speed – I try to get […]
I remember wanting to learn to mark scores more effectively, and being told by someone, “there’s lots of different ways to mark score. However you do it is fine, just pick a method.” I remember mostly being utterly unsatisfied with that suggestion – what I wanted was a specific tool […]
It helps to codify your thinking. Whether you agree or disagree five years down the road, you’ve given yourself a place to start, and clarified your thinking along the way. As I’ve continued this daily project for nearly seven years, I’ve spent hundreds of hours turning thousands of ideas into […]
I was looking over a score I was finishing up the other day, and I absently thought to myself, “Oops, forgot to put lyrics in.” Only these were horn parts I was looking at. It’s how I know I’m a vocal writer at heart. There is so much I love […]
I grew up sailing small boats near near the northern edge of the Detroit River, in a location where you might see a number of fully ladened freighters in a day. They maneuvered the tight shipping lanes between Michigan and Canada, around Belle Isle and various other challenges. We were […]