arrange • compose • conduct
Posts discussing education, both in and outside of music
For teachers, ain’t no tired like a first-week tired. The nights…you crash. It’s easy to think, at the end of the second or third day of school, that you will never, ever, under any circumstances, make it through the year. You say, “I’m going to be in bed exhausted at […]
VI do not know which to prefer,The beauty of inflectionsOr the beauty of innuendoes,The blackbird whistlingOr just after. from Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens I do not know which I prefer,The perfection before journey begins,Or the joy that comes from beginning the journey,The last night […]
Humans tend to think of hard borders between things. Binary. Black & white. But the world is more nebulous than that. Think about a the Mississippi River flowing into the Gulf of Mexico. You might want to draw a line and say, “This side, river. That side, ocean.” But the […]
It turns out, you can go back again. Thirty years later, I successfully and cheerfully finished a backpacking trip with a Scout troop, much like the one I remember on Isle Royale when I was thirteen. This one was through the Porcupine Mountains in the UP of Michigan, and it […]
Are you ready? That’s the message I’m sending to my students this week. Are you ready? Because the calendar moves steadily along. Because there’s so much music-making, learning, and camaraderie in store. Because we’re almost there. Are you ready? I’m rested and rejuvenated from a month of family. Rested, rejuvenated […]
When I was teaching my kids to swim, I had a mantra that I repeated and asked them to repeat. “You’re Always Safe With Dad.” If they were going to take the risks they needed to take to learn to swim, they needed to know that their safety was utterly […]
When a portrait artist starts work, they start with clear shapes and bold lines. Over time, those shapes and lines are softened with shading until the picture becomes clear. But the artist can’t just start with the shading: they build to it. I think experienced professionals are sometimes hesitant to […]
Seth Godin recently wrote: The second time you rewire a system after finding a hum, it might take two minutes. The first time, the time you figured out what the problem was, it might have taken two hours. It’s true! My second virtual choir project was much faster than the […]
My family spent some time recently with a good self-taught musician. He plays a number of different instruments, and can communicate intelligently about music; but to my knowledge he never received formal musical training. I think he is deservedly proud of his hard-won musical skills, but I think some self-taught […]
In his new podcast, Lightning Bugs, Ben Folds sets aside time between interview segments to answer a question from a listener. On a recent episode, he answered a question from someone who was feeling nervous about putting his work into the world. Here is part of Folds’ response: I think […]