arrange • compose • conduct
I have long loved Steve Zegree’s beautiful setting of the Gershwins’ “Love Walked In.” It’s a study in suspension-resolution, it reaches beautiful jazz harmony while retaining excellent voice leading, and it brilliantly teaches expressive singing. I selected it for GRCC Shades of Blue this fall, because while a cappella ballads […]
Over the past year, I’ve developed a quick process for recording myself singing and playing more effectively. I’ve used it to make guide tracks for my students, to be a part of remote projects, and to make a family Christmas card. What I didn’t anticipate was that it would help […]
Every year for the last few years, music from 95 years previous has entered the public domain. 2021 is no exception, welcoming all music published in 1925. We are at the cusp of the peak years of the Great American Songbook. Early examples of the form enter the creative commons […]
Seth Godin has written frequently about using two axes of differentiation (X-Y axes) as a way to target your art. (This post lays it out with a big quote from Godin’s book This is Marketing.) In short: if you lay out two characteristics along the X-Y axis (remember coordinate geometry?) […]
There are many more than 95 reasons to love Alice Parker. She is one of the world’s leading choral composers and arrangers (two sides of the same coin, says she. The only difference is in one case you wrote the melody, and in the other case someone else did.). She […]
Dish management is the secret to a successful Thanksgiving don’t you think? For a while I thought it was oven management – the flow chart that dictated when each baked dish would slip into the oven so that everything was hot and ready at roughly the same time. But a […]
Yesterday, I finally got to share one of the projects that has been occupying my work daily for the last couple of months. This arrangement, a lullaby version of the Beatles’ “Golden Slumbers,” was written in a flurry the week after we lost a former student, Katherine, at 22. She […]
In late September I wrote one of my favorite arrangements in my whole catalog. It happened over about 72 hours, when inspiration met a few free hours, and then an entire unscheduled Sunday. Now, in November, having recorded it (remotely) and prepared for its release, I already can’t remember the […]
One of the strategies I’ve been using to find new reharmonization in my arranging involves writing outer lines first. Melody comes first, always. Then, a strong counter-line in the bottom voice. It might be linear, contrapuntal, or functional (fourths and fifths). With those two written, it’s a question of exhaustively […]
I was flattered when my former student, Harrison Witt, asked me to write an arrangement for his Senior Recital in his Jazz Voice degree at Western Michigan University. When he settled on an “Out Of This World” theme, we came to “Lost In The Stars” as a song to write […]