arrange • compose • conduct
If you’re too afraid of failure to play Wordle, I blame the education system. I heard recently about some high school students who had given up playing Wordle because the fear of breaking a streak by failing to guess a word was debilitating. They would rather not play it than […]
We sing a lot about love in choir. I guess we sing a lot about love anywhere. My long-standing policy for pronouns has been that you should sing with whatever pronouns feel right for you to describe a loved one. Certainly for soloists, but I think it could plausibly work […]
When I bake bread (and I bake a lot of bread), I invariably get some flour on the counters. Whether it’s the mixer throwing some out of the bowl, the extra flour I spread on my cutting board to do a final knead, or just the inefficiency of pouring flour […]
There is a particular anxious-excited, scared-joyful feeling you have when you’re tackling something big and new for the first time. As you repeat similar projects, that feeling ebbs, even if you continue to feel jitters or nerves. I think of the first European choir tour I organized, or the first […]
There are a lot of reasons for feeling unmotivated. Knowing the correct reason can help you take the correct action in response. Maybe you’re unmotivated because: You’re overcommitted and have no free time —-> carve out space for yourself and see if motivation returns. You’re no longer interested in the […]
I’m in a duet book club right now, reading the Aeneid in a new translation, for the first time since I read it in 1993-94, in Latin. My book club partner is a dear friend, was in that Latin class with me (and many others in both high school and […]
I was asked today about a project, “If you had to do it over again, what would you do differently?” The answer was that there were no big pieces I would do differently. There are always 5% of the small details that I plan to do differently next time. But […]
We all have options for the tools we use. In the music world alone, there are DAWs, notation programs, microphones, instruments, and so many other tools that we can choose from among many good options. Why do we choose one or another? My Mentor/Hero Uses It. Think of Jacob Collier […]
In a recent interview with Mike Birbiglia, Malcolm Gladwell said, “I don’t believe in personality….There’s a whole philosophical and psychological tradition around this idea that we are so much a product of our situation and environment that it’s foolish to talk about personality. So, I’m baffled by this notion of […]
Have you tried whisking left-handed recently? (For me, that’s whisking right-handed…what I mean is your non-dominant hand.) It feels weird. I’m pretty agile with kitchen tools, but in my “wrong” hand, I feel like a novice all over again. I sometimes do just that, to remind myself the way that […]