arrange • compose • conduct
It’s easy to think that lack of motivation connotes lack of interest: if I’m not motivated to work on something, it must mean I’m not interested in it. The truth is more complicated. I might lack motivation because I’m tired. I might lack motivation because the goal is so distant […]
Worry more about what you’re going to do tomorrow than about whether it connects to what you did yesterday. Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. – Soren Kierkegaard I try to remember to not try to make my life make sense. I know that […]
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 […]
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” Heraclitus Working on a recording project with the Aces reminds me of this lesson in three ways. These are all good things. We want the music to have life, […]
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 […]
Is each part of your practice integral, or are some things just side habits along for the ride? My writing practice is to simple: sit and write daily. But recently I find it hard to begin my writing except at the end of the day. I can sit and not […]
You have to turn off the infinite tap. Media is effectively infinite now. The media (film, tv, music, podcasts, books & articles, social, etc.) that is inside your niche is vast enough that you need never stop consuming it. But. If you don’t turn it off, you can’t make your […]
The trick to successfully avoiding last-minute scrambling is to anticipate the problem sooner. If you see a challenge a week out instead of the day of, you’re going to have so much more time to prepare for, adjust to, and solve a problem. The day it arrives, you’ll be in […]
I never want to put my ensembles in this position. So much of our students’ lives are in “It all comes down to this” situations. It could be the big football game, auditions for the musical, the SAT, term papers and final exams, GPA, Prom, college acceptance letters, or any […]
How much of a contingency plan do you have as an educator/conductor? I think a lot about this – usually when I get sick shortly before a concert. And what I come up with is always the same: plan on a snow day. In other words, assume that your penultimate […]