jedscott

Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait. – From Psalm of Life, Henry Longfellow These are the first lines of poetry I ever knew my heart – thanks to my dad proclaiming them to encourage […]

When I talk about augmented triads, I always play the Nat “King” Cole version of “Stardust.” The string introduction, wow. Note the echo in the strings at 1:11 (end of verse) Which do you think came first? The introduction or the accompaniment?

“Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” -Anonymous Genuinely funny choral music is hard to come by. You can find clever and witty thing, or pieces where a single joke is stretched out to three minutes. Laugh-out-loud choral music is a little trickier. And that’s probably ok, because it’s surprisingly hard […]

After a busy week of working on many, many projects, Saturday is about reentering with family. Today, that meant sketching birds as they came to the bird feeder; my five-year-old did the coloring. Cardinal collaboration. A photo posted by Jed Scott (@jedscottmusic) on Nov 11, 2014 at 10:50am PST Take […]

I love teaching. I have a student who absolutely knows the meaning of subito thanks to my work, and every time I ask the Aces what it means, the smile on his face is gratifying. He’ll never forget. And most of my day-to-day musical activities are with students. But once […]

Today I get my one rehearsal for the Rockford Choirs Cabaret 2014.  Every year we audition student soloists on songs they have selected for a given theme: this year its “The Piano Men and Women” (singer-songwriter-pianists from any era). In other years, it’s been Disney, the ‘70s, Broadway, Gershwin, etc. Then […]

“A painting is never finished. It simply stops in interesting places.” – Paul Gardener You can keep working on this arrangement forever. Improving it, tweaking it, honing it. (for “arrangement” read “painting”, “monologue”, “song”, “short story”, etc….) But it won’t be your last arrangement. It doesn’t need to be the […]

A Journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. -Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching When I drove roughly 1,000 miles to Massachusetts last weekend, there was a pin in a digital map and Google provided step-by-step directions to get there. We tend to think of career paths that way, […]

I loved watching my sons learn to walk. As long as they weren’t near anything too sharp or hard, I would let them fall and watch them get back up. Again and again and again. The fact is that walking is just falling and catching yourself. You need to learn […]