arrange • compose • conduct
Posts discussing education, both in and outside of music
Get comfortable with not understanding things; it means you’ll get to understanding them faster. If only all realms of learning were like math. Math builds sequentially from one concept to the next. If you understood the last bit, then this bit is the next logical idea. Music literacy is not […]
This is how I started my description of my conducting pattern. (It’s an odd meter piece, with frequent time signature changes and surprising subdivisions.) “You don’t need to know this, but here’s how I’m conducting this.” For a y’all come, multigenerational pickup choir, the theory takes a back seat. And […]
You won’t know the real milestones till later. School years are filled with commonly accepted milestones. First Day of School, Homecoming, the SAT, Prom, Graduation Day, and on and on. But while those events might turn out to be memorable or even significant, my experience suggests that real milestones happen […]
Can you say this to your students? “Everything we do has a reason” is a message I remember hearing many times from Steve Zegree during my time in Gold Company. He followed it by saying, “If you don’t know, just ask.” It’s not essential that we always share the reasons […]
The more discrete and actionable you can make the steps of an educational goal, the better. After graduate school, I had to decide to call myself a musician. It took getting used to, and I think the reason is that I was used to calling myself a music major or […]
As we enter the last few weeks of the school year, this question always emerges: taper, coast, or accelerate? There are situations for each one. We can brake on learning new music after the last concert, focusing on other music endeavors to wrap up the year. I brake on new […]
Don’t think of cheating as an ethical question, think of it as a motivation question. There are two reasons students choose to cheat. The first is out of your control as a teacher: students cheat because they are desperate. Maybe they are working three jobs, have a crisis, or for […]
Some of the best teaching I’ve ever done has been in bringing my students to a concert. When students hear high-level versions of what they’re working on, so many lessons get driven home. A concept I’ve been working on for months becomes instantly understandable because they’ve heard it done right. […]
When you’re listening to learn, listen with an agenda. Yesterday I heard Michael Mayo describe an approach to listening with specific agenda that I think is a very effective approach to intentional listening. Plan on listening to a single piece multiple times. The first time, listen generally, without a specific […]
After you get a vaccination, you’ll often have a day of “flu-like symptoms.” This is off-putting to some, and actually probably accounts for a fair bit of vaccine hesitancy. We aren’t very good at differentiating between the pain that strengthens us and the pain that weakens us. It’s the same […]