arrange • compose • conduct
What will the harmonic language of your next piece be? Hopefully, your musical studies and experiences have given you fluency in multiple harmonic languages. Pentatonic; modal; tonal; functional jazz; modal jazz; atonal….the list goes on.As I begin to write a piece, I am thinking about the harmonic language, and how […]
I tend to be less particular about texts than some composers. I know many composers who don’t involve the commissioning ensembles at all in selecting the text, or who retain final veto, or who control the text decision in some other ways. I personally think of myself as a hired […]
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 […]
Take some time tonight starting at 7pm to check out the premiere of my friend Jeffrey Cobb’s new major work, The Lesson of the Lark. Based on a children’s book by his wife, Laura Knight Cobb, it’s a concert work celebrating the centenary of women’s voting rights in a work […]
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 […]
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 […]
Directing focus is a big part of what I think about as a conductor: How do we direct focus towards the voice part with the melody? How do I direct focus away from myself and to my students? How do I maintain the ensemble’s focus on the music at hand? […]
I spend part of most days writing music. And a small but significant portion of that time, every single session, is focused on musical clarity. Why focus on clarity? Alice Parker says that only 5% of the music you can imagine can be notated, so why worry so much about […]
Great songs don’t require rhymes. Great poetry doesn’t, either. So why do so many have them? From Shakespearean sonnets to the Beatles to Stephen Sondheim, rhymes have a massively important place in the creation of both song and poem. But none of it is required. The art form includes them […]