arrange • compose • conduct
Posts discussing education, both in and outside of music
I am committed to doing better as a leader, educator, composer/arranger, and choral musician to address systemic racism and white privilege in the choral world, and specifically in the work I do. I was moved to sign the Black Voices Matter Pledge after seeing its tenets shared yesterday; it was […]
Chefs often say that properly salting food as you cook it doesn’t make it taste salty – it makes it taste more like itself. Meats taste meatier, breads taste bread-ier, veggies taste more like themselves. A cake doesn’t taste salty, but if you leave the salt out of your cake […]
How do you end without an ending? Musicians are well accustomed to clear endings. Whether it’s the exuberantly repetitive final cadence in a classical symphony, a wailing 13(#11) chord for a big band, or the Plagal Amen at the end of a hymn, we pay a lot of attention to […]
If you can face a new challenge with confidence, despite not knowing how to yet to solve it, it’s because you can say to yourself, “I’ve solved problems before.” Best to have solved all kinds of problems. Home maintenance problems and musical problems and trigonometric problems and rhetorical problems and […]
I often recommend Seth Godin’s marvelous free book Stop Stealing Dreams, It speaks to our particular time of massive evolution of educational paradigms. In a companion article, Godin takes on the idea of enrollment. Not as in, “I enrolled Jane in elementary school” but as Godin writes, Enrollment is what […]
We planted a couple dozen vegetable plants today – tomato, squash, cucumber, herbs, kale, chard, lettuce. Planting vegetable plants is, in the grand scheme, a necessary act – for human survival. But in the small scheme, for instance in my backyard, planting vegetables is an aspirational act. When I plant […]
Feedback loops are an incredibly vital part of teaching. Great teachers are right now discovering just how much they rely on tight feedback loops to inform their teaching and connect with students. It’s the ten questions you can answer in five minutes – and see in their eyes when they […]
“I don’t know how to do this, but I’m willing to try and learn.” That is the exact attitude that we should desire from our students – the sign of curiosity, engagement, and a desire to grow and improve. It seems to me to be the message that all teachers […]
We didn’t ask for this. We didn’t ask to reinvent our curricula over a weekend. We didn’t ask take decades of in-person teaching experience and transition to all online teaching without proper training. We didn’t ask to see and hear our choirs one-at-a-time in Zoom windows. But we’re doing the […]
My kids have been watching YouTube clips of close-up magicians, particularly from America’s Got Talent and Penn and Teller’s Fool us. So YouTube suggested yesterday I watch clip of magic revealed – a freeze-frame walk through of a close-up magician. Does it bring you less joy knowing how the magic […]