arrange • compose • conduct
How can you not? It’s so often what happens, though. How many students you know who have poured time and effort into activities they clearly don’t love? There can be so many other factors that drive us to do things besides love, but there’s also the complicating factor that sometimes, […]
“Follow your heart, and you’ll never work and day in your life.” So goes the aphorism we tell young people – heck, we tell ourselves! And it’s just not true. Doing things well is hard, whether you love doing them or not. That’s the truth. It’s also still a good […]
Communities take time. One of the best things you can do for your choir is to craft a community they can be a part of. Call it communityism. Being a part of a community makes everything easier. You know who to call for a favor. You know who can solve […]
Do you incorporate any made-up rituals into your rehearsals? The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos explores the way we make decisions that we think will make us happier but don’t, and also offers researched techniques that actually do improve our happiness. In a 2020 episode, she discussed the idea […]
I love yesness. But it can be a liability. Yesness is that attribute is possessed by people who are willing to try new things, go where leaders direct, and generally approach life without a neon NO over their heads. When does yesness become a liability? When yes people consistently take […]
It’s important to say thank you. Even to yourself. Every time I get a jar of last summer’s strawberry jam from my pantry and start spreading it on sandwich bread, I take a second to thank past me. June 2022 Jed worked very hard on that jam in the summer […]
Have a vision for what you want to create, and take steps to create it, but don’t expect it to happen as soon as you’re ready for it to happen. How much you want to change and how much you can change are two different things. When you enter a […]
Are you looking forward or backward? It’s a time of reflections and resolutions. I know some who focus on reflections – working to understand and learn from their successes and failures. I know others who focus on resolutions – looking ahead to what they hope and intend to do in […]
It’s poetry time. Let the prose wait for a week. A celebrate quote from former New York governor Mario Cuomo states, “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.” I don’t know about the work of politics, but I do think that prose and poetry do have seasons. The week […]
On blackbirds, silences, and eves. I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after. Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, V. Wallace Stevens gave us two choices, but I’m not sure that I don’t prefer the third option: […]