arrange • compose • conduct
Posts discussing education, both in and outside of music
I’ll never forget the day I was showed how to color properly. It took years to overcome the unspoken lesson. It was on a bring your child to work day – I was in a staff lounge with my sister while my dad was checking on patients. A friendly nurse […]
There are three pieces of information present in a Roman numeral analysis of a chord. The root of the chord. (Shown by the Roman numeral, which refers to the scale degree of the root.) The quality of the chord. (Shown by the case of the Roman numeral, and possibly an […]
JEFF: You got a dollar? JOSH: Yeah. JEFF: Take it out. Look at the back. The seal, the pyramid, it’s unfinished. With the eye of God looking over it. And the words Annuit Coeptis. “He, God, Favors our Undertaking.” The seal is meant to be unfinished, because this country’s meant […]
Take advantage of these two recent video panel discussions coming from the vocal jazz community. There is much to learn from here as we move into new worlds in the choral world. First, this forum from a couple weeks ago, titled Race Conversations in Vocal Jazz, features a wonderful group […]
I am committed to amplifying more music from Black culture in teaching music theory, ear training, and repertoire. As such I want to amplify these resources from my old friend Justin Binek, who has begun creating an online, freely accessible repository of examples. Included as of now are interval examples […]
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 […]