arrange • compose • conduct
Posts discussing education, both in and outside of music
Creativity isn’t a skill. A skill is something that you get better at over time. In my experience, you don’t get better at creativity. You get more versed in accessing it, you get better at recognizing better creative impulses, but you don’t get better at being creative. That’s because creativity […]
I dare you to take a longer break. What was the last day you completely didn’t think about work? For me, I even worked every day I was home with COVID this winter. My last day without work thoughts was in early August, on my off-the-grid family vacation. For better […]
The golden rule of improv applies well beyond comedy. The most famous dictum of improv comedy is “Yes, and.” When someone adds something to the scene, you must accept it and work with it as you continue. Only through that open collaboration can you create something all the improvisers share […]
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 […]