arrange • compose • conduct
My son and I play what we’ve come to call “The Doodle Game” whenever he’s home sick from school. It’s simple: one of us draws the same doodle on two pieces of paper. We each take one and “finish” the doodle into a drawing. Sometimes we might put a limit […]
The longer I teach, the more I see ghosts. I see teenagers in my rehearsals who are now in their thirties, raising kids and in established careers. I rehearse pieces and can hear other groups from other years with their own interpretations. I don’t talk about these shades of the […]
Teachers, I beg you ramp up your self-care now. Everything about teaching right now feels impossible. Fully Remote Teaching: Impossible.Hybrid Teaching: Impossible.In-Person Teaching: Impossible. It all feels impossible. And so you are doing the impossible, day after day. It takes extra support to do the impossible, and with the sheer […]
Until you learn attain sufficient music literacy, every piece you learn is an island. One of the biggest gifts music literacy can give you is the gift of perspective. That is, the ability to recognize common characteristics from one piece to the next. Imagine you are an explorer in the […]
Having a Plan B is a good idea. Having a Plan F might be self-sabotage. Don’t have too many contingency plans. It can be tempting to spin out many follow-up plans, in the form of “And if A doesn’t work, I’ll try B, and if B doesn’t work I’ll try […]
Here’s a little flow chart for how to interact with your own mistakes. I made a new mistake when I did this chart. And I learned how to fix it for this photo.
The most we can achieve together in an ensemble are the lowest aspirations of any one member. I refuse to use the phrase the “only as strong as the weakest link” because someone with low aspirations isn’t weaker than anyone else. It’s just that their aims are different. It’s okay […]
I attended a virtual session through Sing! The Toronto Vocal Arts Festival yesterday. They, like everyone else, have pivoted to virtual offerings. I admit I didn’t desperately need Anders Edenroth’s session Recording From Home. I’ve done a lot of recording, both in the home and in the studio, and I’m […]
I attended a great Zoom masterclass led by the great Anders Edenroth, of The Real Group, today. He spent the hour talking about his philosophies of recording, and especially about how to adapt to the new normal and make quality recordings in the home. But I also wrote down this […]
I am preternaturally comfortable with silence as a teacher. But remote teaching is challenging me. I like almost nothing better than the 10-12 seconds of absolute silence that it sometimes requires for students to move past the fight-or-flight reaction to a question, think about it, and come to an answer. […]